Abstract
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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Notes
- 1.
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.
- 2.
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).
- 3.
Ash (2000), pp. 80–81.
- 4.
Marwah (2013), pp. 1–4.
- 5.
Song (2007), pp. 345–368.
- 6.
Kushner (2009), pp. 22–29.
- 7.
Wilhelmus (2004), pp. 133–140.
- 8.
Wilhelmus (2008), pp. 580–586.
- 9.
Deresiewicz (2006), pp. 17–24.
- 10.
Grewal (2005), p. 61.
- 11.
See also Dhingra and Cheung (2012).
- 12.
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.
- 13.
See the critiques of polarised representations of East and West in Divarakuni’s short stories discussed in Srikanth (2004), p. 130.
- 14.
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).
- 15.
Katrak (2002), pp. 5–6.
- 16.
Srikanth (2004), p. 49.
- 17.
Grewal (2005), p. x.
- 18.
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).
- 19.
Grewal (2005), pp. 66–67.
- 20.
Grewal (2005), p. 67.
- 21.
- 22.
Marwah (2012), pp. 59–79.
- 23.
Deb (2013).
- 24.
Schillinger (2008).
- 25.
Lahiri (1999), p. 174.
- 26.
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).
- 27.
Srikanth et al. (2012), p. 59.
- 28.
Mishra (2013).
- 29.
Mani (2012), pp. 75–97.
- 30.
- 31.
Ash (2000), pp. 80–81.
- 32.
Sawhney (2008).
- 33.
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.
- 34.
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).
- 35.
See Roy’s (2010) excellent discussion of NRI citizenship.
- 36.
Ong (1999), p. 6.
- 37.
Reddy (2013), pp. 29–59.
- 38.
Reddy (2013), pp. 29–59.
- 39.
Reddy (2013), pp. 29–59.
- 40.
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).
- 41.
See Chap. 2 for a similar incident in Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss.
- 42.
Ash (2000), pp. 80–81.
- 43.
Grewal (1993), pp. 226–236.
- 44.
Grewal (1993), pp. 226–236.
- 45.
Ash (2000), pp. 80–81.
- 46.
Williams (2007), pp. 69–79.
- 47.
Sawhney (2008).
- 48.
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).
- 49.
Lahiri (2008), p. 82.
- 50.
Srikanth (2004), p. 51.
- 51.
Maxey (2012), p. 179.
- 52.
Jhumpa Lahiri, cited in ‘A conversation with Jhumpa Lahiri’ (2003) at www.bookbrowse.com.
- 53.
Lahiri (2004), p. 38.
- 54.
Ruth Maxey suggests this is an example of North America teaching immigrants self-sufficiency (Maxey 2012, p. 176).
- 55.
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).
- 56.
Sawhney (2008).
- 57.
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).
- 58.
As Song observes, this suggests another allegorical position between nation and ethnos (Song 2007, pp. 345–368, 367, n. 8).
- 59.
Lahiri (2013a).
- 60.
Sawhney (2008).
- 61.
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.
- 62.
- 63.
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).
- 64.
Bayley (1998), p. 57.
- 65.
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).
- 66.
- 67.
Lahiri (2013a).
- 68.
Bala (2002).
- 69.
- 70.
Maxey (2012), p. 68.
- 71.
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).
- 72.
Lahiri (2013b), p. 131.
- 73.
Deb (2013).
- 74.
Malone (2013).
- 75.
Fellicini (2013).
- 76.
Malone (2013).
- 77.
Lasdun (2013).
- 78.
Merrit (2013).
- 79.
Kakutani (2013).
- 80.
Hensher (2013).
- 81.
Mishra (2013).
- 82.
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).
- 83.
Lahiri’s portrait of the city is more fully explored in Chap. 6.
- 84.
Fernando (2012b), p. 191.
- 85.
Fernando (2012a).
- 86.
Khan (2004), p. 296.
- 87.
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).
- 88.
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).
- 89.
Shamsie (2002), p. 160.
- 90.
Shamsie (2002), p. 181.
- 91.
For a reading of these characters’ different views of mapping see Mallot (2007), pp. 261–284.
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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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