Jhumpa Lahiri

Published on 5 Apr. 2022.

One of the most critically acclaimed and respected writers in the field of Indian English fiction, Nilanjana Sudeshna ‘Jhumpa’ Lahiri was born on 11 July 1971 to Bengali parents in London, before moving to and growing up in Rhode Island, USA. Educated in English from Columbia University and with MA degrees in English and Creative Writing followed by a PhD on Jacobian theatre from Boston University, Lahiri’s fiction combines creative innovation with rigorous research and formal training in literature. The experiential knowledge of immigration, travelling, and multiple roots spread across Kolkata, London, and Boston, informs and shapes several fictional frames and characters in Lahiri’s writing, which depicts complex tensions between loyalty to origins and fluency in the new, without any romanticizing or essentializing eye. The language espoused by Lahiri is fluid, realist, and affective, with no contrived efforts to correspond to conveniently classified and artificially engineered post-colonial or multi-cultural registers. Lahiri’s later move to Italy in 2011 and her writerly shift to Italian language for her essays and fiction add a further dimension to her literary creativity, as well as foregrounding the entangled ontology of exile, intentionality, and artistic agency. A child of Indian-American diasporic parents forced to fit and shift between several homes and cultural narratives, Lahiri’s preference of language and home in Italy subsequently raises complex philosophical questions about the intimate intentional voice for creative and existential expression, one which may or may not align with one’s language and home of birth or growing up but may just be what it should ideally be, a pure choice of imagination.

Lahiri’s first major published work in fiction in 1999 – one which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award in 2000 – was a collection of nine short stories titled Interpreter of Maladies. Reminiscent of Maupassant’s emotional intensity and Chekhov’s attention to ordinariness and ordinary objects, the nine stories in the collection emerge as a modern masterclass in creative short fiction, while reflecting the existential shifts and tensions experienced by Indians living in different districts of the USA. All stories in the collection deal with ordinary human beings in suddenly extraordinary emotional situations, trying and mostly failing to find closures in grief, guilt, loss, and love.  The opening story of the volume ‘A Temporary Matter’, first published in The New Yorker, depicts a failing marriage of an Indian couple and their forced attempt to connect with a re-membering game against the backdrop of an hourly electric failure in their Boston home. The presence and symbolic appearance of their stillborn child add further darkness and despair to their existential efforts as the story ends with the emotional exhaustion of their marriage. Likewise, the titular story in the collection ‘Interpreter of Maladies’ operates with several storytelling structures and focal points which play with shifting gazes and judgmental frames, dealing with complex emotional issues involving parental and medical care, selfishness, guilt, infidelity, and neglect. Lahiri’s finesse as a writer is evident in her subtle skills at open-endedness, which make her short stories small yet complex capsules of human emotions and experiences rather than a ready reflection of standard societal situations. This lends a transcendental quality to the stories themselves, which are situated at specific and very local landscapes inhabited by uniquely human and ordinary figures and yet cross and connect geopolitical and existential borders in their elegant and complex treatments of universal and timeless human emotions.

As the very debut collection of short fiction reveals, Lahiri’s strength and uniqueness as a writer rest in small yet deep emotional events which make change happen to ordinary flawed humans who try to cope, control, and curate with all their vulnerabilities and ordinary objectives. What readers receive in the process are complex crystals of space, time, and emotions, defining and re-shaping human lives and journeys across continents, classrooms, and kitchens, with equal attention to the smallest objects and political movements across public space. Lahiri’s short fiction, especially in Interpreter of Maladies, are a testimony to the affective power of fiction to retell human events and experiences, foregrounding how lives are defined and shaped by small acts of kindness, accidents, and love. Intensely realist as well as emotionally evocative, the nine stories in Interpreter of Maladies emerge as moving depictions of human aspirations, attempts, and loss, with a complex interplay of matter, metaphor, and memory.

Lahiri’s second published work was her the massively celebrated novel The Namesake which appeared in 2003, translated subsequently into Bengali in 2005 with the title Shamanami and adapted into a major feature film with the original title by Mira Nair in 2006. A tale of several cities and existential journeys across Kolkata, Boston, and New York, Lahiri’s novel is a remarkable work depicting the complex markers of memory and identities, including pet names, puffed rice, and literary texts. It depicts the intergenerational existential experiences and tensions of belonging among the Bengali white-collar diaspora in the USA, marked by a pure nostalgia for a home they will never return to and an aspiration to assimilate in the new land which will never fully become their own. The spectral and symbolic presence of the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol and his work ‘The Overcoat’ extends onto an existential event in Lahiri’s novel, from the character Ashok’s miraculous survival in a train accident to a complex marker of deep filial bond enacted beautifully in the famous estuary scene in the novel as the father and son walk up to a point before the endless sea, making a small yet symbolic journey together to a place from where there was nowhere left to go.

Lahiri’s second collection of short stories titled Unaccustomed Earth appeared in 2008, winning the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award in the same year. Drawing on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Preface to The Scarlet Letter, the title of the collection of eight stories is evocative of the sense of unbelonging endlessly experienced by Indian Americans in complex cultural conditions which are simultaneously inviting and alienating. The titular opening story in the collection ‘Unaccustomed Earth’ presents a patriarch from an old Bengali world-order who also indulges in his ‘new-world’ interests such as an amorous relationship with a new-found female friend, while complexly connecting with his grandson who is absolutely ‘American’ in his hedonistic habits and lifestyle. The story – set in Seattle – foregrounds the themes of care-giving and professional sacrifices in an intergenerational diasporic framework, while also underlining how value systems and behavioural patterns are always already mixed in such family settings, where the old and new orders merge asymmetrically and where the cultural landscape for all generations is marked in different degrees by the experience of being unaccustomed.

Lahiri’s second novel The Lowland, published in 2013, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for the same year. The most explicitly political of all her works, The Lowland offers a complex representation of several major movements and events including the Naxalite Movement in India and the Vietnam War. As in all Lahiri’s fiction, the focus is on the small moments and ordinary objects which mark memories and existential changes. The life-narratives and journeys of the two Bengali brothers Subhash and Udayan – the latter becoming a Naxalite in West Bengal who gets killed in an encounter while Subhash settles for a life of research and professional life in the Rhode Island – shape the story which also depicts several complex characters such as Udayan’s widowed wife Gauri who subsequently settles in USA after marrying Subhash. Gauri’s American academic life of independence leaving behind her child with Subhash and her subsequent lesbian relation with a graduate student further problematize any easy profiling of values and choices. The novel ends with the flashback of Udayan’s death and the thought processes in his head about Gauri moments before he is killed. The most experimental and ambitious of all Lahiri’s works, The Lowland connects a range of space-time, revealing character shifts and emotional movements with an abruptness that captures psychological situations and lived experiences in real time.

Lahiri’s In Other Words, published in Italian in 2016 and translated in English, is a non-fictional work that offers a lyrical and evocative series of short philosophical essays that discuss the discipline, desires, and anxieties involved in a crossover into a different language, one which is also a pure literary and artistic choice.  A remarkable work underlining the existential and artistic entanglements of the chosen language of creative expression, the volume anticipates Lahiri’s later Italian novel Dove mi trovo which appeared in 2018 and was translated in English by Lahiri herself in 2021, with the title Whereabouts. A novel about travelling and emotional absorption, embodied by an unnamed female narrator, Whereabouts marks a departure in style in Lahiri’s writing into a more minimalist prose that shapes suspension rather than the linear life of meanings and materials. The unnamed writer woman, who inhabits various cafes and dinners with friends, reveals fault-lines in her estranged relationship with her widowed mother while also contemplating the roads taken and not taken in her own life. The slow suspended pace of narration in the novel is complemented by Lahiri’s poetic depth and fluid metaphors, with several images of sea and swimming appearing in passages evocative in memory and the remembering mind. In contrast to the realism in The Interpreter of Maladies, Whereabouts appropriates a more languid language which is also more minimalist in quality with its psychological depth and philosophical questions on existence, action, and essence, perhaps indicating the writerly method and style Lahiri will espouse and offer in the times to come.

As is evident in the study of her major works above, Jhumpa Lahiri’s fiction is characterized by a keen eye for details and objects which emerge with symbolic significance. The stories are often focalized by a gaze that looks inside the home, at the domestic, intimate space, for signifiers of connect and disconnect to the world and life of movements, mutability, and memories. Memory in Lahiri’s writing is thus almost always affective and metonymic, characterized by emotional entanglements and shifting, partial objects that complexly correspond to human emotions such as love, melancholia, and nostalgia. As in Anton Chekhov’s short fiction, Lahiri’s stories are mostly marked by psychological realism, slow intensity, and liminality, depicting the thresholds moments and experiences through which human awareness, communication, and its collapse materialize as non-events. The political subtexts in Lahiri’s fiction are profound – marked by diasporic movements, immigrant experiences, and intergenerational tensions – but are always carefully contextualized within emotionally moving human stories of love, loss, aspiration, and alienation. It is this human storytelling quality – espousing the sincerity and emotional intensity around ordinary objects rather than the otherworldliness of magical realism – that lends a special narrative empathy in Lahiri’s writings. This quality of narrative empathy may be defined and described as a process through which fictional characters are rendered rounded, relatable, and recognizable through a steady storytelling voice that integrates an emotional economy of affectivity, discursivity, and materiality. The focus in this fiction is almost always on silence and slow time, on small incidents and ordinary objects causing emotional and existential changes in domestic settings rather than big events in the public space.

The emotionality in Lahiri’s stories never borders on anarchy or violence but instead depicts a crystallization of a rich range of affects through slowness, silence, and suppression, reflective of a psychological realism that corresponds to the highest artistic level in storytelling. The narrative method Lahiri espouses is thus marked by an economy of expression, symbolism, and complex orders of focalization, whereby stories are shown rather than told through emotionally charged as well as subliminal episodes that never spill over into violence or excess.

The episodic quality in Lahiri’s writing – whether in the opening scene of the novel The Namesake where the character attempts to appropriate the Calcutta jhalmuri with American puffed rice or in the periodic power-cuts that darken the drawing room of the characters in the short story ‘A Temporary Matter’ – is revealed best in carefully curated emotional set-pieces. The appearance, affect, and symbolic significance of ordinary objects in Lahiri’s fiction emerge as telling testimony to the power of fiction to re-present reality and lived experience. What makes Lahiri’s writing so profoundly political as well as compellingly existential simultaneously is her complex depictions of home, memory, and exile, with similar events and experiences focalized through different and contrasting characters inhabiting dissimilar experiential frames. The crisscrossing space-times in Lahiri’s writing – most immediately and effectively depicted in the broader canvas of human memories and movements in the two novels The Namesake and The Lowlands – correspond to multiple experiential and existential frames, consequently generating complex chronotopes which appear as literary devices as well as emotional situations. Additionally, Lahiri’s writing appears to accentuate and foreground an order of literariness that manifests itself in intertextual planes, most immediately and famously exemplified in the relationship the story and the characters in The Namesake establish in Gogol’s short story ‘The Overcoat’.

The literariness and intertextuality mark and flag up a distinguishing style in Lahiri’s writing, the literary imagination which can connect across spaces and temporal planes, extending further onto an economy of empathy and affectivity that is universally human in quality. The emergent as well as the connective quality of emotion, memory, and affect in Lahiri’s fiction is an interesting, albeit complex counterpoint to the fragmented experience of home and exile informing the alienation of diasporic generations. Nostalgia in Lahiri’s writing is thus often reflective rather than restorative in quality, whereby home is not simply a place in the past but a state of constant aspiration, negotiation, and reconfiguration. This fluid ontology and experience of home and homelessness finds a unique voice in Lahiri’s foray in a different language, Italian, whereby the linguistic landscape of difference also offers fresh forms of freedom and artistic agency that subvert commonly considered notions of cosmopolitanism and postcolonial identities. Lahiri pushes the boundaries further by blurring the borders between genres, whereby her early Italian work is deliberately non-fictional, as the act of writing itself emerges as a self-reflective philosophical enunciation and existential emancipation. In her fiction as well as in her non-fiction, Lahiri connects homeliness with alienation, agency with exile, through a constantly creative writerly imagination, making her a major figure in Indian English literature today and one of the greatest global literary voices of her generation.

Further Reading

Bhalla, Tamara. Reading Together, Reading Apart: Identity, Belonging, and South Asian American Community. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2016.

Chakraborty Madhurima. “Adaptation and the Shifting Allegiances of the Indian Diaspora: Jhumpa Lahiri’s and Mira Nair’s ‘The Namesake’“. Literature/Film Quarterly. 42.4 (2014): 609-21.

Koshy, Susan. “Minority Cosmopolitanism“. PMLA. 126. 3 (May 2011): 592-609.

Song, Min Hyoung. “The Children of 1965: Allegory, Postmodernism, and Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘The Namesake'”. Twentieth Century Literature. 53. 3 (Fall, 2007): 345-70.

Williams, Laura. “Foodways and Subjectivity in Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘Interpreter of Maladies'”. MELUS. 32.4 (Winter, 2007): 69-79.