The Short Story in Articulating Diasporic Subjectivities in Jhumpa Lahiri

Abstract

This chapter will examine the use of the short story by the Indian-American writer Jhumpa Lahiri, two of whose three works, Interpreter of Maladies (1999) and Unaccustomed Earth (2008), are short story collections. Interpreter of Maladies won critical acclaim and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and she followed up the superb act with Unaccustomed Earth. Though writing from a vantage point distinctly embedded in an American cultural space, Lahiri can definitely be called a key practitioner of the contemporary postcolonial short story. She can be seen as perpetuating a literary tradition of short fiction in Indian-American women’s writing, specifically among Bengali-American women authors in the works of her predecessors like Bharati Mukherjee and Chitra Divakaruni, who also write from a similar position and often about similar experiences. She thus not only affirms the centrality of the short story in American literature, but reveals how this form is being adapted by contemporary diasporic authors to write ‘America’. Lahiri is distinguished from writers like Mukherjee or Divakaruni by virtue of being a second-generation immigrant in the US, which makes her work different despite their similarities. This chapter attempts to unpack some significant questions in this literary tradition, such as whether the short story becomes an enabling genre for diasporic authors like Lahiri, by investigating what motivates this formal choice and what this medium offers which distinguishes it from the novel. I aim to analyse if Lahiri’s choice is to be viewed in the context of a North American tradition of short fiction or if her work can be considered within a broader South Asian or even postcolonial ambit.