reveiws on lahiri

8/7/2019 reveiws on lahiri

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THE NEW YORK TIMES

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/04/books/04Book.html?pagewanted=1&ref=reviewBOOKS OF THE TIMES

Wonder Bread and Curry: Mingling Cultures,

Conflicted Hearts

By MICHIKO KAKUTANIPublished: April 4, 2008

Jhumpa Lahiris characters tend to be immigrants from India and their American-

reared children, exiles who straddle two countries, two cultures, and belong to neither:

too used to freedom to accept th

e rituals and conventions ofh

ome, and yet too steepedin tradition to embrace American mores fully. These Indian-born parents want the

American Dream for their children name-brand schools, a prestigious job, a roomy

house in the suburbs but they are cautious about the pitfalls of life in this alien land,

and isolated by their difficulties with language and customs. Their children too are often

emotional outsiders: having grown up translating the mysteries of the United States for

their relatives, they are fluent navigators of both Bengali and American culture but

completely at home in neither; they always experience themselves as standing slightly

apart, given more to melancholy observation than wholehearted participation.

As she did in her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of stories Interpreter of Maladies

(1999) and her dazzling 2003 novel The Namesake, Ms. Lahiri writes about these

people in Unaccustomed Earth with an intimate knowledge of their conflicted hearts,

using her lapidary eye for detail to conjure their daily lives with extraordinary precision:

the faint taste of coconut in the Nice cookies that a man associates withhis dead wife;

the Wonder Bread sandwiches, tinted green with curry, that a Bengali mother makes for

her embarrassed daughter to take to school. A Chekhovian sense of loss blows through

these new stories: a reminder of Ms. Lahiris appreciation of the wages of time and

mortality and her understanding too of the missed connections that plague her

husbands and wives, parents and children, lovers and friends.

Many of the characters in these stories seem to be in relationships that are filled with

silences and blackholes. In some cases this is the result of an arranged marriage thats


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never worked out; in others it is simply a case of people failing to communicate or failing

to reach out, in time, for what they want.

In Only Goodness Sudha, who is working on her second masters degree at the London

School of Economics, wonders at the bizarre lack of emotion in her parents marriage,which was neither happy nor unhappy and seemingly devoid of both bitterness and

ardor, but she finds her own marriage to an Englishman foundering upon her failure to

tell him a family secret. In Hell-Heaven the narrator recounts the story ofher parents

chilly marriage and her mothers passionate, unrequited love for a fellow Bengali and

family friend, who gave her mother the only pure happiness she ever felt. And in A

Choice of Accommodations Amit realizes that the most profound thing in his life

the birth ofhis daughters has alreadyhappened, that the rest ofhis life will be only a

continuation of the things he already knows. Increasingly he will come to regard

solitude a run in the park, a ride byhimself on the subway as what one relished

most, the only thing that, even in fleeting, diminished doses, kept one sane.

As for Ruma, the heroine of the title story, she realizes during a visit from her widowed

father that they rarely talk about matters of real importance; they do not speak about

her mother or her brother, they do not discuss her pregnancy or her marriage, or her

fathers new relationship with a woman he met on vacation. This has been their history

as long as she can remember: Somehow, she feared that any difference of opinion

would ch

ip away at th

e already frail bond th

at existed between th

em. Her marriage,Ruma realizes, is stilted too: she is increasingly aware that she and her husband, Adam,

are separate people leading separate lives, and that part ofher is actually relieved

when Adam leaves on one ofhis many business trips.

Like many children of immigrants Ms. Lahiris characters are acutely aware of their

parents expectations; that they get into an Ivy Leagueschool, go to med school or grad

school, marry someone from a good Bengali family. Deftly explicating the emotional

arithmetic of her characters families, Ms. Lahiri shows how some of these children

learn to sidestep, even defy their parents wishes. But she also shows howhaunted theyremain by the burden of their families dreams and their awareness of their role in the

generational process of Americanization.

UNACCUSTOMED EARTH

ByJhumpa Lahiri


3/44

333 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.

Related

Excerpt: Unaccustomed Earth(April 4, 2008)

Times Topics: Jhumpa Lahiri

Their parents often seem so exhausted just coping with the difficulties of surviving in a

strange new world that talk about self-fulfillment or depression or happiness seems

utterly irrelevant to them; they are strangely pragmatic and unsentimental about

their marriages, their work, the hardships of daily life. These characters American-born

children are, at once, more romantic about the possibilities of finding genuine love and

rewarding careers and more cynical too about the trajectories of most peoples lives.

Often cast in the role of facilitator or fixer, they are accustomed to serving as their

parents go-betweens and to easing th

eir younger siblings way into full-fledgedAmerican lives.

Sudha, for instance, scavenged yard sales for the right toys for her little brother the

Fisher Price barn, Tonka trucks, the Speak and Say that made animal sounds; she read

him books like The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Frog and Toad, and toldher parents to

set up sprinklers on the lawn for him to run through in the summer.

The last three overlapping tales in this volume tell a single story about a Bengali-

American girl and a Bengali-American boy, wh

ose crisscrossing lives make up apoignant ballad of love and loss and death. Hema and Kaushik get to know each other as

teenagers, when Kaushiks family comes to stay with Hemas parents while theyhouse-

hunt in the Boston suburbs. Hema secretly nurses a crush on Kaushik, but he is

oblivious to her schoolgirl antics and preoccupied with his mothers deteriorating

health. His grief over her death and his rage at his fathers hasty remarriage will propel

him into a career as a photojournalist, who spends most ofhis time traveling to war

zones in distant parts of the globe.

Hema, meanwhile, becomes a professor, a Latin scholar, who after a long, unhappy loveaffair impulsively decides to opt for a traditional arranged marriage; though she is

conscious of the deadness of this proposed partnership, she tries to convince herself

that the relationship will endowher life with a sense of certainty and direction. Then,

against all odds, Hema and Kaushik run into each other in Rome on the eve of Hemas

departure for her wedding and embark on an intense, passionate affair. And yet it is


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an affair that concludes not with a fairy-tale happy ending but with an operatic

denouement that speaks of missed opportunities and avoidable grief.

In the hands of a less talented writer its an ending that might have seemed

melodramatic or contrived, but as rendered by Ms. Lahiri it possesses the elegiac andhaunting power of tragedy a testament to her emotional wisdom and consummate

artistry as a writer.

http://nymag.com/arts/books/profiles/45571/

The Confidence ArtistJhumpa Lahiri isnt afraid to provoke tears, or calls of dj vu.

y 7 Comments Add Yours

y ByBoris Kachka

y Published Mar 27, 2008

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Among the Brownstone Brooklyn novelists made good,theres one thing that sets Jhumpa Lahiri proudly apart. She is a succinct realist writer in an era of

attention-getting maneuvers. Stylistically, sh

e doesnth

ave ah

ook: no genre bending, no comics-inflected supernaturalism, no world-historical ventriloquism, no 9/11 flip books. Just couples andfamilies joining, coming apart, dealing with immigration, death, and estrangement. This is true ofher debut short-story collection,Interpreter of Maladies (which won a Pulitzer in 2000); hernovel, The Namesake (a best seller turned Mira Nair film); and her new book,Unaccustomed Eartheight mature stories each stretching almost to novella length. Her heroes are Chekhov, Hardy,William Trevor, and Alice Munro. Surrounded by acolytes of Rushdie or DeLillo, shes atraditionalist.

If there is a hook, it might pompously be called, in the language of the numerous liberal-arts syllabithat list her books, the Bengali-American Experience. But Lahiri is no Orientalist; most of hercharacters are middle-class strivers, like the academic parentsRhode Island by way of London andCalcuttawho raised her. What may have made The Namesake so popular (more than 800,000

copies sold, per BookScan) was the frisson of unfamiliar culture meeting familiar story lineyoungman on identity quest.

[Readers] can read their family stories into her family stories, says Lahiris editor at Knopf, RobinDesser, who took her on in a two-book deal worth at least $1 million. Its emotionally basedstorytelling that unfolds in a many-layered way, but without tricks. She even compares it, a bitbreathlessly, to Tolstoy: When you read a paragraph of Natasha putting on her shoes, you knowexactly who she is. I feel that way about reading Jhumpa Lahiri.

(Photo: Peter Hapak)


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But Tolstoy wrote about Napoleon. Unaccustomed Earth is, once again, about upwardly mobileSouth Asians from New England, and so is the novel shes working on. Is that all youve got inthere? I get asked the question all the time, says Lahiri. It baffles me. Does John Updike get askedthis question? Does Alice Munro? Its the ethnic thing, thats what it is. And my answer is always,yes, I will continue to write about this world, because it inspires me to write, and theres nothingmore important than that.

What makes Lahiris corner of the world seem so important, to her and to us? Maybe, for all thepolish, its the lack of ironic layering that tends to distance us from the tragedies chronicled in mostliterary fiction. Lahiri isnt afraid to make people cry.

Desser admits to breaking down in the office while going over Unaccustomed Earthsometimes onthe third read. Lahiri writes often of illnesses, failing marriages, and just plain loneliness, but thanksto her economy and mastery of detail, it never quite crosses over into the sentimental. Nor does itrely on the melodramatic twists that are staples of more middlebrow writers like Sue Monk Kidd orAlice Sebold.

Everyone has their Kleenex moments. For some, its the passage in The Namesake where theprotagonist, Gogol Ganguli, remembers walking withhis now-dead father across Cape Cod at lowtide. Desser cites a relatively lighthearted scene in Hema and Kaushik, the sad trio of linked storiesthat closes Unaccustomed Earth, in which two immigrant children buy doughnuts for the first time.Its the happy parts of Mozart that make me cry, she explains. She also gets to see firsthand, intheir meetings, how Lahiris own experiences keep feeding those moments. The more life happensto someone like Jhumpa Lahiri, the more it goes into the work, she says. I look forward to that.

Sitting in a starkly modern Italian restaurant in the far West Village, Lahiri, now 40, looks livelierand looser than she did when fame first barged into her lifewhen a call about the Pulitzerinterrupted her cooking, or paparazzi staked out her Calcutta wedding to Guatemalan-Greek-American journalist Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush. That steely-eyed stiffness in her first book-jacket

photo has given way to a gentler, more relaxed wariness.

Lahiri still expresses an ambivalence about all her success that cant be entirely written off as falsemodesty. Yet success has allowed her to work on long-shelved ideas (some ofher new storiesas wellas her coming novelhave been in the works for more than a decade). And its enabled her to writelonger short stories, a form that happens to suit her perfectly. I could keep them on the back burner,at a low simmer, for a longer time, she says.

The new stories have an expansiveness that Interpreters snapshots lacked, but also a cohesionthat The Namesake could have used. I just feel like maybe theres a little more meat on the bones,she says. I think that maybe, um, Im a little less afraid to write about things.

And hold on: There is a historical hook inUnaccustomed Eartha reference to the 2004 tsunami.It could be a great talking point, which is maybe why it makes Lahiri a little uncomfortable. The realevent just sort of caught my character in there, she says. I dont tackle major global events. I dontlike to read about somethingan event, a cataclysmin fiction for the sake of reading it. I will wantto read [Lawrence Wrights]The Looming Tower, because it will help me understand what happenedon September 11. I mean, thats what good nonfiction is for. And I think that the fact there is a majorglobal event in this bookI dont know if it was okay or not.


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been made real. And the fact that America is still a place where the rest of the world

comes to reinvent itself accepting with excitement and anxiety the necessity of leaving

behind the constrictions and comforts of distant customs is the underlying theme

ofJhumpa Lahiris sensitive new collection of stories, Unaccustomed Earth. Here, as

in her first collection, Interpreter of Maladies, and her novel, The Namesake, Lahiri,

who is of Bengali descent but was born in London, raised in Rhode Island and today

makes her home in Brooklyn, shows that the place to which you feel the strongest

attachment isnt necessarily the country youre tied to by blood or birth: its the place

that allows you to become yourself. This place, she quietly indicates, may not lie on any

map.

The eight stories in this splendid volume expand upon Lahiris epigraph, a metaphysical

passage from The Custom-House, byNathaniel Hawthorne, which suggests that

transplanting people into new soil makes them hardier and more flourishing. Human

fortunes may be improved, Hawthorne argues, if men and women strike their roots into

unaccustomed earth. Its an apt, rich metaphor for the transformations Lahiri oversees

in these pages, in which two generations of Bengali immigrants to America the

newcomers and their hyphenated children struggle to build normal, secure lives. But

Lahiri does not so much accept Hawthornes notion as test it. Is it true that

transplanting strengthens the plant? Or can such experiments produce mixed

outcomes?

As her characters mature in their new environments, they carry with them the potential

for upheaval. Geography is no guarantee of security. Lahiri shows that people may be

felled at any time by swift jabs of chance, wherever theyhappen to live. Uncontrollable

events may assail them accidents of fate, health or weather. More often, they suffer

less dramatic reversals: failed love affairs, alcoholism, even simple passivity the sort

of troubles that seem avoidable to everyone except the person who succumbs to them.

Like Laura, the well-meaning narrator of Brief Encounter, the men and women of

Lahiris stories often find themselves overwhelmed by unexpected passions. They share

her refrain: I didnt think such violent things could happen to ordinary people. Again

and again, the reader is caught off-guard by the accesses of emotion and experience that

waylay Lahiris characters, despite their peregrinations, their precautions, their

concealments.


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Each of the five stories in the books first section is self-contained. In Hell-Heaven, the

assimilated Bengali-American narrator considers how little thought she once gave to her

mothers sacrifices as she reconstructs the tormenting, unrequited passion her young

mother had for a graduate student during the narrators childhood. In Only Goodness,

an older sister learns a sharp lesson about the limits ofher responsibility to a self-

destructive younger brother. A Choice of Accommodations shows a shift in power

dynamics between a Bengali-American husband and his workaholic Anglo wife during a

weekend away from their kids at the wedding of the husbands prep-school crush.

And the American graduate student at the center of Nobodys Business pines for his

Bengali-American roommate, a graduate-school dropout who entertains no romantic

feelings for him, spurns the polite advances of prospective grooms from the global

Bengali singles circuit and considers herself engaged to a selfish, foul-tempered

Egyptianh

istorian.

In the title story, Ruma, a Bengali-American lawyer, repeats her mothers life pattern

when she gives up her job and follows her husband to a distant city as they await the

birth of their second child. Growing up, her mothers example moving to a foreign

place for the sake of marriage, caring exclusively for children and a household had

served as a warning, a path to avoid. Yet this was Rumas life now. The nurturing force

field of pregnancy shields Ruma from the sting this reflection might be expected to

provoke, but it doesnt protect her widowed father. When he visits her in Seattle from

his condo in Pennsylvania, he asks her a very American question: Will this make youhappy? Urging Ruma not to isolate herself, to look for work, he reminds her that self-

reliance is important. Thinking back on his wifes unhappiness in the early years of

their marriage, he realizes that he had always assumed Rumas life would be different.

But ifhis daughter chooses a life in Seattle that she could have led in Calcutta, whos to

say this isnt evidence of another kind of freedom?

Ruma is struck byhow muchher father resembled an American in his old age. Withhis

gray hair and fair skin he could have been practically from anywhere. Seeing his

daughter, Rumas father has the opposite reaction: She now resembled his wife so

strongly that he could not bear to look at her directly. Rumas identity, Lahiri suggests,

is affected less byher coordinates on the globe than by the internal indices ofher will.

She is a creature of the American soil, but she carries her own emotional bearings within

her. What are the real possibilities for change attached to a move? Lahiri seems to ask.

What are the limits?


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UNACCUSTOMED EARTH

ByJhumpa Lahiri.

333 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.

Related


'Unaccustomed Earth,' by Jhumpa Lahiri: Wonder Bread and Curry: Mingling Cultures, Conflicted

Hearts (April 4, 2008)


While tending Rumas neglected garden, her father shows his grandson how to sow

seeds. The boy digs holes, but plants Legos in them, along with a plastic dinosaur and a

wooden block with a star. Emblems of the international, the prehistoric and the

celestial, th

ey are buried in one garden plot, auguries of an ideal future, a utopia th

atcould be anywhere or nowhere. How can it grow?

Lahiris final three stories, grouped together as Hema and Kaushik, explore the

overlapping histories of the title characters, a girl and boy from two Bengali immigrant

families, set during significant moments of their lives. Once in a Lifetime begins in

1974, the year Kaushik Choudhuri and his parents leave Cambridge and return to India.

Seven years later, when the Choudhuris return to Massachusetts, Hemas parents are

perplexed to find that Bombayhad made them more American than Cambridge had.

The next story, Years End, visits Kaushik during his senior year at Swarthmore as hewrestles with the news ofhis fathers remarriage and meets his fathers new wife and

stepdaughters. The final story, Going Ashore, begins with Hema, now a Latin

professor at Wellesley, spending a few months in Rome before entering into an arranged

marriage with a parent-approved Hindu Punjabi man named Navin. Hema likes Navins

traditionalism and respect: It touched her to be treated, at 37, like a teenaged girl. The

couple plan to settle in Massachusetts. But in Rome, Hema runs across Kaushik, now a

world-roving war photographer. As a photographer, his origins were irrelevant,

Kaushik thinks. But how irrelevant are Kaushiks origins to Hema and to himself?

And which suitor will Hema choose? The romantic who has no home outside of

memory? Or the realist who wants to make a home where his wife chooses to live?

Except for their names, Hema and Kaushik could evoke any Americans 70s

childhood, any Americans bittersweet acceptance of the compromises of adulthood. The

generational conflicts Lahiri depicts cut across national lines; the waves of admiration,


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competition and criticism that flow between the two families could occur between

Smiths and Taylors in any suburban town; and the fight for connection and control

between Hema and Kaushik as children and as adults replays the tussle that has

gone on ever since men and women lived in caves.

Lahiri handles her characters without leaving any fingerprints. She allows them to grow

as if unguided, as if she were accompanying them rather than training them through the

espalier ofher narration. Reading her stories is like watching time-lapse nature videos

of different plants, each with its own inherent growth cycle, breaking through the soil,

spreading into bloom or collapsing back to earth.

http://www.pajiba.com/book_reviews/unaccustomed-earth-by-jhumpa-lahiri.php

Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

By Sophia | Posted Under BookReviews | Share |

Short stories arent usually my favorite genre. They tend to go by too quickly, so by the

time I get involved with the characters and story, its over and Im already struggling to

ground myself in the next story.Unaccustomed Earth (2008) byJhumpa Lahiri somehow

sucked me into each story but also left me satisfied with their brief length. This was myfirst foray into Lahiris writing, although I have seen the movie The Namesake, but I am

now looking forward to reading Interpreter of Maladies (1999).

Unaccustomed Earth consists of eight short stories, the last three of which center around the

lives of two recurring characters, Hema and Kaushik. The stories focus on the private,

family dramas that change our lives and shape our personalities but are rarely detected

by those around us. The first story describes a fathers week-long visit to see his

daughter after his wife, her mother, unexpectedly dies. Its amazing what true and

different emotions and themes Lahiri could pack into this short story. Theres the loss of

a parent and a spouse, the staleness of marriage and roles in the marriage, the push andpull of cultural expectations, the constantly changing roles of parent, caretaker, and

child, the silence that surrounds important issues, and understanding and forgiveness.

The other stories explore an aging marriage, the love (or crush) of an unhappily married

woman, alcoholism, and a housemates view of a failing relationship. The final three

stories visit Hema and Kaushik at different turning points of their lives.


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I sometimes have a hard time describing books that Ive really liked. I donthave

anything negative to say, and anything I could say to describe it wouldnt be as good as

actually reading the stories. These werent exactly page-turners, but quiet, insightful,

and emotional stories about people that I could relate to, feel for, and understand. I

enjoyed reading them and was very impressed by my first reading of Lahiris work.

This review is part of the Cannonball Read series, which Sophia has already

completed. But she keeps bringing the reviews, god bless her. For more of Sophias

reviews, check out her blog, My Life As Seen Through Books.

http://bookreviews.bookrack.in/2010/05/unaccustomed-earth-by-jhumpa-lahiri.htmlShort Stories byJhumpa Lahiri - The Unaccustomed

EarthShare

POSTED BY BOOKLOVER FRIDAY, MAY 7, 2010

Book Review by Pritha Mathur

The Unaccustomed Earth" is a splendid work by Jhumpa Lahiri. The work involves elegance and

poise intermingled with intricate feelings of the heart.

The book has two parts. The first part has some stories with a variety of characters : When Ruma's

father came to spend a few days with her family, she feared that he would permanentlysettle down

with them. She realised that her mother's death made them intimate in a way that never had been

before and also, that the relationship between them was then "infinite" and "unyielding". And after

her father left, unexpectedly, she found out a secret that explained - everything. There's a story

about a housewife who fell in love with a young family friend and revealed this to her daughter

years later when the latter's heart was broken by a broken relationship. Amit and Megan's

relationship were fading away over the years but unexpectedly, they begin to love each other after

many years of their marriage and he hoped that she had forgiven him after they had finished. A

sister introduced her brother to alcohol, cared for him when everybody rejected him and at the end,she behaved with him just as everybody else did.

The second part deals with stories where the characters are interlinked. The most striking

relationship is that of Hema and Kaushik. In "Going Ashore" the writer has succinctly written how

their meeting after many years was unexpected, their parting sudden and yet, obvious and

extremely painful and how their feelings had taken every particle of their care to slowly take shape.


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The beautiful thing about the stories is that they involve the happiness and sorrow of common and

yet, uncommon people; the stories end quite suddenly and the reader has to imagine so much

before he/she is fully satisfied.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C06E7DD1239F930A35754C0A9669C8B63&ref=jhum

palahiriIndia's Post-Rushdie Generation; Young Writers LeaveMagic Realism and Look at Reality

By MERVYN ROTHSTEIN

Published: July 3, 2000

The tale begins in the middle of a swelteringlyhot April night in 1996 on a train

meandering through the Indian countryside. Pankaj Mishra, a 27-year-old editor at

HarperCollins's India division, was reading a manuscript, a first novel by a relatively

unknown Indian film writer.

The writer was Arundhati Roy. The novel was ''The God of Small Things,'' a story of love

and caste in Kerala in tropical southwest India. Mr. Mishra immediately championed

her book in the West and watched his instincts validated as it sold nearly three million

copies worldwide and won the prestigious Booker Prize in Britain.

Now, four years later, a young, critically praised generation of Indian writers -- some of

whom are now New Yorkers -- are following in Ms. Roy's footsteps in their chosen

language, English.

And although their voices are being heard much more loudly in the West than in India,

they are ushering in a new era for Indian literature in English. They are often called

Midnight's Grandchildren in homage to another seminal Indian novel, Salman

Rushdie's ''Midnight's Children,'' the dark parable of Indian history since independence

that won the Booker Prize in 1981 and in 1993 won a special Booker Prize as the best

British novel of the previous quarter century. Now the new generation of writers have in

many ways broken away from the magic realism that characterizes much of Mr.

Rushdie's work.

''The signal that young Indian writers got from the success of 'The God of Small Things'

and the way the media dealt with the book is that there are people out there willing to

look at what you have to say,'' said Raj Kamal Jha, a 33-year-old editor at The Indian


13/44

Express in New Delhi, whose first novel, ''The Blue Bedspread,'' has received strong

reviews and an advance reported in the Indian press to be more than $275,000.

The phenomenon, publishers and writers say, is also a product of a renewed interest in

th

ings Indian th

at began in 1997 with

th

e mammoth

publicity for th

e 50th

anniversaryof the country's independence and that has been enhanced by the growth of computers

and the Internet, whichhave increased contact between Indian writers and Western

influences.

In addition to Mr. Jha, the writers include Mr. Mishra, now 31, whose first novel, ''The

Romantics,'' was called ''resonant and highly subtle'' by Michiko Kakutani in The New

York Times; Amit Chaudhuri, 37, of Calcutta whose writing has been described by Mr.

Rushdie as ''languorous, elliptical, beautiful''; and Kiran Desai (daughter of the

renowned Indian fiction writer Anita Desai), 28, wh

o won praise two years ago forh

erfirst novel, ''Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard.''

They also include Jhumpa Lahiri, a 33-year-old New Yorker, the daughter of Bengali

immigrants, who won the Pulitzer Prize in April for her first book, a collection of short

stories titled ''Interpreter of Maladies.'' The stories evoke the complex and conflicted

world of Indian immigrants in the United States. This month Akhil Sharma, a 28-year-

old investment banker in Manhattan whose stories have appeared in The New Yorker

and The Atlantic, will publishhis first novel, ''An Obedient Father'' (Farrar, Straus &

Giroux). It is about corruption, decay and greed in th

e Indian government and about anIndian family.

Mr. Jha, who graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi with a

degree in mechanical engineering, went on to get a master's degree in journalism at the

University of Southern California. Richard Bernstein said in The New York Times that

''The Blue Bedspread,'' published in the United States by Random House, is ''a brilliant

beginning for a writer whose voice already shows a maturity well beyond his years.''

In the novel, an unnamed narrator is told that his sister has died in childbirth and that

he must care for her daughter for one night, until the baby can be placed for adoption.

As he watches the infant in his home, he writes for her the stories he believes will help

her understand her place in the world.

India's Post-Rushdie Generation; Young Writers LeaveMagic Realism and Look at Reality


14/44

By MERVYN ROTHSTEIN

Published: July 3, 2000

The tale begins in the middle of a swelteringlyhot April night in 1996 on a train

meandering through the Indian countryside. Pankaj Mishra, a 27-year-old editor atHarperCollins's India division, was reading a manuscript, a first novel by a relatively

unknown Indian film writer.

The writer was Arundhati Roy. The novel was ''The God of Small Things,'' a story of love

and caste in Kerala in tropical southwest India. Mr. Mishra immediately championed

her book in the West and watched his instincts validated as it sold nearly three million

copies worldwide and won the prestigious Booker Prize in Britain.

Now, four years later, a young, critically praised generation of Indian writers -- some ofwhom are now New Yorkers -- are following in Ms. Roy's footsteps in their chosen

language, English.

And although their voices are being heard much more loudly in the West than in India,

they are ushering in a new era for Indian literature in English. They are often called

Midnight's Grandchildren in homage to another seminal Indian novel, Salman

Rushdie's ''Midnight's Children,'' the dark parable of Indian history since independence

that won the Booker Prize in 1981 and in 1993 won a special Booker Prize as the best

British

novel of th

e previous quarter century. Now th

e new generation of writersh

ave inmany ways broken away from the magic realism that characterizes much of Mr.

Rushdie's work.

''The signal that young Indian writers got from the success of 'The God of Small Things'

and the way the media dealt with the book is that there are people out there willing to

look at what you have to say,'' said Raj Kamal Jha, a 33-year-old editor at The Indian

Express in New Delhi, whose first novel, ''The Blue Bedspread,'' has received strong

reviews and an advance reported in the Indian press to be more than $275,000.

The phenomenon, publishers and writers say, is also a product of a renewed interest in

things Indian that began in 1997 with the mammoth publicity for the 50th anniversary

of the country's independence and that has been enhanced by the growth of computers

and the Internet, whichhave increased contact between Indian writers and Western

influences.


15/44

In addition to Mr. Jha, the writers include Mr. Mishra, now 31, whose first novel, ''The

Romantics,'' was called ''resonant and highly subtle'' by Michiko Kakutani in The New

York Times; Amit Chaudhuri, 37, of Calcutta whose writing has been described by Mr.

Rushdie as ''languorous, elliptical, beautiful''; and Kiran Desai (daughter of the

renowned Indian fiction writer Anita Desai), 28, who won praise two years ago for herfirst novel, ''Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard.''

They also include Jhumpa Lahiri, a 33-year-old New Yorker, the daughter of Bengali

immigrants, who won the Pulitzer Prize in April for her first book, a collection of short

stories titled ''Interpreter of Maladies.'' The stories evoke the complex and conflicted

world of Indian immigrants in the United States. This month Akhil Sharma, a 28-year-

old investment banker in Manhattan whose stories have appeared in The New Yorker

and The Atlantic, will publishhis first novel, ''An Obedient Father'' (Farrar, Straus &

Giroux). It is about corruption, decay and greed in the Indian government and about anIndian family.

Mr. Jha, who graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi with a

degree in mechanical engineering, went on to get a master's degree in journalism at the

University of Southern California. Richard Bernstein said in The New York Times that

''The Blue Bedspread,'' published in the United States by Random House, is ''a brilliant

beginning for a writer whose voice already shows a maturity well beyond his years.''

In th

e novel, an unnamed narrator is told th

ath

is sisterh

as died in ch

ildbirth

and th

athe must care for her daughter for one night, until the baby can be placed for adoption.

As he watches the infant in his home, he writes for her the stories he believes will help

her understand her place in the world.

It is that kind of knowledge, she said, that propels her stories of Indians in what for

them is a strange land. But the writers who have influenced her the most, she said, are

not Indian. They are instead also strangers in strange lands -- either immigrants or

writers who live or lived in a kind of self-imposed exile. They include Vladimir Nabokov,

James Joyce, Mavis Gallant and William Trevor.

''What I love about these writers is their connection to place, or at least their obsession

with place, even if they don't feel connected,'' she said.

Mr. Sharma, the author of ''An Obedient Father,'' moved to NewJersey from New Delhi

withhis parents when he was 9, but when it comes to writing about India and Indians,

he said, he views himself as ''quite an insider.''


16/44

His resume seems quintessentially American. He took Toni Morrison's writing class at

Princeton University, was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in creative writing at Stanford

University, went to Harvard Law School and is an investment banker in New York. But

''I've spent a lot of time in India,''he said. ''I've been back 10 to 15 times, three months

or so each visit, a total of three and a half years. India has played a large role in myimagination, and I think I write from an Indian point of view.''

Ms. Desai, whose novel focuses on the contradictions of modern life in a small Indian

town, has been compared by critics to an older generation of Indian writers, among

them her mother and R. K. Narayan. Ms. Desai, who has lived in the United States since

she was 14 and has a home in Manhattan, spends about half the year in New Delhi. She

said she considers herself ''an Indian writer who lives in America.''

''My own relation to India is a very natural one,'' sh

e said in an interview. ''I find it veryeasy to reach into my past and write about India, because it is myheritage. It's in my

blood. My family lives in both places. These days there's so much coming and going. It's

not the old style of immigration.''

Mr. Jha and Mr. Mishra say that in the vastness of India, where their middle-class lives

have been the exception rather than the rule, they feel that they are in some ways

separate from the real country and its overwhelming issues of poverty and class.

''When I go home from work I see at every intersection 5-year-olds coming to my car

and tapping on the window for some loose change,'' Mr. Jha said. ''I can't escape that

reality. It deeply affects me. And at the same time I feel very impotent, because I can't

engage with it. And one simply must.''

Despite the problems and concerns, Mr. Chaudhuri, whose first American book,

''Freedom Song,'' was praised by critics last year and whose new novel, ''A New World,''

is being published by Knopf in October, said he was confident about the future of Indian

writing in English.

''This is the coming of age of a particular generation that suddenly finds the novel anattractive form,'' Mr. Chaudhuri said. '' We need time to witness the evolution, and see

what develops.''

Photos: Among the young Indian writers who are making a literary splash in the West:

above, Jhumpa Lahiri and from left, Raj Kamal Jha, Arundhati Roy and Pankaj Mishra.


17/44

(Ruth Fremson/The New York Times); (Raaj Dayal/Random House); (Associated

Press); (Pradip Krishen/Random House)http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/04/books/04Book.html?ref=jhumpalahiri

Wonder Bread and Curry: Mingling Cultures,Conflicted Hearts

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Published: April 4, 2008

Jhumpa Lahiris characters tend to be immigrants from India and their American-

reared children, exiles who straddle two countries, two cultures, and belong to neither:

too used to freedom to accept the rituals and conventions ofhome, and yet too steeped

in tradition to embrace American mores fully. Th

ese Indian-born parents want th

eAmerican Dream for their children name-brand schools, a prestigious job, a roomy

house in the suburbs but they are cautious about the pitfalls of life in this alien land,

and isolated by their difficulties with language and customs. Their children too are often

emotional outsiders: having grown up translating the mysteries of the United States for

their relatives, they are fluent navigators of both Bengali and American culture but

completely at home in neither; they always experience themselves as standing slightly

apart, given more to melancholy observation than wholehearted participation.

Elena Seibert

Jhumpa Lahiri

UNACCUSTOMED EARTH

ByJhumpa Lahiri


As she did in her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of stories Interpreter of Maladies

(1999) and her dazzling 2003 novel The Namesake, Ms. Lahiri writes about these

people in Unaccustomed Earth with an intimate knowledge of their conflicted hearts,

using her lapidary eye for detail to conjure their daily lives with extraordinary precision:

the faint taste of coconut in the Nice cookies that a man associates withhis dead wife;

the Wonder Bread sandwiches, tinted green with curry, that a Bengali mother makes for

her embarrassed daughter to take to school. A Chekhovian sense of loss blows through


18/44

these new stories: a reminder of Ms. Lahiris appreciation of the wages of time and

mortality and her understanding too of the missed connections that plague her

husbands and wives, parents and children, lovers and friends.

Many of the characters in these stories seem to be in relationships that are filled withsilences and blackholes. In some cases this is the result of an arranged marriage thats

never worked out; in others it is simply a case of people failing to communicate or failing

to reach out, in time, for what they want.

In Only Goodness Sudha, who is working on her second masters degree at the London

School of Economics, wonders at the bizarre lack of emotion in her parents marriage,

which was neither happy nor unhappy and seemingly devoid of both bitterness and

ardor, but she finds her own marriage to an Englishman foundering upon her failure to

tell him a family secret. In Hell-Heaven the narrator recounts the story ofher parents

chilly marriage and her mothers passionate, unrequited love for a fellow Bengali and

family friend, who gave her mother the only pure happiness she ever felt. And in A

Choice of Accommodations Amit realizes that the most profound thing in his life

the birth ofhis daughters has alreadyhappened, that the rest ofhis life will be only a

continuation of the things he already knows. Increasinglyhe will come to regard

solitude a run in the park, a ride byhimself on the subway as what one relished

most, the only thing that, even in fleeting, diminished doses, kept one sane.

As for Ruma, the heroine of the title story, she realizes during a visit from her widowed

father that they rarely talk about matters of real importance; they do not speak about

her mother or her brother, they do not discussher pregnancy or her marriage, or her

fathers new relationship with a woman he met on vacation. This has been their history

as long as she can remember: Somehow, she feared that any difference of opinion

would chip away at the already frail bond that existed between them. Her marriage,

Ruma realizes, is stilted too: she is increasingly aware that she and her husband, Adam,

are separate people leading separate lives, and that part ofher is actually relieved

when Adam leaves on one ofhis many business trips.

Like many children of immigrants Ms. Lahiris characters are acutely aware of their

parents expectations; that they get into an Ivy Leagueschool, go to med school or grad

school, marry someone from a good Bengali family. Deftly explicating the emotional

arithmetic ofher characters families, Ms. Lahiri shows how some of these children


19/44

learn to sidestep, even defy their parents wishes. But she also shows howhaunted they

remain by the burden of their families dreams and their awareness of their role in the

generational process of Americanization.

UNACCUSTOMED EARTHByJhumpa Lahiri


Related



Their parents often seem so exhausted just coping with the difficulties of surviving in a

strange new world that talk about self-fulfillment or depression or happiness seems

utterly irrelevant to them; they are strangely pragmatic and unsentimental about

their marriages, their work, the hardships of daily life. These characters American-born

children are, at once, more romantic about the possibilities of finding genuine love and

rewarding careers and more cynical too about the trajectories of most peoples lives.

Often cast in the role of facilitator or fixer, they are accustomed to serving as their

parents go-betweens and to easing their younger siblings way into full-fledged

American lives.

Sudh

a, for instance, scavenged yard sales for th

e righ

t toys forh

er little broth

er th

eFisher Price barn, Tonka trucks, the Speak and Say that made animal sounds; she read

him books like The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Frog and Toad, and toldher parents to

set up sprinklers on the lawn for him to run through in the summer.

The last three overlapping tales in this volume tell a single story about a Bengali-

American girl and a Bengali-American boy, whose crisscrossing lives make up a

poignant ballad of love and loss and death. Hema and Kaushik get to know each other as

teenagers, when Kaushiks family comes to stay with Hemas parents while theyhouse-

hunt in the Boston suburbs. Hema secretly nurses a crush on Kaushik, but he isoblivious to her schoolgirl antics and preoccupied withhis mothers deteriorating

health. His grief over her death and his rage at his fathers hasty remarriage will propel

him into a career as a photojournalist, who spends most ofhis time traveling to war

zones in distant parts of the globe.


20/44

Hema, meanwhile, becomes a professor, a Latin scholar, who after a long, unhappy love

affair impulsively decides to opt for a traditional arranged marriage; though she is

conscious of the deadness of this proposed partnership, she tries to convince herself

that the relationship will endowher life with a sense of certainty and direction. Then,

against all odds, Hema and Kaushik run into each other in Rome on the eve of Hemasdeparture for her wedding and embark on an intense, passionate affair. And yet it is

an affair that concludes not with a fairy-tale happy ending but with an operatic

denouement that speaks of missed opportunities and avoidable grief.

In the hands of a less talented writer its an ending that might have seemed

melodramatic or contrived, but as rendered by Ms. Lahiri it possesses the elegiac and

haunting power of tragedy a testament toher emotional wisdom and consummate

artistry as a writer.

http://www.inflibnet.ac.in/ojs/index.php/JLCMS/article/viewFile/9/8Negotiating Borders of Culture :

Jhumpa Lahiris Fiction

DEBARATI BANDYOPADHYAY*

In Indian English Literature : A Critical Survey 1980-2000, M.K. Naik

and Shyamala A. Narain praise Jhumpa Lahiri for creating history

in becoming the first Indian author to win prestigious Pulitzer Prize

in the USA for her collection of short stories, Interpreter ofs Maladies.

(1999: 36) ThoughJhumpa Lahiri belongs to the second generation

of an Indian family abroad, she retains her links with India even

today, as amply proved byher subsequent work in the form of a

critically-acclaimed novel, The Namesake (2003). Inher work, Indians

going abroad negotiate the borders and fringes of a foreign society


21/44

in various ways and seek to establish their identity on alien shores.

It is this movement across continents and cultures that I intend to

maph

ere.

Negotiating borders, moving across continents and the seven seas,

when an individual in search of a better life, reaches the First World,

how does he assimilate himself with the citizens of the host nation?

Is the process of such assimilation or its oppositedissension

different in the case of men, women and children? This question

arises because the response of Ashima in The Namesake, is different

from that ofher children Gogol and Sonali, to the socio-cultural

conditions of life in the USA, born as she is in Calcutta. Similarly

there had been different responses to life in the USA in the case of

various characters in the collection of stories depicting life in Bengal,

Boston and Beyond, as the subtitle of Interpreter of Maladies reveals.

Conflict between distinct cultural backgrounds and regular encounters

between different worldviews shape the emotional life of the diaspora

even in multi-ethnic, multicultural societies like India and the USA.

Culture suggests the arts, customs and institutions of a certain

people or nation, therebyhelping us to distinguish a certain group

of people from others and one nation from another. It also helps in


22/44

the burgeoning of a distinct national identity among its citizens.

Multiculturalism in the context of one nations experience of

vicissitudes appears to institutionalize anoth

er way of expressing th

at

nations cultural identity. In Jhumpa Lahiris fiction, Indian roots and

American life, or, to be more precise, at least in the case of The

Namesake, Calcutta on the one hand, and Cambridge and New York

on the other, provide readers with different paradigms of life among

people representing distinct cultures and worldviews. It is in this

context, however, that we ought to remember Edward Saids scepticism

with the concept of culture as something distinctive, representative

of and exclusive to a certain group or nation in Culture and Imperialism

(1993) so as to understand the basic problem with such terms. Said

writes:

Culture is a concept that includes a refining and elevating

element, each societys reservoir of the best that has been known

and thought, as Matthew Arnold put it in the 1860s. Arnold

believed that culture palliates, if it does not altogether neutralize,

the ravages of a modern, aggressive, mercantile and brutalizing

urban experience . In time culture comes to be associated, often

aggressively, with the nation or the state; this differentiates us


23/44

from them, almost always with some degree of xenophobia.

Culture in this sense is a source of identity, and a rather

combative one at th

at. (xiii)

Against this concept of culture as a homogenization of the good,

patriotic attributes of a nation for the sake of exclusiveness, and

creation and preservation of an identity, Said mentions

multiculturalism and hybridity next, in order to praise their

permissiveness and relatively liberal philosophies (xiv). In the case

ofJhumpa Lahiris characters, a search for their origin, finding a

place or a nation that may be called ones own and belonging to

either the Indian subcontinent or the USA, or, in other words, making

a choice between the concepts of cultural identity and multiculturalism

seem to remain juxtaposed always.

Multiculturalism suggests the coexistence of a number of different

cultures. It does not prescribehomogenization and conformity directly,

nor does it encourage overtly different ethnic, religious, lingual or

racial constituents of a particular society to denigrate and alienate

each other to such an extent that the fragile balance of such a society

is damaged or destroyed permanently. It is at a transitional point

between two hemispheresEast and Westand two segments of the


24/44

world hierarchyThird and Firstor, the Indian subcontinent and

the USA that we may locate most ofJhumpa Lahiris fictional world.

India with

h

er concept of unity in diversity and th

e USA as th

e

melting pot of cultures and races, coexist inher fiction.

98

*Reader, Department of English, Viswa Bharati, Santiniketan.

Journal-7 97Number 1 q Summer q June 2009

Journal of Literature, Culture and Media Studies

Number 1 q Summer q June 2009

Discussing a cultural experience in a completely different context,

Vijay Mishra, in New Lamps for Old: Diasporas Migrancy Border,

had commented:

Even though the establishment of a homeland is not essential

to the cultural logic of diasporas it must be conceded that

homeland figures prominently in the psychic imaginary of

diasporas. Hindi news from India on SBS radio in Australia

always refer to the news as desh ki khabar (news from desh

where desh is unmarked as a country and can be translated as

Homeland). India alone as desh is unnamed, every other country

including Australia is named in the news bulletin. (70)


25/44

ThoughJhumpa Lahiri has been living away from Bengal for the

largest part ofher life, in When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine, it is

th

is same yearning for onesh

omeland th

at finds expression. Mr.

Pirzada in the crucial days of 1971, comes to the tiny Lilias US home

to her Bengali parents to dine and gradually, more important, to listen

to the news of the birth pangs of Bangladesh: At six-thirty, which

was when the national news began, my father raised the volume and

adjusted the antennas. (31) Lilias Indian parents and Mr. Pirzada

from East Pakistan in 1971, watch their national news of mass

destruction avidly. In contrast, Lilia, born in the USA (in her mothers

estimation, unlike herself, and also her husband) is assured of an

easy life during which she would never be compelled to eat rationed

food, or obey curfews, or watch riots from rooftop, or hide

neighbors in water tanks to prevent them from being shot. (26-27)

And the price paid for this in the US is the limits imposed upon

young Lilias awareness of the non-US parts of the world:

No one at school talked about the war followed so faithfully

in my living room. We continued to study the American

Revolution, and learned about the injustices of taxation without

representation, and memorized passages from the Declaration of


26/44

Independence. During recess the boys would divide in two

groups Redcoats against the colonies. (32-33)

Wh

ile Lilia learns about US Declaration of Independence, East

Pakistans struggle to become independent as a nation is, ironically,

neglected completely. Mr. Pirzada, the newcomer, separated from his

wife and seven daughters, for whom he remained anxious throughout

this period, must have yearned to return to his own country. Yet,

like Lilias parents, he graciously accommodates US celebrations into

his life byhelping Lilia celebrate Halloween like a typical American

child. In contrast, when in the school library, Lilia finds and begins

to read a book containing a few pages on Dacca,her teacher acts

decisively:

Mrs. Kenyon emerged and lifted the book by the tip of

its spine as if it were ahair clinging to my sweater. She glanced

at the cover, then at me.

Is this book a part of your report, Lilia?

No, Mrs. Kenyon.

Then I see no reason to consult, she said, replacing it in

the slim gap on the shelf. Do you? (33)

This reading of Lahiris short story reveals that though the author


27/44

herself was born in London and grew up in Rhode Island, USA, yet

she has Bengali parents and even celebrated her marriage in the

Bengali manner and continues to write about both

th

e countries, both

the continents, thereby expressing the emotions that disturb all

expatriate artists. Brati Biswas quotes Lahiris words from an internet

conversation: I began writing fiction seriously, my first attempts

were always set in Calcutta. I learned to observe things as an

outsider, and yet I also knew that as different as Calcutta is from

Rhode Island, I belonged there in some fundamental way . (187)

Lahiri points out clearly in this conversation that though she lives

in the USA and visits Calcutta as well as India from time to time

she feels a sense of belonging here in the ways I did not seem to

belong in the United States. (187) It is in this sense that Suman Bala

chooses to consider her as an expatriate Indian writer [who]

stands in the same category as that of V.S. Naipaul, whom Bharati

Mukherjee calls an Indian expatriate writer. (11)

However, in Lahiris fiction the readers are constantly being

invited to cross over from India to the USA alongwith the characters.

Against a panoramic background of journeys not merely in terms

of physical and career relocation as in the case of Mrs. Sen in a short


28/44

story and Ashoke in The Namesake, but also emotional, leaving behind

permanent fault-lines marking rupture and patching up the minute

details representing socio-cultural parameters for acceptance and

rejection, stand out conspicuously. Amalgamation of typically Indian

incidents and their American counterparts in detail help us to

compare and contrast two different cultural patterns. In the first story

in her collection, A Temporary Matter, Lahiri begins by creating

a typically Indian situation at the very centre of the USA, namely,

Negotiating Borders of Culture : Jhumpa Lahiris Fiction 99 100Number 1 q Summer q

June 2009



that of power-cut. Of course, where in the USA it is only a temporary

matter and the local consumers receive notice and ample time for

preparing for the situation, in India it is not so, as Shoba points out

in the darkness lit up with candles: Its like India. Sometimes the

current disappears for hours at a stretch. I once had to attend an

entire rice ceremony in the dark. The baby just cried and cried. It

must have been so hot. (11)

In this case, Lahiri makes the distinction quite vivid but a mere

hint can sometimes alert the readers to these situations that mark


29/44

India and the USA. as so far apart. For instance, in the same story,

when Shoba used to go shopping, she could be found arguing

under th

e morning sun with

boys too young to sh

ave but already

missing teeth.During the drive backhome, as the car curved along

the Charles, they invariably marveled at how much food theyd

bought. (7)

It is not the hint of violence in lower class life in the USA in

the pre-adolescence group but the other suggestion that links India

with the American way of life by means of contrast. In the case of

Boorima in A Real Durwan, a refugee in Calcutta from East

Pakistan, who had to work throughout the day in an apartment

building full of middle to lower-middle class families, inher old age,

a time comes when her old bedding gets wet and turns into useless

pulp, reducing her to sleep on discarded newspapers spread over a

hard floor and she does not even get a glass of tea or any food from

the apartment owners. Suffering from pangs ofhunger,

Reed broom in head, sari smeared with newspaper ink, she

wandered through markets and began spending her life savings

on small treats: today a packet of puffed rice. The next day

she walked to the produce markets in Bow Bazar. It was there


30/44

that she felt something tugging on the free end ofher sari.

When she looked the rest ofher life savingswere gone. (81)

Boorimah

ad already lost not onlyh

er country of origin buth

er family

and all her possessions. Now she loses all means of survival. The

subtle hints localizing Shoba along the Charles and Boorima at

Bowbazar suggest the yawning gap that exists between the old

womans starvation and Shobas ability to purchase astonishingly

rich food, both in quality and quantity, thereby indicating the nature

of Lahiris awareness of the socio-economic divide between First and

Third World countries.

Where in A Temporary Matter Lahiri mentions the piles of food

purchased in passing, in This Blessed House the details she

provides, makes the opulence (compared to an average lower middle

class Indians lifestyle) of a person in the USA with roots in India,

quite vivid:

The menu for the party was fairly simple: there would be

a case of champagne, and samosas from an Indian restaurant

in Hartford, and big trays of rice with chicken and almonds and

orange peels, which Sanjeevhad spent the greater part of the

morning and afternoon preparing worried that there would


31/44

not be enough to drink,[he] ran out at one point to buy another

case of champagne just in case. (150)

Th

e fairly simple menu and th

e ch

ampagne prove th

at Sanjeev and

his wife Twinkle have blended the western and the Indian food

habits quite well. Cross-cultural relations are on display in Sanjeevs

cooking and sweeping the house as preparatory work for the party

while his wife had left for a pedicure and a manicure. In A

Temporary Matter too, Shoba continued to work out ofhome while

Shukumar, on leave to complete his dissertation, would prepare food

for both. This is normal in the West and gradually, not so very rare

in India either. But even a few years ago, at the time when these

stories are set, the domestic pictures in India and the west could not

have been more different, as proved in the Interpreter of Maladies

where Mr. Kapasi, a typical Indian husband would return home after

a long days work outside, scrubhis feet and hands with sandalwood

soap, and enjoy the evening newspaper and a cup of tea that his

wife would serve him. (60)

Lahiri is not only aware of the traditional Indian family-structure

and the role designated to men and women in this society, but also

the way Indians view foreign-returned fellow-Indians or people of


32/44

white skin. In A Temporary Matter Shoba says that back in

Calcutta [for] some reason my relatives always wanted me to tell

th

em th

e names of my friends in America. I dont know wh

y th

e

information was so interesting to them. The last time I saw my aunt

she asked after four girls I went to elementary school with in Tucson.

I barely remember them now. (12)

And for foreign-returned Indian and N.R.Is themselves, India is

both a threat and an attraction as amply proved by Shukumars

experiences. His parents used to go back without him. The first

time hed gone as an infant hed nearly died of amoebic dysentery.

Negotiating Borders of Culture : Jhumpa Lahiris Fiction 101 102Number 1 q Summer q

June 2009



His father was afraid to take him again.... (12) But while India

remained a country whose germs were to be avoided and sailing

camps in the USA were to be given preference over, when this same

Shukumar had grown up and listened to his wife Shoba reminiscing

about India, he wished now that he had his own childhood story

of India. (12)

Undoubtedly those who make the transition from the Indian


33/44

subcontinent to the West feel both attraction for their roots in a

nostalgic manner and yet, it is difficult for them to accept the

mundane realities prevailing in India. For women of an earlier

generation especially, the West provided opportunities that in the

past traditional Indian wives and mothers could not even imagine

of. In A Temporary Matter we find such a lady maintaining a

balance between Indian tradition and Western necessities. Shobas

mother, who had come over to spend two months with the couple

after Shoba had given birth to a dead son, takes care of everything

efficiently.

She came from America cooked dinner every night, drove herself

to the supermarket, washed their clothes, put them away. She was

a religious woman. She set up a small shrine, a framed picture of

a lavender-faced goddess and a plate of marigold petals, on the

bedside table in the guest room. She folded his [Shukumars]

sweaters with an expertise she had learned from her job in a

department store. (9)

But though in this case a perfect balance had been reached, the

case was not so for the majority of women who had gone abroad

with their husbands. In Mrs Sens, the lady in question finds it


34/44

difficult to adjust to the fast pace of life in the West, symbolized in

her inability to master driving skills quickly enough and her propensity

to use th

e curved blade h

inged at one end to a narrow wooden

base to cut vegetable into pieces instead of the knife used in the

West for this purpose (114). In The Namesake, after spending all her

married life in the USA, even after giving birth to her two children

and bringing them up there, Ashima, the housewife retains completely

Indian sentiments in such a manner that the USA never feels like

her home. With grown-up children living away from home, she

continued to revisit India in nostalgia, rereading her long-dead

parents letters from India, her home. At forty-eight, she is still unable

to operate a bank account all byherself and when she has cheques

to deposit she hands them over to her husband Ashoke and he

deposits them for her at the bank into their account. (162) When

her husband returns home every third weekend, he does the things

she still doesnt knowhow to do. He pays all the bills, and rakes

the leaves on the lawn, and puts gas from the self-service station into

her car. (163)

But is the situation the same for second generation members of

the diaspora? Since she herself is a representative of this group of


35/44

expatriate Indians, Jhumpa Lahiri knows the meaning of this type

of life very well and therefore, she distinguishes between the

experiences of different generations of th

e diaspora emph

atically. As

Brati Biswas had quoted from her internet-interview, Lahiri discusses

her own experience and points out its significance in the larger

context of the rest of such expatriate Indians. She says:

In fact, it is still veryhard to think of myself as an American.

For immigrants the challenges of exile, the loneliness, the

constant sense of alienation, the knowledge of and longing for

a lost world, are more explicit and distressing than for their

children. On the other hand, the problem for the children of

immigrants, those with strong ties to their country of origin, is

that they feel neither one thing nor the other. The feeling that

there was no single place to which I fully belonged bothered

me growing up. It bothers me less now. (187-8)

This seems to be the story of not onlyJhumpa Lahiris life, but

also of Gogol alias Nikhil Ganguli in The Namesake. In her first novel,

Lahiri continues to relocate her characters from Calcutta to Boston

and for Gogol, the representative of the next generation, from these

places to New York and in the midst of the sophisticated white urban


36/44

population in the USA. In contrast to both Ashoke and Ashima, the

India-born couple, Gogol is born in the USA and as an US citizen

by birth

,h

e feels a lost more confident abouth

is position inh

is

society than his parents would ever be, except possibly for the

problem about the unusual appearance ofhis own name. Therefore

in his childhood, Ashoke and Ashima, eager to ensure that their son

would imbibe and retain some essence of their Indian as well as

Bengali background, would make a point of driving into Cambridge

when the Apu Trilogy plays at the Orson Welles, or when there is

a Kathakali dance performance or a sitar recital at Memorial Hall

send him to Bengali language and culture lessons. (65) Gogol himself,

like other children of Indian expatriates sitting through these lessons

without interest, wishing they could be at ballet or softball practice

Negotiating Borders of Culture : Jhumpa Lahiris Fiction 103 104Number 1 q Summer

q June 2009



instead like typically American children,hated attending them

too.(66)

Where Ashoke and Ashima work and behave like all normal

American people except for receiving issues of India Abroad and


37/44

Sangbad Bichitra, Gogol proves to be a more authentic American than

they are, though, he does not look forward to occasional visits to

Calcutta or th

e annual pujoh

eld at one of th

e local communityh

alls

where they were required to throw marigold petals at a cardboard

effigy of a goddess and eat bland vegetarian food. (64) Tohim, it

was never as interesting and lively as Christmas. And the fact that

the American themselves make a subtle yet pronounced distinction

between his parents and himself (presumably because of their accents

and behaviour) posits in him a confident, American way of viewing

life.

For by nowhe is aware, in stores, of cashiers smirking at his

parents accents, and of salesmen who prefer to direct their

conversation to Gogol, as thoughhis parents were either

incompetent or deaf. But his father is unaffected at such

moments. (67-68)

However, it is not always that even Gogol can feel confident about

his position in the American society. When he finds the family

mailbox bearing the surname GANGULI had been tampered with to

spell GANGREEN (67), and when during a school project where the

young students are made to record the names etched on tombstones,


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Gogol realizes that he can never hope to find his family name on

any of these among hordes of Smiths, Collinses and Woods or as

his ot

her classmates find t

heirs,

he feels enraged at being burdened

with a useless, absurd identity.

Apart from these stray experiences sobering up Gogol Gangulis

wild enthusiasm to lead a life on his own terms like a typical

American citizen a bit, he goes on to chart out his own path away

from home among Ruth, Maxine, Gerald, Lydia and other American

friends and lovers, just as his sister Sonali (turned into Sonia now)

does withher boyfriend Ben. And like a typically American couple,

Gogol and his wife Moushumi separate quite naturally over marital

infidelity. Compared to the situation of Lahiris earlier story Sexy

where a philandering Indian husband in the USAhas a tearful, loyal

wife clinging to him and not ready to accept separation at all,here

it is the infidelity of the wife, born to Indian parents but brought

up in England and the USA like Lahiri herself, that destroys their

marriage. Moushumi, like Gogol, is a second generation Indian

immigrant and there is a world wide gap between the traditional Mrs.

Sen or Ashimalike wife in the West and women ofher generation

in 2000.


39/44

In contrast to Gogols confident view of the American way of

life as the acceptable one, we find the wealthy and suave urbanites

Maxine andh

er parents Gerald and Lydias polite expression of

interest in India. India viewed through the eyes of the American

citizens who have learnt about this Asian country not by visiting it

but by glancing at pictures and reading newspaper reports or from

hearsay at the most is something like this:

Eventually the talk turns to India. Gerald asks questions about

the recent rise of Hindu fundamentalism, a topic Gogol knows

little about. Lydia talks at length about Indian carpets and

miniatures, Maxine about a college class shed once taken on

Buddhist stupas. Gerald has an Indian colleague who just

went to India for his honeymoon. Hed brought back spectacular

photographs, of a palace built on a lake. (134)

On the other hand, Pamela, another American woman says

unequivocally that Gogol must be lucky becausehe does not have

to fall sick visiting India like her friend had. When Gogol says that

he too has to get shots before he goes to India and that his parents

devote the better part of a suitcase to medicine, she is sceptical,

as, according to her, as an Indian, he must be immune to the health


40/44

hazards the Americans face in India. (157) This then, represents the

spectrum of the American ways of viewing India, as from the country

ofh

istorical artifacts to recent religious controversies in polite society

and then as a spectre of an ugly, unhealthy, dirty place crawling

with germs, in case of the more forthright.

Gogol Gangulis choice of this American way of life over the

Indian and the Bengali had appeared to be quite natural for the

greater part of the novel, at least to him. It is only afterhis marriage

with Moushumi fails and his father dies that Gogol returns home

dutifully to take care ofhis mother regularly, as much as possible.

It is in these changed circumstances where traditional Indian concepts

of filial duty and responsibility are reasserted as values that Gogol

understands his true position in the world. Along with the legacy

left by the father, he finds a new love to cherish for the motherland

far away. Not because the Americans had rejected Gogol (because

Negotiating Borders of Culture : Jhumpa Lahiris Fiction 105 106Number 1 q Summer

q June 2009



theyhad accepted him as an American most of the time clearly), nor

because he could not imbibe the American way of life but because


41/44

he feels that now since Ashima, a widow, is to spend half the year

in Calcutta and half in the States after selling off the house, he will

findh

ish

ome occupied by strangersh

enceforth

, th

e new buyers of

their house. Now that one peripatetic Gogol Ganguli loses the only

fixed point, his home containing his roots, he is able to understand

the value of the homeland.

He wonders howhis parents had done it, leaving their respective

families behind, seeing them so seldom, dwelling unconnected, in a

perpetual state of expectation, of longing. All those trips to Calcutta

hed once resented how could theyhave been enough? Gogol

knows now that his parents had lived their lives in America in spite

of what was missing, with a stamina he fears he does not possess

himself. (281)

The realization ofhis inadequacy, the inability to be sustained by

memories of a homeland, to go on struggling to survive abroad, are

skills that Gogol seeks because he feels that in the absence of a little

India in the form ofhis home containing Ashima, he will not feel

at home in the country where he was born. Nowhe understands

the nature of the bond that compelled his parents to make annual

pilgrimages to the motherland.


42/44

He had spent years maintaining distance from his origins; his

parents, in bridging that distance as best they could. And yet, for

allh

is aloofnessh

eh

as alwaysh

overed close to th

is quiet, ordinary

town that had remained, for his mother and father, stubbornly exotic.

for most ofhis adult life he has never been more than a fourhour train ride away.

And there was nothing, apart from his family,

to drawhim home, to make this train journey, again and again. (281)

Roots, origin, family bonds induce expatriate, immigrant nonresident Indians to return

again and again to the point from where

they move away. This emotional and spiritual bond gives form to

Jhumpa Lahiris stories and about such a state of expatriate existence,

the following words of Aamer Hussin seem to be the most appropriate :

it implies neither a forced eviction from ones motherland, nor

a deliberate rejection; there are no connotations of permanent

or obligatory leavetaking. There is, instead, a tremendous inherent

privilege in the term, a mobility of mind if not always of matter,

to which we as writers should lay claim: a doubling instead of

a split. (102)

Jhumpa Lahiri, as a fictional creator, occupies this privileged space

in between two countries, two continents, two cultures, and this

multiplicity of perspectives, a truly multi-national existence and a


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multi-cultural experience makes her one of the foremost spokespersons

of the multitude of minute yet consequential incidents that constitute

contemporary life.

References

Bala, Suman.2002. Jhumpa Lahiri: The Master Storyteller, Jhumpa Lahiri: The

Master.Storyteller: A Critical Response to Interpreter of Maladies,

ed. Suman Bala. New Delhi: Khosla.

Biswas, Brati. 2002. Beyond Ethnicity: A Study of Interpreter of Maladies,

Jhumpa Lahiri: The Master Storyteller: A Critical Response to Interpreter

of Maladies, ed. Suman Bala. New Delhi: Khosla.

Hussein, Aamer.1991. The Echoing ofQuiet Voices. Asian Voices in English,

eds. Mini Chan and Roy Harris. Hong Kong: Hong Kong UP.

Lahiri, Jhumpa. 2000. Interpreter of Maladies. 1999. New Delhi: Harper Collins,

1999.

------------- 2003. The Namesake. London: Flamingo-Harper Collins.

Mishra, Vijay. 2000. New Lamps for Old: Diaspora Migrancy Border.

Interrogating Post-colonialism: Theory, Text and Context. eds. Harish

Trivedi and Meenakshi Mukherjee. Shimla: Indian Institute of

Advanced Study, 1996.

Naik, M.K. and Shyamala A. Narayan. 2001. Indian English Literature 1980-


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2000: A Critical Survey. Delhi: Pencraft.

Said, Edward W. 1994. Culture and Imperialism. 1993. London: Vintag

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