Jhumpa Lahiri — Mingling Two Worlds on Page

I was fifteen years old when I picked up The Namesake, written by Pulitzer-prize winning Bengali author Jhumpa Lahiri, and fell in love with her gorgeous style of writing. Amazing descriptive, eloquent and haunting, Lahiri’s stories stay with you long after you finish turning the page. Her work mostly consists of the Indian-American experience—with themes such as marital difficulties, class, and the disconnection between first and second-generation immigrants. 

On her work, she commented, “When I first started writing I was not conscious that my subject was the Indian-American experience.

What drew me to my craft was the desire to force the two worlds I occupied to mingle on the page as I was not brave enough, or mature enough, to allow in life.”

Her debut short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (only the seventh time a story collection had won the award).

Her first novel, The Namesake, was adapted into a film by acclaimed director Mira Nair in 2006.

Her second collection of stories, Unaccustomed Earth, departs from her two earlier works and focuses on third and fourth generation Indian-Americans. Her second novel, The Lowland, is set to release September 24^th. 

Reading her books will make you feel connected to the Indian-American community on a deeper level. It’s easy to forget that there are so many of us who faced the same challenges, awkwardness, heartbreaks and triumphs that unite us as Indian-Americans.

Lahiri’s early works focus on Indian parents trying to impart their values and cultures onto their reluctant and often moody children. 

What’s so lovely about her work is that she addresses both viewpoints equally—you can feel the parent’s pain and longing for homeland and fully understand the alienation and annoyance the immigrant children undergo.

Excerpts such as this—“For being a foreigner Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy -- a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts.

It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been an ordinary life, only to discover that previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding.

Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity of from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect,”—illustrate Lahiri’s ability to tap into the root of sentiments and aptly describe them. 

Nivi Elango