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Literary
Shelf The object of this paper is to discuss the major themes of the writings of Jhumpa Lahiri, the celebrated diaspora writer. Lahiri’ s characters in her short story collection Interpreter of Maladies and novel The Namesake perambulate between two worlds and search for their identity among two dispossessed nests of theirs – one in their homeland and the other in the country where they chose to live and die.
Jhumpa Lahiri is the daughter of Bengali parents, born and brought up in the US. Her heritage and culture are inclined to both India and the United States. From her personal experience as a child of immigrant parents, in her literary output, she records the emotional journey of characters seeking love beyond the barricade of nations, cultures, religions, and generations. Permeated with the immigrant sensibility, her characters speak with universal articulacy and empathy to everyone who has ever felt like a recluse. They visualize the experiences of both first and second generation Indian immigrants, presenting the old world (India) knocking against the new world, the foreign land. Against this backdrop of culture clash, the stories in her collection Interpreter of Maladies and her novel The Namesake deal with the universal motif of love, the individual’s effort to surmount the change, primeval traditions of ancestors and the impenetrable prospects of the new world-- matters which seem fleeting and yet impinge on the whole life. She speaks of unforeseen cruelty and gradual understanding of the reality, the psychic mechanisms to resist the environment and the power of survival. Jhumpa Lahiri plaits her plots around these key themes. This paper aims to throw light on these sensitive issues and the characters’ longing to belong to either or both of the habitats – in the old world and the new – and their inevitable failure to do so. A textual analysis of both of her works of art may add the integrity to this dialogue. Among the few writers who have illustrated the ostensible “return” of the second generation emigrants to South Asia, we may describe Jhumpa Lahiri as the most outstanding. Lahiri wrote about this hypothesis in a number of short stories and in The Namesake. Lahiri’s aim is to show the convolution of these journeys, also defined as “culture missions.” Jhumpa Lahiri published her first book, the short story collection Interpreter of Maladies, in 1999; and in April 2000, she received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Her novel, The Namesake, was released in 2003 to considerable critical and popular applause. Lahiri seems to take full advantage of her position within the cultural borderlands of India and the United States to render the assorted occurrences in the lives of South-Asian Americans. Her books accentuate the embryonic nature of both immigrant and normal American cultural configuration, mainly by illustrating with sympathy and insightfulness, the lives of these second-generation Americans. “She explores the difficulties of establishing a sense of self for the second generation, an experience never quite replicated by other generations of the immigrant family; and, ultimately, her work points to the transience of “ethnic American” identity in favor of a transnational, post-ethnic global ethos.”1 Crossing the periphery of homeland does not revise one’s tradition because it fails to fabricate a home in the new home which is finely reflected in literature and art. The course of migration in the twentieth century has produced a riddle of the very perception of geological gap and race. Postcolonial studies have been preoccupied with issues of hybridity, in-betweenness with mobility and crossover of ideas and problems generated by colonialism. Terms like ‘hybridity’ and ‘diaspora’ have come to characterize mixed or globalized cultures. Diaspora evokes the specific trauma of human displacement. To be in diasporas (dia means through and sperno means scattered community) means to be in an un-belonging room. Diaspora is today an undeniable fact of world ethnicity. It is commencing to engage a larger place in intercontinental financial and customs’ barter. Diasporic communities do not split their association with their homeland, but erect different relations. Devotion to cultural roots is a characteristic of the diasporic experience. On the realistic side, the Indian American needs to use its regular character which has Indian roots. Indians in America have come to be known as a part of NRI community around the world. This diasporic community realizes that it is very hard to leave the county behind even though one has left it in a conspicuous sense. The inner character of this society is inevitably India. In the communal structure and creative field the communications among different cultural entities have created an eclectic milieu and a distinct body of literature of writers such as Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Rohinton Mistry, Vikram Chandra, Ardhasir Vakil, Kaizad Gustad, Amitav Ghosh, Anita Rau Badami, Bharati Mukherjee, Meera Sayal, Chitra Diwakaruni, among others.Diaspora is no longer very far from Bollywood’s horizon either, in films such as Dilwade Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, Pardes, Jeans, Kal Ho Na Ho, Swadesh, diaspora community and their predicament essayed dramatically. These works tackle the ball of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’. The ‘other’ has been making the existence felt both in the affirmative and pessimistic twists, thereby forcing the observer to take note of them as human beings. The magnitude of literature of the émigré leaps from this rendezvous with the host country on the part of the immigrant. Exile plays a major role in determining Indian English susceptibility. It is a composite evolutionary modus operandi, it is a situation involving cross-cultural shifts, loss of mother tongue, native ethos skirmishing with the new environment and the twofold drag of intellectual allegiance. Indian English writing, due to its cross-culture basis, has inherently been rotating time and again in the region of the theme of the undeniable and taxing meet between two cultures--antagonistic in their mind-set, approach and standards. The immigrant understanding is convoluted as a susceptible immigrant finds himself or herself perpetually at a passage burdened with the memories of the original home which is besieged with the authenticity of the new world. It is more so in the case of Indian women writers in English because most of them share the same cultural dichotomy. To name only a few, Kamala Markandeya is married to an Englishman and settled in England; there is Ruth Prawar Zhabvalla of Polish parentage who has her upbringing in Germany and education in England and is married to an Indian architect; there is Anita Desai who has a German mother and a Bengali father and there are Bharati Mukherjee and Jhumpa Lahiri. Jhumpa Lahiri belongs to a new age of East Indian writers of narrative fiction that includes Arundhati Roy, Raj Kamal Jha, and Pankaj Mishra, who, as Mervyn Rothstein suggests in an article for The New York Times (3 July 2000), have “broken away”2 from Salman Rushdie’s magic practicality and embraced truth. It is, however, more practical to compare Lahiri and Bharati Mukherjee as representatives of the East Indian voice in American fiction. Daughters of Calcuttans, the two authors segregate the Indian Americans’ links with their motherland, as well as their response to migration and absorption. Mukherjee examines immigration broadly from the standpoint of immigrants of various nationalities, while Lahiri contemplates on Indians. Lahiri illustrates Indians overseas who face dislodgment, stick to their native culture, endeavor to incorporate themselves into their espoused home, and suffer strain over ethical and emotional issues. Their Indianness plays a derivative role, since she emphasizes, through their connections with Indians and other Americans, such persistent themes as love, matrimonial complexity, betrayal, culpability, estrangement, communiqué, private affairs. Nilanjana Sudeshna Lahiri (nick-name ‘Jhumpa’) was born in London on 11 July 1967 and grew up in South Kingstown, Rhode Island. Her father, Amar K Lahiri, is a professor librarian at the University of Rhode Island, and her mother, Tapati Lahiri, who holds an M.A. in Bengali, is a schoolteacher. In the US, Lahiri fruitlessly applied to several universities. Postponing graduate studies, she began working as a research assistant with a non-government organization in Cambridge, Massachusetts. While at the job, she committed herself to the ferry of fiction writing, in due course applying to the creative-writing program at Boston University. There she earned four graduate degrees--an M.A. in English, an M.A. in Creative Writing, a third M.A. in Comparative Literature and Arts, and a Ph.D in Renaissance Studies. Having completed her dissertation, she held a two-year fellowship at Fine Arts Work Centre in Provincetown, which allowed her more freedom to write stories. Written over a seven year period, her stories appeared in The New Yorker, the Louisville Review, AGNI, the Harvard Review, Salamander, Epoch, and Story Quarterly, and she received many literary awards. At the age of thirty-two, Lahiri incorporated the stories into her debut collection, Interpreter of Maladies (1999). Two years later, on 15 January 2001, she married Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, deputy editor of the Latin American edition of Time. Lahiri’s depiction of Indian culture is not overstated or imperious which is evident from an interpretation of the stories in Interpreter of Maladies. In this, the plots are stuffed with specifics of Indian names, foods, cooking and wardrobe, which give a divergent flavor to them. It can also be deduced as a mechanism for the support of the memorable Indianness into an unusual setting. This collection deals with universal abrasions in love, individual’s struggle to overcome the change, insecurities within affairs which are disturbing. She addresses antique traditions of ancestors and the unsettled diagnosis of the new world, maladies at times accurately analyzed and cured, at other times misapprehended, matters which appear to be fleeting but involve life, unforeseen malice and concern, the intuitive means to defend against the milieu and the power of fortitude. In the stories, Lahiri documents these questions beautifully, representing the range of incidents doable for the second generation as they bargain their own cultural identities. While she also writes judiciously about the residents of India and the United States, Lahiri makes her most momentous endowment to contemporary American literature by arresting the flimsy balance between cultural choices and personal bureau in the lives of second-generation South Asian Americans. In particular, she expounds the necessary detachment between the originating culture of immigrant parents and the daily lives of their America-raised children, an aspect of the second-generation experience. In the story, “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine”, she uses the viewpoint of a ten-year-old daughter of Indian émigré to accentuate the psychosomatic as well as the objective remoteness of the second generation from their parents’ land and culture. Set in 1971 as civil war explodes in Pakistan, this story pictures the evening visits of Mr. Pirzada, a Pakistani scholar studying in the States, to Lilia’s home. Lilia’s parents, living in a small university town in New England, had hunted his acquaintance: “In search of compatriots, they used to trail their fingers, at the start of each new semester, through the columns of the university directory, circling surnames familiar to their part of the world. It was in this manner that they discovered Mr. Pirzada, and phoned him, and invited him to our home” (IoM, 23). As this method of making new acquaintances emphasizes the cultural similarities of “South Asians” as a group, it is not astonishing that Lilia is confused about Mr. Pirzada’s nationality. She refers to him as “the Indian man,” and corrected by her father about the differences between Indians and Pakistanis. Because of her distance from her parents’ homeland, Lilia is unaware of the important historical and cultural precedents. She muses: “It made no sense to me. Mr. Pirzada and my parents spoke the same language, laughed at the same jokes, looked more or less the same. They ate pickled mangoes with their meals, ate rice every night for supper with their hands. Like my parents, Mr. Pirzada took off his shoes before entering a room, chewed fennel seeds after meals as a digestive, drank no alcohol, for dessert dipped austere biscuits in successive cups of tea. Nevertheless my father insisted that I understand the difference.” (IoM, 25). Lilia’s schooling in America does not grant her an understanding of world history and ethnicity, or any imminent into her own South Asian inheritance. Indeed, Lahiri ironically notes the predilection in elementary school history classes for teaching the American revolution to the omission of current events. Lilia’s father is disappointed by her lack of information and questions what she learns in school. Lahiri shows her anxiety through the character of Lilia’s father the significance of appreciating the unity in diversity within the larger cultural group of South Asian people, a characteristic of her cultural heritage that Lilia had not yet taken hold of, living in a diaspora culture. There is an element of Lahiri’s own life in the story: “I never experienced anything but a very superficial interest from my friends and my teachers about India and so I never felt motivated to know more. I felt my heritage was a private part of me to be experienced through my home and parents” 3 Lahiri wryly points out that Lilia’s mother dismisses her daughter’s need to know everything South Asian, saying: “We live here now, she was born here” (IoM, 26). With these words, Lilia’s mother accepts the necessary distance of the second generation from their cultural heritage, as they are actively forming their identities as Americans. Lahiri’s portrayal of the physical and psychological distance of the second generation from their roots thus strongly emphasizes the personal agency exercised in incorporating aspects of their cultural heritage into their daily lives. On the contrary, Mr. Pirzada relives the past by putting a pocket-watch on the coffee table before dinner. This pocket-watch is set according to the time in Dacca to which he belongs. The loss of familiar and the ingenious devices these immigrants formulate to cope with an unfamiliar world are conveyed with touching warmth and concern in the story.In the short story “Interpreter of Maladies,” the title story of the Pulitzer-winning collection, Lahiri writes about one of those journeys, of the “return” of a young husband and wife, Raj and Mina Das, hailing from New Brunswick, New Jersey, who are spending a holiday in India with their three children.The “cultural mission” of these two Indian Americans might be read as a passage to India. When coming face to face with this country, the second generation migrants like Mina and Raj Das are as all at sea and disorientated as if they were two travelers during the British period. For Mrs. Das, Kapasi’s job is “so romantic” (IoM, 50) since she reflexively sees him as a representative of the romanticized India her parents’ generation cannot stop glancing back to. Besides, Mrs. Das turns to Kapasi because she feels that he might help her recognize India just like he helps the doctor comprehend his patients’ illness. She is searching for her identity. As Sunaina Maira situates it: “The desire to “return” stems from layers of second-generation experience, many of them imbued with emotional significance, that give rise to wishes to learn more about family history and background, to feel a sense of “belonging,” or to resolve conflicting identity issues.” 4 Mr. Kapasi is an interpreter of maladies, and the “malady” of Mrs. Das is to be an unfamiliar person to her family’s culture. Since Mrs. Das is undertaking a “second migration,” she turns to a translator or an interpreter like Mr. Kapasi, whose job interests her so much, perhaps in order to be translated back to India.There is a lot of importance given to children in Lahiri’s collection with a view to the act of transforming between cultures, serving as a catalyst for giving intercultural message. Lahiri draws on children in a number of her stories to provide the readers with a more snooping insight, may be because she feels that her grown-up characters might allocate into cultural dissimilarity and adjustment. In “Mrs. Sen’s,” “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine,” and “Sexy,” Lahiri’s child is an onlooker, uncontaminated by the effects of the much discussed cultural bias, and brings maladies among the native and immigrant groups to the scene with an ingenuousness. In these stories, different aspects of North American culture are revealed as hardly complete, the segregation between Hindu and Muslim South Asians as highly counterfeit, and extramarital affairs between men and women of different cultural backdrop as having less en route for individual attractiveness and more for promiscuity. This yearning for home in the first generation immigrants is a predominating feeling. The plot has some autobiographical element when Jhumpa Lahiri, in one of her interviews recounts ,“I’ve inherited my parents’ preoccupations. It’s hard to have parents who consider another place their home even after 30 years.” 5The story “Mrs. Sen’s,” which is about an immigrant-woman who takes care of an eleven-year-old American boy in her residence after school, allows Lahiri to lay bare her full consciousness of the immigrant world in concurrence to the essentials of an American childhood. The title character in the story, “Mrs. Sen’s”, is born in India, she still dresses in saris, applies vermilion on her forehead, for her recollection is a way to redemption. She represents those Indian immigrants who find themselves marooned in a country and a culture that is not their own but which anticipates conventionality from them. Mrs. Sen’s obstinate denial and disinclination to learn driving seems to be a psychic contrivance of her conflict to this order of treaty from the new world. While driving, looking at the traffic, her English falters and she, with a sense of incomprehension, says to Eliot: “Everyone, this people, too much in their world.” Paradoxically again, this is true of herself also as she contemplatively declares, “Everything is there” (she speaks of India) and her catastrophe lies in the actuality that she herself no longer is there. Seeking recluse in memory, she keeps listening to the tape in which the voices of her relations at home are recorded. One day while chopping vegetables she asks Eliot if he thinks the neighbors would come to her help if she were to yell at the top of her lungs. “May be”, he says and adds that more likely they would just call to find the blunder about the noise. She then explains to him that, “At home that is all you have to do. Not everybody has a telephone. But just raise your voice a bit, or express grief or joy of any kind, and one whole neighborhood and half of another has come to share the news, to help with arrangements.” (IoM, 116) This makes Eliot think about his home and the fact that he has never spoken to his neighbors. Mrs. Sen’s loneliness derives from being so far from home where as the boy’s loneliness comes from living in suburbia, may be because he does not know his father and hardly knows his mother. When Mrs. Sen asks whether he misses his mother in the afternoons, he finds that the idea has never even occurred to him. Mrs. Sen comes to this sad understanding that he is wiser as he has by now become accustomed to the ache that upsets her all the time, the longing to belong. It is mostly at that flash when Eliot observes his mother in dissimilarity with Mrs. Sen, that a sense of the foreignness clears itself. This sense generates a mode of sensitive consciousness that carries over for the reader to other scenes in the story when the mother and Mrs. Sen emerge individually, spaced out from one another. The sense of evaluation, of gauging one woman against the other by a child, or one way of life or set of customs against the other troubles any simple reader about this intricate and adaptable narrative. Similarly, in the story of Mr. Pirzada, Lilia is the spokesperson of Lahiri, in fact of the entire diaspora community. Lilia not only observes the divergence, but, as the adult narrator, is also able to comment on what she saw as a child and to speak eloquently of the conclusions that she reached. That life is not only winning half a world away, but half a day in advance of her own, provides what must be one of her first insight into the refugee minds of her parents .Lilia says, “When I saw it that night, as he … arranged it (The watch, bracket mine) on the coffee table, an uneasiness possessed me. Life, I realized, was being lived in Dacca first…Our meals, our actions, were only a shadow of what had already happened there, a lagging ghost of where Mr. Pirzada really belonged.” (IoM, 30-31) In the story, “Sexy”, Miranda realizes the pointlessness of her liaison with a married Indian only when a seven-year old Indian boy interprets the meaning of the word ‘Sexy’ - an admiration compensated to her by her lover – as ‘loving someone you don’t know’. Lahiri also explores the idea of love and marriage in some stories like “A Temporary Matter.” For second-generation South-Asian Americans, marriage is a sternly challenged characteristic in this embryonic society. Indeed, the preference of a love match over an arranged marriage is one of the most imperative examples of the option of one meticulous cultural practice over another. Lahiri depicts both types of marriage in her fiction but eventually privileges neither. “A Temporary Matter” ends with the sentence: “They wept together, for the things they now knew.” (IoM, 66) The story is marvelous for its silence and soaking pain, it is also one of the momentous skin texture of Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories that the deepest state of affairs moves towards a unambiguous split second of knowledge which enlightens the entire anecdote. This minute of awareness acts like a prism through which the story can be perceived in its various sunglasses. Yet Lahiri’s stories that attribute arranged marriages make obvious how cultural acquaintances certainly can be adequate to keep a couple together. “This Blessed House” portrays a massive disparity of personalities, but a marriage that eventually may continue. Sanjeev and Twinkle also have met at the appeal of their parents, who are old friends: “She was twenty-seven and recently abandoned, he had gathered, by an American…Sanjeev was lonely, with an excessively generous income for a single man, and had never been in love. At the urging of their matchmakers, they married in India” (IoM, 143). Yet Sanjeev quickly is irritated by Twinkle’s careless habits. The incongruity of their every day life leads Sanjeev to question his bond with his wife. However, a sort of stamped civilizing cryptogram leads him to think the following: “Now he had [a wife], a pretty one, from a suitably high caste, who would soon have a master’s degree. What was there not to love?” (IoM, 148), which is a very Indian sensibility. At their housewarming party, when Twinkle is irritating him and yet still fascinating their guests, Sanjeev has a fantasy about locking his wife and their guests in the attic and to have the house to himself, but then realizes that altering his state of affairs by divorcing Twinkle “would require some effort” (IoM,155). Unlike the couples earlier discussed, Sanjeev and Twinkle depend completely upon their parents’ cultural instructions to channel their paths. This arranged marriage, with all its flaws, survives, for ahead of the elementary differences in individuality are the cultural conventions that brought the two people together, and at the end of the day keep them together. Furthermore, Lahiri’s portrayal of very rewarding arranged marriages in “The Third and Final Continent” and The Namesake at last demonstrates how cultural resemblance endows with as supporting a basis for dedication as personal attachment. Thus in her fiction Lahiri makes obvious how the second generation is existing with a range of cultural inclinations to consider, and then acknowledge or discard, when considering matrimony. While analyzing the experiences and maladies of the diasporas presented in Lahiri’s short stories, it is necessary to understand the term diaspora and the received notions of diaspora characteristics and their modes of existence. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin define ‘diaspora’ as “the voluntary or forcible movement of peoples from their homelands into new regions…” 6 Robert Cochen describes diasporas as the communities of peoples living together in one country who “acknowledge that the old country – a nation often buried deep in language, religion, custom or folklore – always has some claim on their loyalty and emotions.”7 Diasporas thus subsist in one country as the society but look across time and space to a different. The immigrant diasporas and their descendents experience dislodgment, disintegration, marginalization and discontinuity in the cultural dialogue and involvement of the subject countries. Avtar Brah describes this condition of diasporas in the prevailing culture: “… All diasporas are differentiated heterogeneous, contested spaces, even as they are implicated in the construction of a common ‘we’.”8 This living ‘in-between’ condition is very excruciating and marginalizing for the diasporas. There is a yearning for “home,” to go back to “the lost origin,” and “imaginary homelands”9 which is created from the disconnected and fractional reminiscences of their motherland. “They stand bewildered and confused, and show resistance also to the discourse of power in various forms. In the following generations these confusions, problems and yearnings become less intense as they get influenced by the culture of that country and also adapt themselves to it.”10 No doubt, due to the generation gap the migrants and their children inhabit dissimilar spaces in the ‘representative’ culture but their understanding of rootlessness and displacement can also be of parallel nature. Though the children born to them enjoy a better deal in that country “their sense of identity borne from living in a diaspora community (is) influenced by the past migrant history of their parents or grandparents,”11 remarks John McLeod. In course of time, diaspora individuals from the same country form communities, and different diaspora communities make “composite communities.” Thus distinct diaspora communities are created out of “the confluence of narratives of the old country to the new, which create the sense of shared history,”12 states Robert Cohen. Thus “hybrid identities” are bargained which transport and revolutionize the fixed established binary oppositions such as local residents/diaspora people, identical/different, master/slave and this is called “postcolonial” by Home K. Bhabha.13 Here we can say that by understanding the maladies and experience of the diasporas in their various tinges and symptoms, and explaining them new potentials, new directions and new approaches of idea and being in the new countries in the fast changing, political, communal, financial and cultural international picture, Jhumpa Lahiri has secured for herself a creditable place along with other Indian diaspora writers such as Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, V.S. Naipaul, and Bharati Mukherjee.The Namesake prolongs to expand and advance the themes of cultural alienation and loss of identity depicted in the Interpreter of Maladies. In her debut novel Lahiri tries to incarcerate the experiences and cultural impasse of 30 year struggle of the Ganguly family, for their amalgamation and absorption into an alien culture. She follows the story of Gogol, born to an Indian immigrant couple who have come to get a new life of prospects for themselves in the university environs of Boston. The name Gogol is taken from his father’s fascination with reading Russian novels, especially the author Nikolai Gogal. His father’s phenomenal break out in an Indian train crash is endorsed to a bulky copy of a Nikolai Gogol’s novel for which the parents decide that Gogol is the perfect name for their first born boy. The kernel of cultural problem starts evolving as Gogol grows adult and becomes more enthusiastic to fit in with his peers, he begins to hate his name – it is neither American, nor even Bengali. It will not be wrong to say that here Lahiri’s spotlight is on the concealed deposit of the consciousness and the internal confusion of the characters who find themselves ensnared in the middle of two cultures. In fact, she animates the numerous selves put up so scrupulously to make sense of the unknown world that is as much a land of opportunities as it is of divergence and confusion. The novel is a kaleidoscope of the different shades of individual relationships, the conflicts and confusions of the characters’ emotional pains and afflictions as she portrays the theme of cultural dilemmas and the dislocation of the immigrants. The disarticulation and its significance can be seen at two levels, first, from the point of view of the parents, Ashima and Ashoke, and second, from that of the children Gogol and his sister Sonia, the American born second generation Indian-Americans.Like many skilled Indians who left for the United States in the early 60’s. Ashoke Ganguli too leaves for America in pursuit of higher studies and a prospect of setting down “with security and respect”. (TN, 108). After a two year stay in America, Ashoke returns to Calcutta and marries a nineteen-year-old Bengali girl named Ashima. Gradually, Ashima adjusts in America on her own, taking pride in rearing her child, moves about alone in the market with Gogol in the buggy, talks to passers-by who smile at the baby and goes to meet her husband in the campus, thus rising positive. Nevertheless, she feels the dislocation more, after their relocation from the university apartments to a University outside Boston where Ashoke is hired as an Assistant Professor. The shift to this uptown district with no “street lights, no public transportation, no stories for miles” Ashima feels it is “more drastic, more distressing than the move from Calcutta to Cambridge had been.” (TN, 46) Ashima, though not pregnant, begins to realize that “Being a foreigner is a sort of life long pregnancy – a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an on-going responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been 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 from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect.” (TN, 49-50)In order to safeguard their culture in the unfamiliar land, the first generation immigrants educate their children in the native language, literature and history and guide them about their religious customs, traditions, beliefs, food habits, and social mannerisms. Along with this, they also train them in the ways of the new land and its common traditions. In the novel, Ashima teaches Gogol to memorize a poem by Tagore and the names of gods embellishing the ten-headed Durga. At the same time, every afternoon, before going to sleep, Ashima switches on the television and makes Gogol watch “Sesame Street” and “The Electric Company” in order to make him get used to the American way of speaking English. Even if the immigrants struggle their best to conserve their custom and ethnicity, they willy-nilly absorb the social and cultural way of life of the host country. Though primarily Ashoke does not like the commemoration of Christmas and Thanksgiving yet as Gogol recalls “it was for him, for Sonia, that his parents had gone to the trouble of learning these customs.” (TN, 286) Their own children are more Americanized than what they wish them to be. The children too, brushed up to be bilingual, envisage the cultural tight spots and dislocation. Though compulsorily they sit in Pujas and other religious ceremonies, Gogol and Sonia, like the children of other Bengali families, savor American food more than the Bengali dishes. The parents cannot make compromise with their children’s wishes. The Gangulys have to integrate the American way of living into their lives for the sake of their children: “They learn to roast turkeys…at Thanksgiving, to nail a wreathe to their door in December, to wrap woollen scarves around snowman, to colour boiled eggs violet and pink at Easter for the sake of Gogol and Sonia …they celebrate with progressively increasing fanfare, the birth of Christ, an event the children look forward to far more than the worship of Durga and Saraswati (TN,64). “Migrants,” says Salman Rushide, “straddle two cultures… fall between two stools” 14 and they suffer “a triple disruption”15 comprising the loss of roots, the linguistic and also the social dislocation, which Gogol deeply suffers from in the story. This personality catastrophe, the emotion of “in-betweenness” and belonging “nowhere” is experienced by him deeply during his school trip to the cemetery where finding no grave of his ancestors he felt that being a Hindu/Bengali “he himself will be burned not buried, that his body will occupy no plot of earth, that no stone in this country will bear his name beyond life.” (TN, 69) A sequence of his conked out relationships with Ruth, Maxine and his “wrecked marriage” with the second generation Bengali girl Moushumi, -- commenced by his mother with the anticipation of his better resolution in life-- and the divergence between the an anesthetized Bengali cultural way and his cognizant adjustment to the American “way” made him a sandwich, wrecked and disjointed. Lahiri elucidates her aim behind creating such a character in The Namesake, “I just wanted to write something focusing on the experiences of Bengali-American kid.”16 The Word ‘namesake’ shows the weight of carrying someone else’s name on oneself throughout life. This is the clash that the protagonist Gogol lives with. He becomes a representation of the émigré experience. The novel speaks of “the uneasy status of the immigrant, the tension between India and the United States and between family tradition and individual freedom”.17 The immigrant lives a confused existence as Indian-American, American-Indian, Overseas-Born-Indian, American-Born-Indian.Jhumpa Lahiri maters the art of moving from the micro to the macro. Lahiri in this novel views that it is not only the Indian migrants who feel disrupted in other countries and face intellectual impasse, the immigrants from any culture feel the same in other dominant cultures. For example, Graham, Moushumi’s fiancée, during his visit to Calcutta, found the Bengali customs “taxing” and “repressed” as there were no drinks and he couldn’t “even hold her hand on the street without attracting snares”. (TN, 217) Hence he decided to break with Moushumi. Even Gogol and Sonia do not feel “at home” in Calcutta where their parents find relief and solace. Ashima feels sad “staring at the clouds as they journey back to Boston” (TN, 87) while Gogol and Sonia feel thankful. While depicting the theme of civilizational dilemmas and disorder in the lives of the migrants, Lahiri does not stay restricted to the migrants in foreign lands alone. She projects un-belongingness as an unending human clause. Man is put out of joint in this world. He may have a home in the homeland, fabricate a ‘home’ in a foreign land acclimatizing to the cultures, but at the end of the day he has no home. He has to leave all the ‘homes,’ as bereavement takes him to the ‘other’ world. Lahiri’s reflections on Ashoke’s death in America “who had forsaken everything to come in this country, to make a better life, only to die here?” (TN, 180) point out that the theme of cultural dilemmas and disruption gets idealistic with an existential magnitude in this novel. Seclusion, loneliness is one of the smoldering troubles of the émigré society in any country. Ashoke Ganguli and Ashima Ganguli experience this problem abundantly on landing in Cambridge/Massachusetts. Of the two, it is the wife who goes through this strain more than the husband as the male goes out and meets his colleagues in his work place in a congenial atmosphere. As the woman is mostly restricted to the kitchen and the bedroom in the early days of the couple’s stay in the US, she has to bear the burden more. Ashima Ganguli is pregnant and is expecting her baby in a couple of week’s time. She is hospitalized but there is no one to be with her. Had it been in India, there would have been plenty of relatives to stand by her and she wonders, “If she is the only Indian person in the hospital” (TN,03). She remembers that when she was boarding the airplane for the States, there were “twenty-six members of her family” (TN 04) to bid her a warm farewell. Now there is just a dry obstetrician Dr. Ashley to examine her. The doctor tells her that everything is fine, but “noting feels normal to Ashima” (TN,05). They are at home in Cambridge since eighteen months, but nothing has been normal to Ashima. She is very much worried about “motherhood in a foreign land” (TN,06)Her worry is it “happening so far from home, unmonitored and unobserved by those she love .” (TN,06) She is gripped in fear; “she is terrified to raise a child in a country where she is related to no one, where she knows so little, where life seems so tentative and spare” (TN,06). Ashoke has seen dreadful tragedies in his life like the train accident which he survived. He remembers someone whispered seeing his condition, “Let’s keep going” (TN 18). This optimism-- ‘Let’s keep going’ – has become a hymn in his existence. But Ashima could not take such a contented position on her life, the torment of leaving her beloved Bengal has always been there and that is why even though both her children are in the US, Ashima after her widowhood decides to “return to India with an American passport” (TN 276). Traditions of the immigrants get distorted when immigrants settle down in a country like the States. When Ashoke and Ashima’s parents died in India, they could not go straight away to India and share in the funeral rites and it has been a guilt in their minds forever. But back in the US Ashoke shaved his head in the wake of his father’s death and Gogol, then a small boy did not value the significance of it, broke into a laughter, Sonia, then a baby at the sight of her father’s hairless, grief-stricken contour, cried aloud. But such religious ceremonies are not observed by Gogol when his father dies. Only his mother has shampooed the vermilion from her hair part. She has also taken off her iron wedding bracelet. She does not want to escape to Calcutta too as soon as her husband dies. She refuses to be so far from the place, “where her husband made his life, the country in which he died” (TN 183). She has never uttered her husband’s name even after his death. As her husband died in Cleveland and all alone, she would say, “He was teaching me how to live alone” (TN 183). Americanized Indian offspring very often collide with their parents when their life style goes absolutely contradictory to their Indian parents’ outlook. When Gogol dates with his girl friend Ruth, his parents are a bit panicky, because they know many Bengalis in the US, who have married American women, but their marriages have led to divorce. It is almost an accepted fact in the US that the first marriage generally fails in a year’s time and the second marriage consistently gets on. Ruth is living with her father and stepmother, her mother might have taken another man. For the Americans it is a way of life, but if such a thing happens to the Indians living abroad, they do get concerned. Even dating is not a serious affair between the Americanized Indian children. Gogol dates American women more than once. As the book says, “a few months after his father’s death, he stepped out of Maxine’s life for good” (TN 188). Gogol has been staying with Maxine under the same roof as his parents, “a thing Ashima refuses to admit to her Bengali friends” (TN 166). Ashima ponders to which course her life has been moving. Having been deprived of the companionship of her own parents under the excuse of moving to the States, “her children’s independence, their need to keep their distance from her, is something she will never understand” (TN, 166). When her children do not come back home even for holidays, she thinks, “She has given birth to vagabonds” (TN167). Only an archetypal middle class mother knows how hurting it is to learn that her children acquire American ways, which are total abhorrence to her social and religious values and observations. Gogol dates Maxine and goes to spend his vacation with the girl’s parents, Ashima feels the gulf in her heart. The text goes like this: “I’am going to spend a couple of weeks in New Hampshire.” “Oh”, his mother says. She sounds at once unimpressed and relieved. “Why do you want to go there, of all places? What’s the difference between New Hampshire and here?” “I’am going with a girl I’m seeing”, he tells her. “Her parents have a place there” Though she says nothing for a while, he knows what his mother is thinking, that he is willing to go on vacation with someone else’s parents but not see his own (TN 145). Deeply treasured Indian Values like virginity and chastity have absolutely no significance not only to the Americans but also to the Americanized Indians. Moushumi, the Bengali-American contentedly dates with the American man Graham and even gets betrothed to him but the engagement breaks. Moushumi has already a French boyfriend, Dimitri, whom she had met in her teens. But Dimitri is now in Paris. In the mean time, she sees her distant cousin Gogol Nikhil and agrees to marry him. Even though Gogol knows all about Moushumi’s past, he is not improperly worried about it as it is the culture of the US. Occasionally, in the residence, “he finds old remnants of her life before he’d appeared in it, her life with Graham” (TN 229). Gogol and Moushumi live for a year as husband and wife but soon they lose interest in each other. When she goes to Paris for a paper presentation, she meets her former friend and goes to bed with him. At the same time “She wonders if she is the only woman in her family ever to have betrayed her husband, to have been unfaithful. This is what upsets her most to admit: that the affair causes her to feel strangely at peace, the complication of it calming her, structuring her day” (TN 226). Without any argument they both agree to divorce. Cultural and family ties play a major role in the lives of these immigrants. Like immigrants of other communities Ashima and Ashoke too make their circle of Bengali connections, get known through one another. “They know Maya and Dalip Nandi, “meet Mitras, through the Mitras, the Banerjees” and then the young Bengali bachelors in the market who return from Calcutta with ‘wives’. They become “friends” only “for the reason” that “They all come from Calcutta.” (TN, 38) These Bengali families get together on different events like the rice and name ceremonies of their children, their birthdays, marriages, deaths, and Bengali festivals like navratras and pujos. They celebrate these as per Bengali customs, wearing their best traditional attires, thus trying to safeguard their traditions. In fact, their “beliefs, traditions, customs, behaviours and values” along with their “possessions and belongings” are carried by migrants with them to “new places.” The migrant Bengalis perform as “honorary” uncles and aunts, mashis and meshos for the children for various ceremonies and “sit in circles on the floor, singing songs by Nazrul and Tagore…. They argue riotously over the films of Ritwik Ghatak versus those of Satyajit Ray. The CPI(M) versus the Congress Party. North Calcutta versus South.” (TN, 38) Ironically, their existential dilemma in this new country is, as pointed out by Lahiri, “For hours they argue about the politics of America, a country in which none of them is eligible to vote.” (TN, 38) Thus the immigrants face political displacement too. The basic conflicts of the novel can easily be explained by the theme of roots and divisions. Roots stand for deep-rooted viewpoints, background, one’s initial stages, the personality one is born with, the pull of the native land, the buried power, the consolation of one’s own domicile and security, and so on. Divisions, on the other hand, stand for liberty, escape, exploration, discovery, revelation and removal of the imagination, for balancing new heights, for thoughts and aspiration and achievement and for facing the test of the indefinite. The conflict is between the East and the West, between convention and modernity, between habitat and dispossessed, between the self one is born with and the look for identity, between one’s classification of himself and the meaning imposed on him. The theme is of the pain wedged in the immigrant familiarity, the drag of one’s roots on the one hand and the attraction of the wings for escape, flight, hunt, and explanation on the other. While Indian Diaspora’s associations to the native soil are extremely tough and while there is a bottomless homesickness for the homeland, it is needless to say that only a few have any objective of coming back. The economic position of the Gangulis lets them the opulence of ferrying between two ‘home’ countries, which gives them fiscal and professional satisfaction. Lahiri talks about how the prospect sited upon the second generation are intrinsically complex: “One of the things I was always aware of growing up was conflicting expectations. I was expected to be Indian by Indians and American by Americans. I didn’t feel equipped even as a child to fully participate in things”. 18For Lahiri, christening is something very central in shaping someone’s life as Teresa Wilsz writes: “Naming is everything, a way to claim identity, to pass on notions of love, tradition and hope. And so it is perhaps, that Lahiri dedicates her book to the two men in her life, her husband and son, “For Alberto and Octavio, who I call by other names … For Octavio, she knows, life as a second-generation American-born Gautemalan Greek Deshi will be very different, a different kind of navigating between cultures, but navigating nonetheless.” 18 Gogol is an intelligent American boy. The first time he bestows his name as Nikhil, he handles to kiss a girl even though he is only a awkward adolescent, as Nikhil also he gets friends. He feels it is the command of the name. He hates life as Gogol and becomes Nikhil, doing it officially in the court. He enjoys himself, doing a curriculum in Architecture. He feels liberated from the yoke of the old name. He turns into Nick to friends, actually American. “It is as Nikhil, that first semester, that he grows a goatee, starts smoking Camel Lights and parties and … discovers Brain Eno and Elvis Costello and Charlie Parker … it is as Nikhil that he loses his virginity…” (TN,105) At a panel debate on Indian novels in print in English, an expert declares, “Technologically speaking, ABCD’s are unable to answer the question, “Where are you from?” … Gogol has never heard the term ABCD. He eventually gathers that it stands for “American-Born Confused Deshi,”…himself. He learns that C could also stand for “conflicted.” He despises that deshi, a generic term for “countryman”, means “Indian.” He knows that his parents and all their friends refer to India simply as desh. But Gogol never things of India as desh. He thinks of it as Americans do, as India (TN,118). His father had told him that he had a special kinship with Nikolai Gogol as “He spent most of his life away from his homeland. Like me.” (TN,77) Ashoke had also told Gogol what Dostovesky had said, “We all came out of Gogol’s overcoat.” (TN,78) The overcoat itself is a symbol for the ancient times. Gogol is the interpreter of the maladies of his generation, and in the understanding he gives the solution to the maladies. Thus in the conflict between the heredity and modernity lies the redemption of the soul. It acts as a symbol for the understanding of life as a child of immigrant parents, having an alienated identity, as Lahiri in an interview says, “the question of identity is always a difficult one, but especially so for those who are culturally displaced, as immigrants are, or those who grow up in two worlds simultaneously.”19 How these immigrants face cultural problems in the unfamiliar systems is shown through the problems faced by Ashoke and Ashima. They find it difficult to make these people understand their cultural observation of having two names—a pet-name (daknam) at home and good name (bhalo name) for formal purposes which will be decided on the receiving of a letter from Ashima’s grandmother, to hospital authorities on their son’s birth and on his admission to the School. Hence on their daughter’s birth they decide not to give her two names.The Indian diaspora is marked by a strong tie with its cultural heritage and a common wistfulness for the behavior that was part of the experiences at home. Indians as a group protect their distinctiveness as Indians. “The Gangulis sing songs of Nazrul and Tagore, discuss films of Ritwik Ghatak and Satyajit Ray” (TN, 38). On his birthday, Gogol is dressed as an infant Bengali groom and on also Gogol’s Annaprasan ceremony, his rice ceremony, “the first formal ceremony of their lives centres around consumption of solid food Gogol is dressed as an infant Bengali groom, the fragrance of cumin seeds,the final bowl contains payesh, a warm rice pudding” (TN, 34). When Ashoke Ganguli dies, on the eleventh day to mark the end of the mourn period, there is a religious ritual where a priest chants verses in Sanskrit, they prepare “an elaborate meal, fish and meat with extra potatoes and fresh coriander leaves and the house smelling of food”(181). They continue to re-enact home with a view to distinguish ‘us’ from ‘them.’ Before Ashima goes along with her husband abroad, she is cautioned “not to eat beef or wear skirts or cut off hair” (TN, 39). Gogol’s American girlfriend Maxine is evidently surprised that “his parents’ friends are Bengali, that they had an arranged marriage, that his mother cooks Indian food every day, that she wears saris and bindis…. All his life he has never witnessed a single moment of physical affection between his parents” (TN, 138). He tells her “that they will not be able to touch or kiss each other in front of his parents, that there will be no wine with lunch” (145). These restrictions surprise her. Then Ashima is upset by the idea of Maxine as her daughter-in-law. She felt awkward when Maxine called her ‘Ashima’ and her husband ‘Ashoke.’ “She refuses to admit before her Bengali friends that Gogol has been dating Maxine and sleeping in the same roof” (TN,166). Whenever Moushumi would go to her friend’s place she would always call her mother to inform about her whereabouts. The American mothers were at once captivated and puzzled at her sense of responsibility. Devotion to family is proclaimed as a characteristically Indian attribute. When Gogol’s father dies, Gogol wants to be near his mother and sister. His American girlfriend fails to identify with this and as a result they break up soon. Indians come from a family value which helps them in battering the experience of immigration. Lahiri communicates a similar dilemma in an interview: “When I was growing up, India was largely a mystery to Americans as well, not nearly as present in the fabric of American culture as it is today. It wasn’t until I was in college that my American friends expressed curiosity about and interest in my Indian background. As a young child, I somehow felt that the Indian part of me was unacknowledged and somehow negated, by my American environment and vice versa. I felt that I led two very separate lives.” 20Diaspora Indians find themselves in an unconvincing situation of being subjugated and advantaged at the same time. They discover themselves besieged for cultural prejudices specifically because of their skin tone and general social conditions, both of which invite contempt and classification in a society that efforts to be classless but maintains the old aphorism of fair skin authority. The fear of a group of ‘coloured’ people all-encompassing from Asia, stealing jobs from Americans and in the course renovating the United States into something alien from its origin. Globalization might have abolished physical borders but it has set up intellectual and psychosomatic borders. Moushumi breaks off her engagement with Graham when she realizes his condescension of her culture .With his marriage with Moushumi, Gogol understands that he had satisfied a deep-seated, shared aspiration of all concerned as they both were Bengalis even if the marriage does not survive. Ashima after the death of her husband Ashoke plans to spend six months in America and six months in India. “True to her name, she will be without borders, without a home of her own, a resident everywhere and nowhere” (TN,276). Gogol, being adept to many touching moments because of his ‘bicultural’ identity is crestfallen, distraught, dislocated and forlorn. He does not know what to do after his father’s death, his wife’s abandonment and his mother’s imminent exit to India. Nonetheless, there is some optimism in him, he desires to have a home and ascend resourcefully in the country that is his habitat now. Lahiri brings out the bewildering and complicated voyage an emigrant family makes in order to have a better life in a land, which offers abundant opening. But the story offers a glance into the ruthless actuality that the émigré has to face while he tries to fit into the culture of an alien country. The emergence of second generation writers of Indian origin in America, Canada, England in recent years has been a crucial moment in academic circles. The true representative of the second generation Indian in America, Jhumpa Lahiri, has said of India: “…as different as Calcutta [the place of her origin] is from Rhode Island [the place of her upbringing], I belonged there in some fundamental way. In the ways I didn’t seem to belong in the US.”21 At the same time she has confessed that she does not feel at home in India when she came to Calcutta for her wedding: “I never considered Calcutta my home, just my parents’ hometown.”22 These two statements about her association with India which are self-contradictory speak of the paradoxical nature of the relationship of the diaspora community with this country. But when comes to the second-generation in the west, they contentedly acclimatize themselves to the new environment. Their predicament is like the predicament of ‘Trisanku’. Lahiri, in both of her works Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake struggles with characters that are trapped wandering between two worlds, two personalities. In both her works, the central characters who are first generation immigrants find it hard to let go of their culture and traditions and they fight back to carry on with the environment, which they cannot comprehend. Further, greater part of her protagonists who are second-generation immigrants have in some way or other adjusted and assimilated themselves into the folds of the new culture even if they feel a pull towards their native land. Her stories are recounted in fashions that merge economy of idiom that communicate the involvedness of the plot and characters as much by the disguised as by the declared. Tightfisted with words, yet awfully persuasive, she intertwines illustrated images for the reader in a rational approach. Further, an ear for discourse, a sense of novel metaphors and a judicious expressive talent permeate Lahiri’s text with elegance. I can securely affirm that Jhumpa Lahiri thrives in fusing the theme of migration and dislocation to that of individual relations. She illustrates her characters sprouting in the center of a new crossbreed culture, Indo-American awareness. This new age susceptibility gives them a separate self in the world. This is my response to the concern which looms large among the academia today. In this context I would quote the concept note of this seminar, “When one looks at diasporic writing, one comes across tremendous creativity, hetroglosia, hybridity (mostly positive) and linguistic experimentation. Concerns touching upon race, ethnicity, belonging, otherness (as well as ‘othering’) gender, subalternaiety, voices do come in most of the time and that is a refreshing departure from the earlier more or less monolithic Anglo-American-centric, or Euro-centric fare which one worked with a few decades back.” The point of dialogue here, “Is it a return to the roots or a re-alignment in the wake of a blending of two different world orders?” In case of Jhumpa Lahiri, it is a curious amalgamation of both. However when we persist on the problem of designation, we often forget the established design. The classification “Indian Writing in English” would indeed materialize to be baffling if we ask such questions as when is the Indian writing only Indian? P.Lal had taken up this question by arguing, “There has never been an ‘Indian’ literature for the simple reason that there never has been a very clearly defined sense of Indian nationhood.” 23 In1987 he had argued that those Indo-Anglian writers who had stayed on in the country are closer to the Indian cultural ethos than those Indian writers who write from abroad. C.D. Narasimhah, had given the view that “the mainstream of Indian thought is Hindu and the mainstream of literary sensibility is Sanskrit as the back-bone of the country’s cultural unity”24 a view that absolutely marginalizes the Indo-Anglian literature in the Indian cultural context, because language is posed as a barrier for the Indians writing in English. What is Indian about Indian writing in English? Addressing to this question in an interview given to Swapan Dasgupta, Salman Rushdie says: “First of all, one must separate Indian in the literary sense from Indian in the nationalistic sense because a literature that becomes subservient to nationalism gains all kinds of problems as a result. I think good writers will avoid that trap. But that is a fair question.”25 But there are foreign nationals of Indian origin whose work may or may not be deep-rooted in Indian realism, but they express an experience to which Indians can relate better than others. The new Indian expatriate writers like Bharati Mukherjee, Rohinton Mistry, Uma Parameswaran, Ashis Gupta, Kiran Desari, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Anjana Appachana, Shauna Singh Baldwin, Jhumpa Lahiri, and a host of others are the best examples. Simple as their plots might appear to be, they are subtle, open ended and often indefinite. Cross cultural outlook or attitudes define the outline of Lahiri’s anxiety in most of her stories. With her fiction, Jhumpa Lahiri has brought multiplicity and involvedness to the literature of East Indian experience. She shows a remarkable ability to go beyond the contemporary, since her characters symbolize universal issues. Her descriptive and stylistic devices, her minimalist prose, evocative and spectacular modes, inquisitive actions and creative perceptivity as a means of design and disposition are the features of an outstanding artiste. She seems confident to be one of the foremost Asian American writers of her consortium in the years to come.References:
Dr. Nandini Sahu is a regular contributing writer for BoloKids.com Image: Jhumpa Lahiri and her books. February 17, 2008 |
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