phd thesis on jhumpa lahiri

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• DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2023.2230374
• Corpus ID: 266574397

Jhumpa Lahiri and the Translation Memoir: To Write and Exist Beyond the Mother Tongue

• Benedetta Cutolo
• Published in Life Writing 28 December 2023
• Linguistics

20 References

The mother tongue as border, the bilingual text: history and theory of literary self-translation, beyond the mother tongue: the postmonolingual condition.

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Canons and Controversies: The Critical Gaze on Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction

Naming jhumpa lahiri : canons and controversies, the location of culture, third‐world literature in the era of multinational capitalism, the namesake, minor feelings: an asian american reckoning, reading india now: contemporary formations in literature and popular culture by ulka anjaria (philadelphia, temple university press, 2019), related papers.

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Jhumpa Lahiri . Translating Myself and Others

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Mohammad Shafiqul Islam, Jhumpa Lahiri . Translating Myself and Others , The Review of English Studies , Volume 74, Issue 314, April 2023, Pages 385–387, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgac084

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An eminent and popular voice in fiction, Jhumpa Lahiri, has also earned a prominent place in contemporary world literature as a translator—in fact, she says, ‘I was a translator before I was a writer’. Born to Indian Bengali parents in London in 1967, Lahiri has grappled with language since childhood. When she was three, her parents moved permanently to the US, and Lahiri grew up with a distinctive sense of shifting from one culture to another, from one language to another, her sense of self structured by the features and forms of different languages. Her entente with English and Bengali in childhood developed into a fascination with language learning, which ended in her enchantment with Italian. Lahiri’s love affair with Italian is beautifully illustrated in In Other Words (2016), a book that she wrote in Italian, which was translated into English by Ann Goldstein.

Translating Myself and Others is to some extent an expansion of In Other Words , although the two books are different in style, form, and approach. The latest collection includes some powerful essays on the art of translation as well as on Lahiri’s personal investment in translating from Italian into English. She also offers deep and insightful discussion of relationships between originals and their translations, between a writer and a translator, on superiority and marginality, and also on the necessity of translation. In the first essay, ‘Why Italian’, Lahiri contemplates her growing love for Italian rather than English, her literary language, and Bengali, the language in which she communicated with her parents at home: ‘I am a writer without a true mother tongue’, she says, a writer ‘linguistically orphaned’ (10). She recalls the questions that were raised by her learning another language: ‘You’re of Indian origin, were born in London, raised in America. You write books in English. What does Italian have to do with any of that?’ (9). Even so, she persisted in gathering the details and subtleties that make for an Italian literary style. In the process, she thinks that her life ‘is a series of grafts, one after another’ (20).

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Cultural Reflections and Identity Crisis in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland

The present study focuses on Jhumpha Lahiri's struggle for identity and the cultural dynamic that underpins self-formation in The Lowland .It analyses the characters of Subhash, Udayan and Gauri from a cultural point of view and undertakes an enquiry of themes like the creation and transfiguration of identity, the difficulties of finding true love and the importance of familial ties – themes that span Lahiri's entire output. Finally it examines how Lahiri juxtaposes diverse customs so as to present the clash of cultures, developing her characters and circumstances in greater depth than ever before.

Related Papers

Shashikant Mhalunkar

JhumpaLahiri has been considered as one of the eminent voices in the present times articulating the maladies of the people situated in the unaccustomed earth of the Diaspora communities. Her narratives focus mainly on the itineraries of her subjects, especially, her female characters, facilitating them to explore their ethnicities, identities and femininities. Diasporic identities, multiple migrations, shift in locations and mobility make the female characters more free and liberate than their home country. Lahiri's latest novel, The Lowland epitomizes the flight and plight of her female subjects who in the international space experience loneliness, marginalization, alienation and psychological stress. As a result, they cut loose themselves from the traditional norms of man-woman relationship to find comfort in a subculture of their own. In the homeland the ethnic, social, political and conjugal rigidities restrict their femininities. The same characters, for instance, breathe freely in the international space. For instance, Gauri, the wife of Udayan and later on wife of Subhash distances herself from the men in her life just to discover and relocate her own self and her entity in this world. In doing so she embraces lesbian relationship with her research student, Lorna. Her mute sexuality with Udayan, her occasional sexuality with Subhash and her temporal but very poignant lesbian relationship with Lorna project her as a differently gendered person in Diaspora space. The present paper, therefore, attempts to vocalize the issues of sub-culture and different gender as evident in the character of Gauri. In a way, these are the flights of women in the novel to enter a utopian space-an escape from the parochial world. Gauri stands against every compulsion of hegemony of the social and ethnic taboo. In this novel lesbian relations indicate comfort and intimacy-a temporal relief from stress and alienation.

University of Bucharest Review: Literary and Cultural Studies

Elena Stoican

humpa Lahiri’s novel The Lowland traces the traumatic effect of a family event upon members of different generations – wife (Gauri), brother (Subhash) and daughter (Bela) – whose lives continue to unfold outside India. The analysis discusses the vegetal metaphors of specific plants and roots employed by Lahiri in order to illustrate the emergence of different patterns of (up) rooting that weave the fabric of her transmigrant characters. By closely investigating the intersecting axes of groundedness and deterritorialization, the paper aims to disentangle the significance of the rich Deleuzian imagery that surfaces in the cultural configuration of transplanted individuals, with a focus on Subhash. More specifically, the discussion sets out to establish whether the abundance of rhizomatic elements is meant as a glorification of nomadic subjectivity that implicitly idealizes uprootedness as a pre- condition for the enlargement of cultural perspectives. The present paper analyzes Subhash’s cultural outlook, arguing that his self-transformation entails a symbolic killing of some Indian traditions paralleled by the birth of new outlooks. This process of regeneration situates the protagonist beyond the possibility of fixed allegiances, in a transcultural dimension. The analysis considers theories regarding nomadism, transnational migration and the significance of transgression as a strategy of cultural reinvention.

IOSR Journals

Abstract: Jhumpa Lahiri's novel The Lowland, traces the fate of tender fraternal bonds torn asunder by violent politics. Lahiri's delineation of the narrative events purports to show how the absence of loved ones becomes covertly a portent haunting presence within the subconscious mind of the affected characters directing their overt actions to their own consequential ways of life through which they are goaded on. When their respective paths crisscross, Lahiri proves herself to be adept at depicting the unhappiness at the core of the intricate interpersonal relations that materialises. This write-up attempts to grasp the import of this novel by situating the author's unique presence both in the post millennium Indian English fiction as well as in the fabric of the narrative. Its analytical method moves from an elaborate study of the tortuous plot through a network of characterisation, scrutiny of the multiplex narration leading to a medley of themes that have contemporary appeal. Key Words: plot- characterisation - narrative technique - thematic dimensions

SARI FITRIA

This study is aimed to uncover ambivalence in Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, entitled The Lowland. In this study, Lahiri portrays how ambivalence occurs to Indian immigrants. These Indian immigrants are described as individuals who have spent many years in America. They come to America to continue their study. It implies that they are educated people. However, they are not able to adapt American culture well. At the same time, they also dismiss some of their origin culture. As a result, Lahiri argues that these Indian immigrants face irresolution of identity. In addition, a concept of post-colonialism by Homi K. Bhabha is applied in this study. One of Bhabha’s ideas in his post-colonialism is called ambivalence. The result of this study discloses that there is a high possibility for immigrants to suffer for irresolution of identity as the effect of different and conflicting cultures they have to face. Keywords: ambivalence, irresolution of identity, immigrants, post-colonialis

Langlit: An International Peer-Reviewed Open Acess journal

Maitrayee Misra

Sugata Samanta

Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland, partly set in Calcutta of the 1960's and 70's and partly in Rhode Island of America, tells the story of four generations of Mitra family with a sweeping, addictive plot. The initial development of the story centers around the Naxalite insurgency in West Bengal in late 1960's and 70's which had taken the country by surprise. In this article I have tried to find out, by means of textual analysis, how far the novelist has succeeded in representing the Naxalite movement in her novel vibrantly and aesthetically

Alford Council of International English & Literature Journal

Suchitra Reddy

musarrat shameem

The analysis examines the (dis) empowering valences assigned to nomadic mobility by Jhumpa Lahiri. Relying on a cultural studies approach to literature, the paper builds a comparative perspective on nomadic identities and transcultural transformations as illustrated by The Lowland and In Other Words. The discussion focuses on the interplay between the protagonists’ rhizomatic profiles and their search for rooted configurations. In order to enlarge the scope of the analysis, a few references will be made to Kaushik, a character from Unaccustomed Earth.

IJELS Editor , Rinchen Dorji

Many have categorized Jhumpa Lahiri's oeuvre as the "immigrant genre", in which the immigrants search for a location where they can feel at home in their new homeland. All her works explore this element of diaspora where there is a generational tension between immigrant parents and their children , clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and displacement in their new societies. The Lowland, to some part, deals with this usual immigrant experiences, but what sets the novel apart from all her previous works is that it has the complexity of a political novel whereby the writer uses and explores the Naxalite political movement in India as the background on which the main plot of the book drifts. Such subjects have never been covered by Lahiri before. One of the protagonists of the novel joins this movement, and its repercussion on his family members forms the core of the novel. While the writer does not delve into a political discussion of the movement itself, it forms the basis of the whole plot of the novel. It talks about how a person's enga gement in the naxalite movement affects a grueling three generations of his family after he is killed by the police. This paper shall therefore focus on the political aspect of the novel by presenting the political and personal side by side and by analyzing how politics affects the personal lives of the characters.

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Migration, Gender and Globalisation in Jhumpa Lahiri

• First Online: 29 May 2016

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• Ruvani Ranasinha 2  

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Jhumpa Lahiri’s sharply observed feminist narratives contain diverse female subjectivities, with relationships and the gendered and generational contexts of migration at their centre: Interpreter of Maladies (1999), The Namesake (2004), Unaccustomed Earth (2008) and The Lowland (2013b). They highlight Lahiri’s intervention in complicating and expanding feminist critical expectations. Towards the end of the chapter, Lahiri’s interventions are briefly contextualised in relation to the different trajectories of her migrant peers, Kamila Shamsie, Uzma Aslam Khan, Roshi Fernando and V.V. Ganeshananthan.

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Sri Lankan-born Chandani Lokuge shares Lahiri’s focus on the inner worlds of female migrant protagonists in Australia. Lokuge’s If the Moon Smiled (2000) and Softly , As I Leave You (2011) foreground displacement, rupture and the disintegration of marital and familial relationships and domestic spaces.

See also a recent volume of essays that evaluates Lahiri in terms of the evolution of an Asian American sensibility into universalism (Dhingra and Cheung 2012 ).

Ash ( 2000 ), pp. 80–81.

Marwah ( 2013 ), pp. 1–4.

Song ( 2007 ), pp. 345–368.

Kushner ( 2009 ), pp. 22–29.

Wilhelmus ( 2004 ), pp. 133–140.

Wilhelmus ( 2008 ), pp. 580–586.

Deresiewicz ( 2006 ), pp. 17–24.

Grewal ( 2005 ), p. 61.

See also Dhingra and Cheung ( 2012 ).

Ruth Maxey argues that despite the problems in Bharati Mukherjee’s novel, ‘it is difficult to imagine Lahiri’s historic Pulitzer Prize win in 2000…without thinking back to the literary breakthrough represented by Mukherjee’s Jasmine (1989) that gained unprecedentedly wide readerships’ (Maxey 2012 , pp. 14–15). However, the representative status Jasmine accrued has also been damaging.

See the critiques of polarised representations of East and West in Divarakuni’s short stories discussed in Srikanth ( 2004 ), p. 130.

Reddy ( 2013 ), pp. 29–59. See also Susan Koshy on minority cosmopolitanism and the growing internationalisation of ethnic literary production. Koshy develops the notion of minority cosmopolitanism to examine the ways in which these literary narratives of worlding contest Eurocentric accounts of globality and considers how the gendered figure of the diasporic citizen in Lahiri’s title story serves as a vehicle for minority cosmopolitanism (Koshy 2011 , pp. 592–609).

Katrak ( 2002 ), pp. 5–6.

Srikanth ( 2004 ), p. 49.

Grewal ( 2005 ), p. x.

Grewal ( 2005 ), pp. 66–67. Deepika Bahri similarly details how Mukherjee’s eponymous heroine’s ‘escape route from the assigned subjectivities for the Third World woman as passive victim paradoxically paralyses the Other left behind’. Leaving her ‘backward’ homeland and the debilitating roles constructed for Indian women, Jasmine finds personal fulfilment in the USA (Bahri 1998 , p. 137).

Grewal ( 2005 ), pp. 66–67.

Grewal ( 2005 ), p. 67.

Majumdar ( 2001 ), pp. 199–203. For further India-based responses see Nityanandam ( 2005 ) and Das ( 2008 ).

Marwah ( 2012 ), pp. 59–79.

Deb ( 2013 ).

Schillinger ( 2008 ).

Lahiri ( 1999 ), p. 174.

See Ruth Maxey’s useful discussion of the problematic nature of the term ‘model minority’: ‘The notion of law abiding, family minded, high achieving Asian Americans…elides individual differences between Asian Americans, ignores the ongoing difficulties they may face, subtly maintains their outside status in the eyes of mainstream America—foregrounding minority as much as model—while being used sometimes as an invidious means of explaining the lack of “progression” of other communities of colour’ (Maxey 2012 , p. 71, n. 50).

Srikanth et al. ( 2012 ), p. 59.

Mishra ( 2013 ).

Mani ( 2012 ), pp. 75–97.

Mullan ( 2013 ). See Said ( 1993 ).

Sawhney ( 2008 ).

Lahiri has written about the importance of Calcutta (now Kolkata) in her work: ‘When I began writing fiction seriously, my first attempts were, for some reason, always set in Calcutta, which is a city I know quite well, as a result of repeated visits with my family, sometimes for several months at a time. These trips, to a vast, unruly, fascinating city so different from the small New England town where I was raised, shaped my perceptions of the world and of people from a very early age. I went to Calcutta either as a tourist or as a former resident—a valuable position, I think, for a writer. The reason my first stories were set in Calcutta is due partly to that perspective—that necessary combination of distance and intimacy with a place. Eventually I started to set my stories in America, and as a result the majority of the stories in Interpreter of Maladies have an American setting. Still, though I’ve never lived anywhere but America, India continues to form part of my fictional landscape. As most of my characters have an Indian background, India keeps cropping up as a setting, sometimes literally, sometimes more figuratively, in the memory of the characters.’ ‘A conversation with Jhumpa Lahiri (2003)’ www.bookbrowse.com .

Like Sawhney, Sanjay Subramanian overlooks Lahiri’s engagement with perspectives such as the driver and tourist guide Mr Kapasi in his claim that ‘At its most genteel, this attitude…[an exclusive preoccupation with] the tragic fate of the anglicised members of India’s elite colleges may be found in an Indian-American writer such as Jhumpa Lahiri’, whose work ‘would never embrace [as Adiga’s The White Tiger does] the subjectivity of a crass chauffeur from Bihar’ (Subramanian 2008 , pp. 42–43).

See Roy’s ( 2010 ) excellent discussion of NRI citizenship.

Ong ( 1999 ), p. 6.

Reddy ( 2013 ), pp. 29–59.

I refer to the technique of art to make objects unfamiliar in contrast to habitual or automatic perception. See David Lodge’s discussion of defamiliarisation on pp. 52–55. Michael Cox explores this defamiliarising technique in relation to Lahiri’s child narrators, but I suggest it is not limited to children’s perspectives (Cox 2003 , pp. 120–132).

See Chap. 2 for a similar incident in Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss .

Grewal ( 1993 ), pp. 226–236.

Williams ( 2007 ), pp. 69–79.

See also Srikanth’s rich reading of ‘This Blessed House’ as offering ‘a counterpoint to the weightiness of religious climate in the US by…exploring a sense of playfulness around faith’ (Srikanth 2004 , p. 222).

Lahiri ( 2008 ), p. 82.

Srikanth ( 2004 ), p. 51.

Maxey ( 2012 ), p. 179.

Jhumpa Lahiri, cited in ‘A conversation with Jhumpa Lahiri’ (2003) at www.book browse.com .

Lahiri ( 2004 ), p. 38.

Ruth Maxey suggests this is an example of North America teaching immigrants self-sufficiency (Maxey 2012 , p. 176).

For a different view, see Sawhney, who argues that Lahiri’s depiction of ‘culture-clash spoon-feeds western readers information about race and migration’ (Sawhney 2008 ).

Similarly, Gogol’s subsequent girlfriend Moushumi’s Indian family were prepared to accept her Ivy League-educated white fiancé. See also the inverse race and class hierarchy in the story ‘A Choice of Accommodations’ in Unaccustomed Earth in Amit’s recognition that his less privileged white American wife Megan would have avoided someone from his wealthy background ‘were he not Indian’ (Lahiri 2008 , p. 95).

As Song observes, this suggests another allegorical position between nation and ethnos (Song 2007 , pp. 345–368, 367, n. 8).

Lahiri ( 2013a ).

See the Wages for Housework Campaign, which argues that politicised definitions of mothers as ‘workless’ made way for welfare reform’s definition of a good mother; she goes out to a job even below the minimum wage with whatever childcare she can afford.

See Manzoor ( 2007 ) and Sanghera ( 2008 ).

Akhil Sharma makes a similar point about his semi-autobiographical novel Family Life (2014): ‘It is definitely an immigrant novel and one of its subjects is the Indian community in America of which I am tremendously grateful to be a part. But while it is a loving community, if you are perceived as shameful then you are rejected almost immediately. That is seen with alcoholism and other addictions, but also mental illness. My mother would say my brother was in a coma, a more acceptable phrase than brain damaged’. Akhil Sharma, cited in ‘A life in…’ by Wroe ( 2014 ).

Bayley ( 1998 ), p. 57.

Ruma’s ephemeral friendships with the new mothers in Brooklyn (also born of circumstance) are abandoned once she moves to Seattle: ‘For all the time she’d spent with these women the roots did not go deep’ (Lahiri 2008 , p. 35).

Gogol calls Maya Mashi ‘as if she were his mother’s own sister’ (Lahiri 2004 , p. 61). These fellow migrant friends become ‘honorary aunts and uncles’ (Lahiri 2004 , p. 73) to Gogol and Sonia.

Bala ( 2002 ).

Schlote ( 2006 ), pp. 387–409. In the second chapter, Cheung and Dhingra similarly argue that Lahiri’s The Namesake in particular provides empowered third-space or transnational beyond British American versus Indian (Dhingra and Cheung 2012 ).

Maxey ( 2012 ), p. 68.

In The Lowland Lahiri also extends her customary focus on Asian Americans who are unconscious of their privilege by including the perspectives of lower-middle-class characters like Udayan, Subhash and their parents. The latter educate their children beyond their own achievements and yet still wish them to follow Hindu cultural traditions. Their father, a railroad government employee who works as a railroad clerk—‘barred from joining any party or union…during independence he was forbidden to speak out’—has little sympathy for radicalism ‘dismissed Naxalbari’ as ‘young people…getting excited over nothing’ (Lahiri 2013b , pp. 24, 23). Unlike the wealthy Indian students, Subhash and Gauri eventually teach in North America who are ‘at ease…anywhere in the world’ they hail from ‘a different India’ (Lahiri 2013b , p. 233).

Lahiri ( 2013b ), p. 131.

Malone ( 2013 ).

Fellicini ( 2013 ).

Lasdun ( 2013 ).

Merrit ( 2013 ).

Kakutani ( 2013 ).

Hensher ( 2013 ).

Inevitably, no single work can encompass every aspect of a political movement, but see Deb’s complaint that the novel recounts ‘rote descriptions of demos, political meetings slogans on the wall but not a single line of Naxal poetry of songs that flared through India at the time in numerous languages and that formed a far more defining aspect of the movement than the badly made bombs and dense theoretical tracts mentioned in the novel’ (Deb 2013 ). Urmila Seshagiri points out that the Mitras’ caste is not mentioned, even though caste was a preoccupation in the 1960s(Sehagiri 2013 ). For a reading of the role of caste in the Naxalite uprising see Meena Kandasamy’s (b. 1984) powerful debut novel The Gypsy Goddess (2014). Inspired by Arundhati Roy’s writings, Kandasamy examines the Kilvenmani massacre of forty-four disenfranchised Dalit village labourers (including women and children) by their oppressive upper-caste landlords in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu in 1968. The Lowland ’s exploration of the revolution has been largely well received in India. See Chakrabarti ( 2013 ) and Kapoor ( 2013 ).

Lahiri’s portrait of the city is more fully explored in Chap. 6 .

Fernando ( 2012b ), p. 191.

Fernando ( 2012a ).

Khan ( 2004 ), p. 296.

This is a recurring theme amongst these writers. Lahiri acknowledges the limits of Udayan’s commitment to gender equality: ‘Udayan had wanted a revolution, but at home he’d expected to be served’. This is defined in contrast to Subhash’s domesticity (Lahiri 2013b , p. 126).

See, however, Rehana Ahmed’s argument that Raheen’s and Karim’s migratory experiences represent the seamless movement through transnational space that is conspicuous in the ‘abstraction of global space’ (Ahmed 2002 , pp. 12–28, 14).

Shamsie ( 2002 ), p. 160.

Shamsie ( 2002 ), p. 181.

For a reading of these characters’ different views of mapping see Mallot ( 2007 ), pp. 261–284.

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Ruvani Ranasinha

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Ranasinha, R. (2016). Migration, Gender and Globalisation in Jhumpa Lahiri. In: Contemporary Diasporic South Asian Women's Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40305-6_5

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Jhumpa Lahiri

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• The Guardian - Jhumpa Lahiri: ‘I’ve always existed in a kind of linguistic exile’
• Indian Writing In English - Biography of Jhumpa Lahiri
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Jhumpa Lahiri (born July 11, 1967, London , England) is an English-born American novelist and short-story writer whose works illuminate the immigrant experience, in particular that of East Indians.

Lahiri was born to Bengali parents from Calcutta (now Kolkata)—her father a university librarian and her mother a schoolteacher—who moved to London and then to the United States , settling in South Kingstown , Rhode Island , when she was young. Her parents nevertheless remained committed to their East Indian culture and determined to rear their children with experience of and pride in their cultural heritage. Lahiri was encouraged by her grade-school teachers to retain her family nickname, Jhumpa, at school. Although she wrote prolifically during her precollege school years, she did not embrace a writer’s life until after she graduated (1989) with a B.A. in English literature from Barnard College and obtained three master’s degrees (in English, creative writing, and comparative literature and arts) and a doctorate (in Renaissance studies) from Boston University in the 1990s.

While in graduate school and shortly thereafter, Lahiri published a number of short stories in such magazines as The New Yorker , Harvard Review , and Story Quarterly . She collected some of those stories in her debut collection, Interpreter of Maladies (1999). The nine stories, some set in Calcutta and others on the U.S. East Coast, examine such subjects as the practice of arranged marriage, alienation, dislocation, and loss of culture and provide insight into the experiences of Indian immigrants as well as the lives of Calcuttans. Among the awards garnered by Interpreter of Maladies were the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the 2000 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction.

Lahiri next tried her hand at a novel , producing The Namesake (2003; film 2006), a story that examines themes of personal identity and the conflicts produced by immigration by following the internal dynamics of a Bengali family in the United States. She returned to short fiction in Unaccustomed Earth (2008), a collection that likewise takes as its subject the experience of immigration as well as that of assimilation into American culture. Her novel The Lowland (2013) chronicles the divergent paths of two Bengali brothers. The tale was nominated for both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award and earned Lahiri the 2015 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, a prize established in 2010 by infrastructure developers DSC Limited to honour the achievements of South Asian writers and “to raise awareness of South Asian culture around the world.”

Lahiri was presented a 2014 National Humanities Medal by U.S. Pres. Barack Obama in 2015. That same year she published her first book written in Italian, In altre parole ( In Other Words ), a meditation on her immersion in another culture and language. Lahiri continued writing in Italian, and in 2018 she released the novel Dove mi trovo ( Whereabouts ). She translated the work into English, and during this time she also began translating Italian-language books by other authors. These experiences inspired the essay collection Translating Myself and Others (2022).