This article analyses the changing trends of globalization and modernity that transform the social and individual perceptions. In postcolonial era, globalization proves to be an impetus that precipitates the tension between tradition and modernity. This article studies the competing forces of tradition and modernity as dramatized in Kamila Shamsie’s Salt and Saffron (2000). The novel is a playful account of past memories revisited and preserved by family lore. It is also an appropriation of those traditional views in the modern scene by the members of new generation. Therefore, the novel becomes a microcosm of traditional versus modern values conceived by the family members of Dard-e-dil family. The novel is an effective display of past Muslim cultural and political glory yet it revisits the current issues of identity, displacement and immigration. The article situates the story of Dard-e-dils within the theoretical context of globalization and postcolonialism, and reads the flux and change that the Pakistani fiction reflects as it enters a new realm of changed national, social and individual perception in the post–partition and postcolonial era.

Salt and Saffron, Tradition, Modernity, Postcolonialism, Globalization, Culture, Family Lore