The novel aims at projecting the ethical aspect of Indian immigrants in Jhumpa Lahiri’s debut novel

In her essay “My Two Lives,” Jhumpa Lahiri, an Indian American, explains the balance between the identities of the two countries inside her heart, as well as her psychological struggle between her bicultural identities. She describes herself as an Indian-American because she moved with her family from India to the United States when she was very young. However, confused with her identity through her growth, she feels that she doesn’t belong to either of the two countries because of its completely different cultures. When she is at home, she deals with her parents in an Indian way, which is strange compared to the American way that she come across outside. She says that she has a distinctive identity in spite of her Indian appearance

The book contains the stories of first and second generation Indian immigrants, as well as a few stories involving ideas of otherness among communities in India. The stories revolve around the difficulties of relationships, communication and a loss of identity for those in diaspora. No matter where the story takes place, the characters struggle with the same feelings of exile and the struggle between the two worlds by which they are torn. The stories deal with the always shifting lines between gender, sexuality, and social status within a diaspora. Whether the character be a homeless woman from India or an Indian male student in the United States, all the characters display the effects of displacement in a

She explains her thesis by stating “Others who write stories of migration often talk of arrival at a new place as a loss of communal memory and the erosion of an original culture. I want to talk of arrival as a gain,” (360). The key points of the text include Mukherjee describing her transition between Calcutta and the United States, and what it means to be and American and how culture influences that aspect. The information in the text is significant; the people of America are a part of a melting pot, sometimes it is hard for them to find the distinction between American culture and their own. The information in Mukherjee’s story is clear and specific, unbiased, and is relevant to the purpose of the story. I believe Mukherjee has achieved her purpose of informing her audience about cultural differences; she presents certain strengths and weaknesses within the text.

The short story "Hell-Heaven" written by Jhumpa Lahiri, is about the clashing of the cultures of a Bengali family settling in the west. While story is told in the child's point of view as she matures to a young woman, we're also given the experiences of the people around her through her eyes. These people include her mother, father and a family friend. They each have a different experience as an immigrant migrating and living in America, which leaves us to wonder what message is the author trying to convey with this piece of literature. However, the message to come from "Hell-Heaven" Jhumpa Lahiri is that immigrant families face struggles and tribulations living in unfamiliar territory and having to choose one culture over another.

A person’s heritage and cultural identity may be lost when moving to a new country where the culture is different and other cultures are not easily accepted. In the short story “Hindus”, Bharati Mukherjee uses setting, characters and the plot to discuss what it is like to lose your cultural identity while being a visible minority in America. Mukherjee uses the plot to describe the events that take place in the main characters life that lead her to realize how different the culture and life is in the America’s. She also uses the characters as a way of demonstrating how moving away from one’s culture and heritage can change a person’s perspective and ways of thinking. Mukerjee also uses setting in her story to identity the physical differences in culture between living in India and America. Alike the setting and characters, the plot helps describe the loss of culture with a sequence of events.

In Mira Nair’s film, The Namesake, the disparate cultures of India and America affirms to the binary paradigm of “the one” and “the other”, manifesting the dominance of one from the other and its impact to influence and cause cultural and identity issues. The collision of the two cultures forms a process of trying to construct an identity and a destruction of an ethnic identity, with different factors to consider such as space and other sociocultural codes. This film about the Indian American also shows the concept of model-minority image, standards and expectations imposed to Asian Americans. The Namesake embodies the cultural and identity issues of an Asian American, particularly the Indian Americans, exemplifying the experiences of the

The Namesake, written by Jhumpa Lahira, a famous Indian writer who won the Pulitzer Prize for her story collection Interpreter of Maladies, brilliantly illustrates the immigrant experience and the tangled ties between generations. In this novel, the main characters Ashima and her husband, Ashoke, were first generation immigrants in the United States from India. The whole story begins with Ashima's pregnancy and her nostalgia of her hometown, and a sense of melancholy revealed from the first chapter. While Ashima felt insecure and worried about her new life in the United States, her husband Ashoke, rather wanted to settle in and struggle for a new life. All of uncertainty and reluctance of this new-coming couple faded way when their son,

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 Namesake is the first novel of Lahiri and it was originally a novella published in The new yorker and was later expanded to a full length novel. It explores many of the same emotional and cultural themes as her Pulitzer Price winning short story collection Interpreter of Maladies. Moving between events in Calcutta, Boston and New York city, the novel examines the caught between two conflicting cultures with highly distingtreligious, social and idealogical differences.This novel clearly describes the struggles ofa Bengali couple who migrated to the United States for form a new lifein outside. This story of the novel begins as Ashok and Ashima leave from Calcutta and settle in Central Square, in Cambridge,Massachusetts. Through a series

Jhumpa Lahiri’s short stories in Interpreter of Maladies all deal with some aspect of belonging to more than one cultural group, whether it be Indian, American, etc. Though they each attempt to compromise with the changes in their life, whether it be moving to a different country or having an arranged marriage, the characters are disconnected from their identities or loved ones. A large part of American and Indian culture is marriage, whether it be arranged or of the person’s choice. But marriage is not an easy thing to handle if you aren’t prepared for it, and this is very prevalent in Interpreter of Maladies. Two examples this essay will speak about are Twinkle in This Blessed House and the narrator in The Third and Final Continent.

The book, Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri, is a collection of short stories that shows the culture and immigrant experience of Indians. Lahiri paints a picture of what the Indian diaspora was like. We are able to step into the footsteps of the book’s characters, and we can see what it was really like to live during their time.

In “Interpreter of Maladies”, Jhumpa Lahiri uses both art and language as symbols of the difficulty of belonging when stuck between two or more cultures. Born in London from Indian parents, then raised in the United States, Lahiri puts in this story her own feeling or removal into the characters: The Das, visiting a country that has become more foreign than homely; and Mr. Kapasi, who struggles to claim his identity through language and translation.

‘Interpreter of Maladies’ is a collection of nine short stories. The stories are about the Indians, caught between the culture they have inherited and the one, they have to adapt. All the stories almost remain the same in themes yet ideas differ in their perspectives. They present Indian immigrant people in different and variant roles and situations. Being herself the child of immigrant parents, living in the United States, Lahiri’s characters are also portraiture of such people, torn between two different national identities.

One could say, it is an incredible accomplishment how Jhumpa Lahiri manages to weave together her nine stories, in her debut Interpreter of Maladies. Most of the stories share intimate details about the experiences of first and second generation Indian immigrants in the United States, even though the characters vary greatly, they have corresponding troubles in their lives; “Lahiri constructs a conversation among her pieces” (Brada-Williams 453).

Jhumpa Lahiri as an immigrant writer concerned with sociological, psychological and spiritual maladies, and she tries to an interpreter the experiences of second generation. The Namesake brings about the experience of immigrants who suffer from dual culture identities.