The Postcolonial Writers May Not Achieve International Success

Lahiri has repeatedly been matched with Earnest Hemingway, for her unmingled, arranged and understandable writing art with open ended stories, which do not give the conclusions, but open doors for diverse interpretations for the readers. As stated by Angelina and Basudeb Chakrabarti: “A Temporary Matter is a delicate look at the desolation of the relationships and the danger of new knowledge. Lahiri’s writing here is careful, clear, understated, resulting in a powerful combination of storytelling and insight

Her yearning for the Indian sensibility bears the stamp of a vagrant searching for her lost home. She is as if in self exile. Thus, the collection of short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri are based on the predicaments and inner turmoils of Indian immigrants in the United States. These characters have been uprooted from the secure life mode of a traditional set up and are struggling to cope with the new environment by learning new strategies and cope up methods, but in order to provide an alternate life mode, such learning has to be lived and experienced at first hand. Her fiction establishes a certain Indo-American cultural link, in the post colonial context. She had made a search for identity with an emotional empathy through her female protagonists. The greatness of her writings is in making the tale of human idiosyncrasies thought-provoking and soul searching. Jhumpa Lahiri does not explicitly points out the remedy. She has presented all women characters as they are in real life, but these characters, in one way for the other, teach the lesson of humility and equality, and motivate us to retain the good of the past in the face of the challenge of life with the head held high almost all the stories end on a positive note, with the hope of a

Women in India were unaware of their miserable condition. It is in the post independence period the women’s quest for identity of her own commenced. The 20th century saw the shift from outer to inner sensibilities and no one can better understand a man or woman better a feminine writer. In modern English fiction a number of women novelists have arrived on the literary scene, they have set out making new forays in to the world of women. Nayantara Sahgal being a feminist writer has emphasized in her novels on freedom and a new definition of the New Women. Sahgal’s heroines are well aware of the injustice done to them in their marriage and they come out of this traditional bond.

The Diasporic clan of writers express their unquenching thirst to return to their native country and they capture in words the alienation they face in their own land after their return. Divakaruni is no exception. Her works overflow with immigrant sensibility, longing for the day of come back. These fine fragile feeling of intense pain and frustration could be brought out by analyzing the narrative style of the stories. In the story titled “The Love of a Good Man” from the anthology The Unknown Errors of Our Lives, spun on the intricate fabric of family, the family members, their cultural variations, etc. Memory also plays a vital role in her stories as the characters move back and forth through their memory lane.

When adapting to a new culture, many find it hard to assimilate into their new world while still holding on to their past life. Finding yourself in a new place with a new language and unfamiliar faces is challenging for immigrants. Jhumpa Lahiri, an immigrant herself, sheds some light on the Indian culture in her book, Interpreter of Maladies. She conveys many challenges that immigrants face when moving away from their homeland in a myriad of short stories. These short stories introduce similar themes of immigration and adaptation through different experiences. Two of Lahiri’s short stories, “A Temporary Matter” and “Mrs. Sens”, do a great job in showing similar challenges of cultural differences in two different ways. They introduce characters

The present paper attempts to assess the consequences ensued due to the cultural hybridity of two generation of characters in Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake. The first immigrants - Ashoke and Ashima transmit the Bengali culture to their US born children Gogol and Sonia who in turn, transmit the American cultural patterns to their parents. The psychological writhe of the Indian mother Ashima trying to adjust herself in the American culture and endeavoring to inculcate the moral values archetype of India into her children, is the primary focus of the novel. The paper centers on the reflection of Jhumpa Lahiri’s own inclination for Bengali culture and cultural hybridity through a variety of characters painted by her in the novel The Namesake.

Interpreter of Maladies is a collection of fictional short stories by highly acclaimed author Jhumpa Lahiri. The book illustrates the lives of first- and second- generation Indian immigrants as they face the challenges and struggles of living a culturally conflicted life in the United States. Lahiri herself was a part of an immigrant household. She was born in London in 1967. Her mother and father were both immigrants from India. They moved to the United States when she was two years old. Because her mother wanted her to grow up aware of her Indian, specifically Bengali, heritage and traditions, they frequently visited their relatives in Calcutta. Although Interpreter of Maladies is considered fictional, critics suggest that it is also autobiographical because most of them are adapted from her friends’, parents’, and acquaintances’ lives. This paper will focus on three specific stories in the book namely: When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine, Mrs. Sen’s, and The Third and Final Continent. The aforementioned stories deal with the struggles and challenges faced by most immigrants, specifically, how they deal with the clashing cultures of their old heritage and their new world. Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies illustrates that although migration entails struggles and sacrifices, the expatriate characters decided to move to a foreign land because of their hopes for a better future, but the strong sense of attachment to their Indian heritage made it difficult for some to adapt to their

The political and social events of the sixties and the seventies along with growing opportunities of education and employment for women encourage women belonging to the urban middle class to engage in literary activities. The thematic concerns of these women writers have been cantering around women related issues. The social setting for most of these writings is the urban middle class and the protagonist is, more often than not, a woman. Indian Culture treats women with utmost reverence. Women are identified with Adi Shakti or the primordial energy. Woman’s avatar as mother treated as highest manifestation of human relationship; It is the mother who gets precedence over all other principles of life including father and god in importance. She

The word colonialism is used to describe the act of colonizing another country. To colonize, is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “To settle (a country) with colonists; to plant or establish a colony in.” the settlement into these other countries leaves the indigenous peoples of that nation can leave an unfair biased opinion of the people who are native to the area which is being colonized and exploited. There are two primary examples of the effects of colonialism in the literature examined in class and that is the effects colonialism has had on the colonizers and the effects it has had on the colonized. There can be an obvious one sidedness to both of these opinions, both which can influence the perspective of the situation which had occurred. However before discussing the different opinions post colonialism, we must first discuss the process of colonialism.

Kamala Das (1934-2009) is one of the most significant feminine voices of Indian English poetry. Often her vocabulary, idioms, choice of words and some syntactical construction are part of what has been termed the Indianization of English. As a confessional poet Kamala Das’ poetry deals with the pathos of women, emerging from a possessive role to the point of discovering and asserting the individual liberty. Since confessional poetry is largely subjective and autobiographical, the poet gets the chance to pour her heart into the poetry. Because of its autobiographical nature the confessional poetry deals with the instant feelings of the writers which again associates the personal experiences of the readers also. Through her poetry, Kamala Das not only expresses the inner feelings but she also projects herself as a feminist poetic voice who is always asking for a dignified place of honor and identity.

To dab him a ‘regional poet’ is to overlook the sensibility that shaped his mind. It is safer to say he is a representative poet from Orissa with an Indian sensibility. His poetry is shaped against a mythico- historical background. It is Cuttack Bhubaneswar, Puri forming his literary landscape and particularly Cuttack is the cradle of his imagination. Catching the boat of time the poet floats on the drunk sea from Chandipur to Chilika and the story of life of common folks in his poems. His poetic journey is a journey to recognize the Hindu world. The reflection is that of an Indian poet in the vein of a modern poet. Jayanta Mahapatra is a modern and a contemporary poet in the sense that he reflects on a spectrum of contemporary issues that crop up in today’s realities -- human relationship, dream, existence, past and tradition, society, art, culture, spirituality, conservation of nature’s flora and fauna etc. The sensibility is essentially Indian. In the words of critics like Viswanathan “Jayanta’s sensibility is both Indian and modern; and his response to Indian scene is authentic and credible.” This paper attempts at tracing a note of scepticism apparent in the poems of this great Indian poet. Mahapatra also strikes a note of humanism in delineating a predicament of humanity in his

“It may be that writers in my position, exiles… are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt”1 said Salman Rushdie. The loss and love of home is not what constitutes an exilic existence; what actually and in true sense constitutes it is the chasm between carrying forth and leaving behind and straddling the two different cultures from two different positions. In my paper, I propose to look at the two sides of an exilic existence- the negative that which has the horrors and trauma with reference to Adorno and Said; and the positive, that which provides the intellectuals and writers a critical and reflective insight, and here I

To understand the postcolonial readings of Amitav Ghosh’s novels let us begin by understanding what postcolonial literature is. In this chapter, I will try to understand what the postcolonial literature does by theorizing the entire process of imperialization or colonization. In the following chapters I will try to understand the postcolonial perspective in Amitav Ghosh’s fictional works.

Yet the truth is that magazines such as Hans have been increasingly publishing Dalit literature as a matter of course. The publication of the 2004 special issue proved to be one of several rallying moments around the same time for this large and diverse community of writers, activists and intellectuals; as well as a popular legitimisation of sorts of the hard work this community had been doing for years to carve out a space in the world of Indian literature to articulate the experiential and political perspectives of Dalits. The ‘mainstreaming’ impact of this kind of publication could be seen when, five years later, in August 2009, Navaria again edited the annual special issue ofHans – this one not specifically focused on Dalit writing but rather on new voices in Hindi literature, of which Dalits are a part.

Philosophy permeating through Raja Rao’s novels is generally held to be Vedantic in tone and temper. Being a Vedantin, he seeks Truth on the lines of Advaitavada and frequently refers to the precepts from the Upanishadas. To him, writing is a visible expression of his deeply – felt spiritual experiences. Duly recognizing man’s deep need to seek and realize Truth, he endeavours to revive the traditional Indian quest with all its rigour. The Advaita philosophy of Sankaracharya forms the core of Raja Rao’s fictional world. Sankaracharya expounded the Advaita philosophy in its final form, imparting to it impeccable perfection. This paper focuses on the Advait philosophy by Raja Rao with special reference to The Cat and Shakeshpeare and The Serpent and The Rope.