Englishes Today I December 2016 I Volume II, Issue IV ISSN ... · singularly beautiful and yet...

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Englishes Today I December 2016 I Volume II, Issue IV ISSN : 2395 4809

Transcript of Englishes Today I December 2016 I Volume II, Issue IV ISSN ... · singularly beautiful and yet...

Englishes Today I December 2016 I Volume II, Issue IV ISSN : 2395 4809

Englishes Today I December 2016 I Volume II, Issue IV ISSN : 2395 4809

ENGLISHES TODAY I December 2016 I Vol. II, Issue IV I ISSN : 2395 4809

Diasporic Representation in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Selected Short Stories

Dr. Monali Chatterjee

Assistant Professor Nirma University

Ahmedabad Gujarat, INDIA.

Abstract

The existence of the Indian Diaspora has propelled the imagination of many writers and has instigated a

profusion of “belles lettres ” with a pronounced emphasis on the ‘displaced intellectuals’. Among the writers

who have mastered the art of story-telling centred on such displaced intellectuals, Jhumpa Lahiri has carved

out her own fictional universe. Her stories narrate poignant ballads of love, loss and death that are

singularly beautiful and yet universally appealing. Her potential as a proficient and vibrant story-teller are

on full display in her collections of short stories as Interpreter of Maladies and Unaccustomed Earth. As a

contemporary writer she authentically documents the ordinary lives and events of the Indian Diaspora with

her poised and nuanced sense of expression. She duly binds the mundane existences with reflections so

lyrical that she successfully excites her readers at even the routine developments of human existence. This

paper attempts to critically evaluate the diasporic representations of some of her short stories and speculate

how her characters take “nothing for granted and doubted even the obvious” It analyses how her urban

landscape is peopled with characters that are full-blooded, rounded and realistic and their possible impact

upon similar delineation of characters and plots in fiction of the ages to come.

Keywords : Diaspora, Identity, Discourse, Nation

Englishes Today I December 2016 I Volume II, Issue IV ISSN : 2395 4809

The existence of the Indian Diaspora has propelled the imagination of many writers and has

instigated a profusion of “belles lettres” with a pronounced emphasis on the ‘displaced

intellectuals’. Among the writers who have mastered the art of story-telling centred on such

displaced intellectuals, Jhumpa Lahiri has carved out her own fictional universe. Her stories narrate

poignant ballads of love, loss and death that are singularly beautiful and yet universally appealing.

Her potential as a proficient and vibrant story-teller is on full display in her collections of short

stories as Interpreter of Maladies and Unaccustomed Earth. As a contemporary writer she

authentically documents the ordinary lives and events of the Indian Diaspora with her poised and

nuanced sense of expression. She duly binds the mundane existences with reflections so lyrical that

she successfully excites her readers at even the routine developments of human existence. This

paper attempts to critically evaluate the diasporic representations of some of her short stories and

speculate how her characters take “nothing for granted and doubted even the obvious” It analyses

how her urban landscape is peopled with characters that are full-blooded, rounded and realistic and

their possible impact upon similar delineation of characters and plots in fiction of the ages to come.

The entire idea of a diaspora in Unaccustomed Earth is centred on a prologue from Nathaniel

Hawthorne’s “The Custom House” where he portends:

Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and

replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn out soil. My

children have had other birth places, and so far as their fortunes may be within my

control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth. (as quoted in Lahiri 1)

This idea is illustrated through a variety of experiences narrated through a gamut of short stories

contained in the collection Unaccustomed Earth. Through the sincere tone of her lucid narration

Jhumpa Lahiri successfully demonstrates how human nature flourishes only if it strikes its roots into

unaccustomed earth instead of being planted and replanted in the same worn out soil and thereby

achieving only stagnation.

Diaspora’ refers to a dislodgment from a geographical place of origin and migration to another

territory or nation. A critic points out, “The idea of migration has not been new to the Indian

subcontinent. They have migrated to different countries for various reasons at various periods of its

history.” (Jayaram 228) The majority of diasporic Indians are a systematically transient, peripheral

and marginalised community across continents. Many Indian writers like Anita Desai, Salman

Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, Ved Mehta, Meera Syal, V.S. Naipaul, Abraham Varghese, Amitav

Ghosh, Hanif Kureishi, Bharati Mukherjee and Jhumpa Lahiri, etc. have successfully generated a

proliferation of diasporic writing.

Englishes Today I December 2016 I Volume II, Issue IV ISSN : 2395 4809

South Asian women have successfully exhibited a great deal of literary proliferation in

contemporary diasporic writing. Narrated though personal experiences and observation such stories

often relate and poignant and evocative instances of social dilemma, rootlessness, want of

identification and female oppression. Thus they reflect a transnational resonance and dialogue

across the political boundaries of countries, languages, customs and generations. Characters,

especially women, from the South Asian diaspora are often faced with subjugation, marginalization

and racial discrimination. Diasporic writers, who draw from personal memories and first hand

experiences often deftly synchronize such imagined characters with real people they may be

acquainted with.

Jhumpa Lahiri, the Pulitzer Prize winner for her collection of stories Interpreter of Maladies, and

authored the novel The Namesake has further perfected her gifts as a story-teller in Unaccustomed

Earth.

In the title story — the most carefully crafted of the eight in the book — Ruma, a young mother

whose father comes to visit after her mother’s death, misinterprets his concern for her as

disapproval; he, in turn, is too respectful to tell her that he fears she has chosen a path too similar to

the one that brought her mother years of loneliness. In “Hell-Heaven,” Usha, the narrator, learns

years after the fact of her mother’s desperate, frustrated attraction to a family friend, and examines

her own childhood memories in a strange new light.

In the same lines Lahiri poignantly depicts the internal as well as external conflicts of the characters

in her stories representing people who chose to become expats in a foreign land. This is vividly

depicted through the lines in “Only Goodness”: “Wayland was the shock. Suddenly they were

stuck, her (Sudha’s) parents aware that they faced a life sentence of being foreign.” (Lahiri 138).

Their want of belongingness further surfaces when these realistic characters find it difficult to adjust

to new situations while moving from one alien city to another. In the above mentioned story, Lahiri

evinces the agony and struggle of the first generation immigrants as they wrestle with the constant

need to adjust, adopt and adapt to their changing environment and become adept at it. Lahiri brings

alive this idea in “Only Goodness” through the line: “In Wayland they (Sudha’s parents) became

passive, wary, the rituals of small-town New England more confounding than negotiating two of the

world’s largest cities.” (Idem.)

While the dependence for assistance to adjust rests heavily on the female child, Sudha, the male

child is readily allowed to dismiss this plight as insignificant. This leads to the next diasporic

theme—gender discrimination amongst children and family members. Distinction in the upbringing

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of the male child from the female one is also evident in the story. Though they have changed places,

they still uphold certain traditional values which bring further shocks to the female characters in the

stories. For instance, in “Only Goodness” Lahiri’s talent as a diasporic story teller culminates as she

describes how Sudha being a second generation immigrant helps her parents to adjust to new

surroundings while moving from one city to another (From London to Wayland):

While Sudha regarded her parents’ separation from India as an ailment that ebbed

and flowed like a cancer, Rahul was impermeable to that aspect of their life as

well. “No one dragged them here,” he would say. “Baba left India to get rich, and

Ma married him because she had nothing else to do.” That was Rahul, always

aware of the family weaknesses never sparing Sudha from the things she least

wanted to face. (Idem)

Thus the responsibility of upholding culture traditions and family values rests with the female child

alone, even though she might be brought up in an American society like her male counterparts.

Conjugal harmony is yet another aspect of diasporic delineation that Lahiri deploys frequently in

her stories. This can be seen in stories like “Unaccustomed Earth”, “Heaven-Hell”, “A Choice for

Accommodations” and “Only Goodness”. In “A Choice for Accommodations” Lahiri shows a

parallel between Megan’s torn cocktail dress and gaps in her relation with her husband. At the

wedding party, he later becomes oblivious of the tear when she is thoroughly engrossed in an

engaging conversation with Ted, Amit’s friend in her husband’s absence. Amit senses this fissure as

a typical character in diasporic writing who must have braved the harsh discrimination from the

American acquaintances for being a brown skinned Indian. This has pronounced the impact of

several doubts and suspicion in his mind regarding his conjugal stability with Megan. However this

diasporic narrative gets resolved on a positive note when the couple successful re-ignites their

passions for each other and experiences the mutual need of feeling wanted.

Intimate familial ties are also a crucial aspect of Jhumpa Lahiri’s diasporic representations. These

are best manifested through selflessness in family commitments and sacrifices that one makes of

one’s family. In “Only Goodness” Sudha reflects when she learns about her brother Rahul’s poor

grades:

Her father had no patience for failure, for indulgences. He never let his children

forget that there had been no one to help him as he helped them, so that no matter

how well Sudha did, she felt that her good fortune had been handed to her, not

earned. Both her parents, came from humble backgrounds; both their

grandmothers had given up the gold on their arms to put roofs over their families’

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heads and food on their plates. This mentality, as tiresome as it sometimes felt,

also reassured Sudha, for it was something her parents understood and respected

about each other, and she suspected it was the glue that held them together.

(Lahiri 140)

The idea of self-dependence looms large through these stories. The more one is dependent for

access to food, clothing, one’s own shelter and financial stability for existence the more the

characters have assumed proximity to the other members of the family and vice versa. For instance,

the narrator’s mother in “Heaven-Hell” stifles her fondness and affection for a male family-friend

due to her financial and emotional dependence on her family. However, in this respect she might be

a foil to Ruma’s father, a widower, in “Unaccustomed Earth” who is financially and emotionally

self-dependent, pays occasional visits to his daughter and travels at his will very frequently as a

tourist. Moreover, he is engaged in an intimate relationship with Mrs. Bagchi. Hence, he feels

pathetic deceiving her. Like a typical immigrant who has thrived on Indian values and taboos he

contemplates:

But what would he say? That he made a new friend? A girlfriend? The word

was unknown to him, impossible to express; he never had a girlfriend in his

life. (Lahiri 40)

The notion of loneliness and battling day to day challenges one one’s own, particularly in the case

of women is an essential element of any realistic diasporic fiction that mirrors ordinary tales of

ordinary lives with extra-ordinary narrative techniques. In the story “Unaccustomed Earth” Ruma’s

father reflects: “Like his wife, Ruma was now alone in this new place, over-whelmed, without any

friends, caring for a young child, all of it reminding him, too much, of the early years of his

marriage, the years for which his wife had never forgiven him.” (Idem.)

The element of a culture shock and frequent cross-cultural interventions often enrich the general

texture of the diasporic narrative in Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories. She exhibits extraordinary dexterity at

portraying transnational identity and the trauma and shock of geographical dislocation.

On seeing her father’s gardening in unaccustomed soil, often late into the evening, Ruma recalls

mother’s reluctance to eat before first serving food to her husband, since she had been trained all

her life to do so. However, being brought up in a different culture, Ruma fails to relate to the

pertinence of such a custom in her present day situation. Similarly, later in the same story Ruma

concludes that her decision to remain jobless and devote her herself entirely to the concerns of the

family was right as “Her mother would have understood her decision, would have been

understanding and proud” (Lahiri, 36). It is Ruma’s agile shifts between the bipolar stances of two

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completely distinct cultures lends her the openness to accept her father’s post-marital affiliation. It

is aptly mentioned:

In a moment that fulfils Lahiri’s message of the complexity – both cultural and

emotional—of a woman’s cross-cultural, vernacular response, Lahiri presents

Ruma sending her father’s accidentally left behind postcard to his new girlfriend

into the mail. The significance of the postcard is that it both presents the

possibility for Ruma’s admitted acceptance of the new relationship and, at the

same time, presents the possibility of failure – the postcard Ruma mails may

never arrive. (Kasun 119).

In “Heaven-Hell” a similar culture shock is experienced by the character Pranab

Chakraborty,

Life as a graduate student in Boston was a cruel shock, and in his first month he

lost nearly twenty pounds. He had arrived in January, in the middle of a

snowstorm, and at the end of a week he had packed his bags and gone to Logan,

prepared to abandon the opportunity he’d worked toward all his life, only to

change his mind at the last minute. (Lahiri 74)

Similarly in “Only Goodness” Sudha’s mother attributes the anomalies in Rahul’s behaviour of

drunken driving to the culture of America where he has been brought up. Using Sudha as a mouth

piece here, Lahiri comments:

Sudha pitied her mother, pitied her refusal to accommodate such an unpleasant and alien fact, her

need to blame America and its laws instead of her son (Lahiri 143). We are further informed:

Her parents had always been blind to the things that plagued their children: being

teased at school for the color of their skin or for the funny things their mother

occasionally put into their lunch boxes, potato curry sandwiches that tinted

Wonderbread green. What could there possibly be to be unhappy about? her

parents would have thought. “Depression” was a foreign word to them, an

American thing. In their opinion their children were immune from the hardships

and injustices they had left behind in India, as if the inoculations the paediatrician

had given Sudha and Rahul when they were babies guaranteed them an existence

free of suffering. (Lahiri 143-144)

The delineation of home sickness is ubiquitous and an inevitable element of diasporic fiction. In

“Unaccustomed Earth” Ruma’s father recalls, “The isolation of living in an American suburb,

something about which his wife complained and about which he felt responsible, had been more

solitude than she could bear.” (Lahiri 41) Similarly in “A Choice for Accommodations”

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There was no escape at the end of the day, and though he admitted it to no one,

especially not his parents when they called from Delhi every weekend, he was

crippled with homesickness, missing his parents to the point where tears often

filled his eyes, in those first months, without warning. He sought traces of his

parents’ faces and voices among the people who surrounded and cared for him,

but there was absolutely nothing, no one, at Langford to remind him of

them.(Lahiri 109)

It can be thus concluded that contemporary times of transnational migration, the continual flux of

people to and fro different countries, the notion of diversified identities battling within a single

individual as well as the inadvertent congregation of diverse cultures have toppled the idea of

absolute locale and origin. The notion of home, identity and belongingness that Lahiri’s characters

pine for are often relative and subjective, thereby generating an incessant dialogue to negotiate

between the self and desired identity. While the first generation immigrants struggle to break away

from the traditional values of their motherland that they are strongly rooted in, the second

generation immigrants can barely identify with their origins in the ancestral territory.

References

Jayaram, N. “Heterogeneous Diaspora and Asymmetrical Orientations: India, Indians and the Indian

Diaspora.” Ed. Diversities in the Indian Diaspora: Nature Implications and Responses. New Delhi: Oxford

University Press, 2012.

Kasun, Genna Welsh, "Womanism and the Fiction of Jhumpa Lahiri." Graduate College Dissertations and

Theses. Paper 119, 2009. http://scholarworks.uvm.edu/graddis

Lahiri, Jhumpa. Unaccustomed Earth. Noida: Random House India. 2008.