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Englishes Today I December 2016 I Volume II, Issue IV ISSN : 2395 4809
ENGLISHES TODAY I December 2016 I Vol. II, Issue IV I ISSN : 2395 4809
Diasporic Representation in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Selected Short Stories
Dr. Monali Chatterjee
Assistant Professor Nirma University
Ahmedabad Gujarat, INDIA.
Abstract
The existence of the Indian Diaspora has propelled the imagination of many writers and has instigated a
profusion of “belles lettres ” with a pronounced emphasis on the ‘displaced intellectuals’. Among the writers
who have mastered the art of story-telling centred on such displaced intellectuals, Jhumpa Lahiri has carved
out her own fictional universe. Her stories narrate poignant ballads of love, loss and death that are
singularly beautiful and yet universally appealing. Her potential as a proficient and vibrant story-teller are
on full display in her collections of short stories as Interpreter of Maladies and Unaccustomed Earth. As a
contemporary writer she authentically documents the ordinary lives and events of the Indian Diaspora with
her poised and nuanced sense of expression. She duly binds the mundane existences with reflections so
lyrical that she successfully excites her readers at even the routine developments of human existence. This
paper attempts to critically evaluate the diasporic representations of some of her short stories and speculate
how her characters take “nothing for granted and doubted even the obvious” It analyses how her urban
landscape is peopled with characters that are full-blooded, rounded and realistic and their possible impact
upon similar delineation of characters and plots in fiction of the ages to come.
Keywords : Diaspora, Identity, Discourse, Nation
Englishes Today I December 2016 I Volume II, Issue IV ISSN : 2395 4809
The existence of the Indian Diaspora has propelled the imagination of many writers and has
instigated a profusion of “belles lettres” with a pronounced emphasis on the ‘displaced
intellectuals’. Among the writers who have mastered the art of story-telling centred on such
displaced intellectuals, Jhumpa Lahiri has carved out her own fictional universe. Her stories narrate
poignant ballads of love, loss and death that are singularly beautiful and yet universally appealing.
Her potential as a proficient and vibrant story-teller is on full display in her collections of short
stories as Interpreter of Maladies and Unaccustomed Earth. As a contemporary writer she
authentically documents the ordinary lives and events of the Indian Diaspora with her poised and
nuanced sense of expression. She duly binds the mundane existences with reflections so lyrical that
she successfully excites her readers at even the routine developments of human existence. This
paper attempts to critically evaluate the diasporic representations of some of her short stories and
speculate how her characters take “nothing for granted and doubted even the obvious” It analyses
how her urban landscape is peopled with characters that are full-blooded, rounded and realistic and
their possible impact upon similar delineation of characters and plots in fiction of the ages to come.
The entire idea of a diaspora in Unaccustomed Earth is centred on a prologue from Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s “The Custom House” where he portends:
Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and
replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn out soil. My
children have had other birth places, and so far as their fortunes may be within my
control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth. (as quoted in Lahiri 1)
This idea is illustrated through a variety of experiences narrated through a gamut of short stories
contained in the collection Unaccustomed Earth. Through the sincere tone of her lucid narration
Jhumpa Lahiri successfully demonstrates how human nature flourishes only if it strikes its roots into
unaccustomed earth instead of being planted and replanted in the same worn out soil and thereby
achieving only stagnation.
Diaspora’ refers to a dislodgment from a geographical place of origin and migration to another
territory or nation. A critic points out, “The idea of migration has not been new to the Indian
subcontinent. They have migrated to different countries for various reasons at various periods of its
history.” (Jayaram 228) The majority of diasporic Indians are a systematically transient, peripheral
and marginalised community across continents. Many Indian writers like Anita Desai, Salman
Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, Ved Mehta, Meera Syal, V.S. Naipaul, Abraham Varghese, Amitav
Ghosh, Hanif Kureishi, Bharati Mukherjee and Jhumpa Lahiri, etc. have successfully generated a
proliferation of diasporic writing.
Englishes Today I December 2016 I Volume II, Issue IV ISSN : 2395 4809
South Asian women have successfully exhibited a great deal of literary proliferation in
contemporary diasporic writing. Narrated though personal experiences and observation such stories
often relate and poignant and evocative instances of social dilemma, rootlessness, want of
identification and female oppression. Thus they reflect a transnational resonance and dialogue
across the political boundaries of countries, languages, customs and generations. Characters,
especially women, from the South Asian diaspora are often faced with subjugation, marginalization
and racial discrimination. Diasporic writers, who draw from personal memories and first hand
experiences often deftly synchronize such imagined characters with real people they may be
acquainted with.
Jhumpa Lahiri, the Pulitzer Prize winner for her collection of stories Interpreter of Maladies, and
authored the novel The Namesake has further perfected her gifts as a story-teller in Unaccustomed
Earth.
In the title story — the most carefully crafted of the eight in the book — Ruma, a young mother
whose father comes to visit after her mother’s death, misinterprets his concern for her as
disapproval; he, in turn, is too respectful to tell her that he fears she has chosen a path too similar to
the one that brought her mother years of loneliness. In “Hell-Heaven,” Usha, the narrator, learns
years after the fact of her mother’s desperate, frustrated attraction to a family friend, and examines
her own childhood memories in a strange new light.
In the same lines Lahiri poignantly depicts the internal as well as external conflicts of the characters
in her stories representing people who chose to become expats in a foreign land. This is vividly
depicted through the lines in “Only Goodness”: “Wayland was the shock. Suddenly they were
stuck, her (Sudha’s) parents aware that they faced a life sentence of being foreign.” (Lahiri 138).
Their want of belongingness further surfaces when these realistic characters find it difficult to adjust
to new situations while moving from one alien city to another. In the above mentioned story, Lahiri
evinces the agony and struggle of the first generation immigrants as they wrestle with the constant
need to adjust, adopt and adapt to their changing environment and become adept at it. Lahiri brings
alive this idea in “Only Goodness” through the line: “In Wayland they (Sudha’s parents) became
passive, wary, the rituals of small-town New England more confounding than negotiating two of the
world’s largest cities.” (Idem.)
While the dependence for assistance to adjust rests heavily on the female child, Sudha, the male
child is readily allowed to dismiss this plight as insignificant. This leads to the next diasporic
theme—gender discrimination amongst children and family members. Distinction in the upbringing
Englishes Today I December 2016 I Volume II, Issue IV ISSN : 2395 4809
of the male child from the female one is also evident in the story. Though they have changed places,
they still uphold certain traditional values which bring further shocks to the female characters in the
stories. For instance, in “Only Goodness” Lahiri’s talent as a diasporic story teller culminates as she
describes how Sudha being a second generation immigrant helps her parents to adjust to new
surroundings while moving from one city to another (From London to Wayland):
While Sudha regarded her parents’ separation from India as an ailment that ebbed
and flowed like a cancer, Rahul was impermeable to that aspect of their life as
well. “No one dragged them here,” he would say. “Baba left India to get rich, and
Ma married him because she had nothing else to do.” That was Rahul, always
aware of the family weaknesses never sparing Sudha from the things she least
wanted to face. (Idem)
Thus the responsibility of upholding culture traditions and family values rests with the female child
alone, even though she might be brought up in an American society like her male counterparts.
Conjugal harmony is yet another aspect of diasporic delineation that Lahiri deploys frequently in
her stories. This can be seen in stories like “Unaccustomed Earth”, “Heaven-Hell”, “A Choice for
Accommodations” and “Only Goodness”. In “A Choice for Accommodations” Lahiri shows a
parallel between Megan’s torn cocktail dress and gaps in her relation with her husband. At the
wedding party, he later becomes oblivious of the tear when she is thoroughly engrossed in an
engaging conversation with Ted, Amit’s friend in her husband’s absence. Amit senses this fissure as
a typical character in diasporic writing who must have braved the harsh discrimination from the
American acquaintances for being a brown skinned Indian. This has pronounced the impact of
several doubts and suspicion in his mind regarding his conjugal stability with Megan. However this
diasporic narrative gets resolved on a positive note when the couple successful re-ignites their
passions for each other and experiences the mutual need of feeling wanted.
Intimate familial ties are also a crucial aspect of Jhumpa Lahiri’s diasporic representations. These
are best manifested through selflessness in family commitments and sacrifices that one makes of
one’s family. In “Only Goodness” Sudha reflects when she learns about her brother Rahul’s poor
grades:
Her father had no patience for failure, for indulgences. He never let his children
forget that there had been no one to help him as he helped them, so that no matter
how well Sudha did, she felt that her good fortune had been handed to her, not
earned. Both her parents, came from humble backgrounds; both their
grandmothers had given up the gold on their arms to put roofs over their families’
Englishes Today I December 2016 I Volume II, Issue IV ISSN : 2395 4809
heads and food on their plates. This mentality, as tiresome as it sometimes felt,
also reassured Sudha, for it was something her parents understood and respected
about each other, and she suspected it was the glue that held them together.
(Lahiri 140)
The idea of self-dependence looms large through these stories. The more one is dependent for
access to food, clothing, one’s own shelter and financial stability for existence the more the
characters have assumed proximity to the other members of the family and vice versa. For instance,
the narrator’s mother in “Heaven-Hell” stifles her fondness and affection for a male family-friend
due to her financial and emotional dependence on her family. However, in this respect she might be
a foil to Ruma’s father, a widower, in “Unaccustomed Earth” who is financially and emotionally
self-dependent, pays occasional visits to his daughter and travels at his will very frequently as a
tourist. Moreover, he is engaged in an intimate relationship with Mrs. Bagchi. Hence, he feels
pathetic deceiving her. Like a typical immigrant who has thrived on Indian values and taboos he
contemplates:
But what would he say? That he made a new friend? A girlfriend? The word
was unknown to him, impossible to express; he never had a girlfriend in his
life. (Lahiri 40)
The notion of loneliness and battling day to day challenges one one’s own, particularly in the case
of women is an essential element of any realistic diasporic fiction that mirrors ordinary tales of
ordinary lives with extra-ordinary narrative techniques. In the story “Unaccustomed Earth” Ruma’s
father reflects: “Like his wife, Ruma was now alone in this new place, over-whelmed, without any
friends, caring for a young child, all of it reminding him, too much, of the early years of his
marriage, the years for which his wife had never forgiven him.” (Idem.)
The element of a culture shock and frequent cross-cultural interventions often enrich the general
texture of the diasporic narrative in Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories. She exhibits extraordinary dexterity at
portraying transnational identity and the trauma and shock of geographical dislocation.
On seeing her father’s gardening in unaccustomed soil, often late into the evening, Ruma recalls
mother’s reluctance to eat before first serving food to her husband, since she had been trained all
her life to do so. However, being brought up in a different culture, Ruma fails to relate to the
pertinence of such a custom in her present day situation. Similarly, later in the same story Ruma
concludes that her decision to remain jobless and devote her herself entirely to the concerns of the
family was right as “Her mother would have understood her decision, would have been
understanding and proud” (Lahiri, 36). It is Ruma’s agile shifts between the bipolar stances of two
Englishes Today I December 2016 I Volume II, Issue IV ISSN : 2395 4809
completely distinct cultures lends her the openness to accept her father’s post-marital affiliation. It
is aptly mentioned:
In a moment that fulfils Lahiri’s message of the complexity – both cultural and
emotional—of a woman’s cross-cultural, vernacular response, Lahiri presents
Ruma sending her father’s accidentally left behind postcard to his new girlfriend
into the mail. The significance of the postcard is that it both presents the
possibility for Ruma’s admitted acceptance of the new relationship and, at the
same time, presents the possibility of failure – the postcard Ruma mails may
never arrive. (Kasun 119).
In “Heaven-Hell” a similar culture shock is experienced by the character Pranab
Chakraborty,
Life as a graduate student in Boston was a cruel shock, and in his first month he
lost nearly twenty pounds. He had arrived in January, in the middle of a
snowstorm, and at the end of a week he had packed his bags and gone to Logan,
prepared to abandon the opportunity he’d worked toward all his life, only to
change his mind at the last minute. (Lahiri 74)
Similarly in “Only Goodness” Sudha’s mother attributes the anomalies in Rahul’s behaviour of
drunken driving to the culture of America where he has been brought up. Using Sudha as a mouth
piece here, Lahiri comments:
Sudha pitied her mother, pitied her refusal to accommodate such an unpleasant and alien fact, her
need to blame America and its laws instead of her son (Lahiri 143). We are further informed:
Her parents had always been blind to the things that plagued their children: being
teased at school for the color of their skin or for the funny things their mother
occasionally put into their lunch boxes, potato curry sandwiches that tinted
Wonderbread green. What could there possibly be to be unhappy about? her
parents would have thought. “Depression” was a foreign word to them, an
American thing. In their opinion their children were immune from the hardships
and injustices they had left behind in India, as if the inoculations the paediatrician
had given Sudha and Rahul when they were babies guaranteed them an existence
free of suffering. (Lahiri 143-144)
The delineation of home sickness is ubiquitous and an inevitable element of diasporic fiction. In
“Unaccustomed Earth” Ruma’s father recalls, “The isolation of living in an American suburb,
something about which his wife complained and about which he felt responsible, had been more
solitude than she could bear.” (Lahiri 41) Similarly in “A Choice for Accommodations”
Englishes Today I December 2016 I Volume II, Issue IV ISSN : 2395 4809
There was no escape at the end of the day, and though he admitted it to no one,
especially not his parents when they called from Delhi every weekend, he was
crippled with homesickness, missing his parents to the point where tears often
filled his eyes, in those first months, without warning. He sought traces of his
parents’ faces and voices among the people who surrounded and cared for him,
but there was absolutely nothing, no one, at Langford to remind him of
them.(Lahiri 109)
It can be thus concluded that contemporary times of transnational migration, the continual flux of
people to and fro different countries, the notion of diversified identities battling within a single
individual as well as the inadvertent congregation of diverse cultures have toppled the idea of
absolute locale and origin. The notion of home, identity and belongingness that Lahiri’s characters
pine for are often relative and subjective, thereby generating an incessant dialogue to negotiate
between the self and desired identity. While the first generation immigrants struggle to break away
from the traditional values of their motherland that they are strongly rooted in, the second
generation immigrants can barely identify with their origins in the ancestral territory.
References
Jayaram, N. “Heterogeneous Diaspora and Asymmetrical Orientations: India, Indians and the Indian
Diaspora.” Ed. Diversities in the Indian Diaspora: Nature Implications and Responses. New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2012.
Kasun, Genna Welsh, "Womanism and the Fiction of Jhumpa Lahiri." Graduate College Dissertations and
Theses. Paper 119, 2009. http://scholarworks.uvm.edu/graddis
Lahiri, Jhumpa. Unaccustomed Earth. Noida: Random House India. 2008.