Theme Of Diaspora In Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth is comprised of eight short stories about different Indian families’ struggles in America, many of them going through the immigrant experience. The conflicts are with friends and family, and also with themselves, as each of them attempt to find their own identity along with fitting in with the rest of society. One of the causes of these struggles that because the families in the stories are mixed in terms of generation. Many of the adults in the stories were first generation immigrants from India, while many of the children were raised in the United States, which is the second generation. This led to blending of culture and at the same time, clashes between the immigrant mentality of living and the American mentality of living. In Unaccustomed Earth, Lahiri demonstrates to the reader the important influence of environment, specifically culture and how it impacts parental teachings, on the personality and development of an individuals’ identity, and how the actions and development of characters can affect one’s family and friends; the impact of environment and culture is shown especially by the characters and stories “Hell-Heaven” and “Hema and Kaushik”.

This book depicts the national and cultural status of the immigrant mother, who is able to preserve the traditions of her Indian heritage that connect her to her homeland. Ensuring a successful future for her American-born children is coordinated with the privilege of being an American citizen. Ashima yearns for her homeland and her family that she left behind when

There are many notable moments in Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. The Indian cultural faces many obstacles and are constantly discriminated against because of who they are. The Indian culture is looked at as poor and because of this are not given the same opportunities as others who are white. In one of the most notable moments of this novel Arnold reflects on this idea that Indians are just poor. This moment gives insight to the reader of how people in society look at those who are not the same as them.

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

Indian fiction in English has matured itself over the years. It has become more expressive and experimental, both thematically and stylistically, than ever, and has come to establish itself as an indigenous branch of world literature. With the passage of time novel in English became recognized as an effective vehicle of human relationships in Indian society. Novelists since the formative years of this genre have been exploring through it, human relationships in the complex Indian society. R.K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, Anita Desai, Shashi Despande, Arundhti Roy, Kiran Desai, Jumpha Lahiri, Geeta Mehta, and Githa Hariharan etc., have produced social novels which deal with the theory of human relationships in the traditional and

The new worlds emerging from such phenomena go beyond the personal, for the country they left behind is changed as well as the one to which they go. The Indian diaspora contains a high number of professionals, making for a global expatriate community with a strong measure of influence and clout. Chaudhuri’s novel is a gently told, convincing glimpse into the life of one ordinary non-resident Indian, stated in deceptively simple, elegantly rendered.

A person has always been able to choose to what extent their cultural experiences affect their perspective. Amy Tan’s, “Two Kinds,” Bharati Mukherjee’s, “Two Ways to Belong in America,” and Robert Lake’s, “An Indian Father’s Plea,” all show how the main characters have chosen to let their experiences have an effect on their cultural identity. A person’s cultural experiences shape perception based on their own identifications and they may chose to assimilate to different cultures.

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.

Literary Analysis of Interpreters of Maladies "Interpreters of Maladies" by Jhumpa Lahiri is a short story that focuses on a far from average family vacation. Mr. Das and Mrs. Das take their three children on a family vacation to explore heritage and show the children more about Indian culture. The Das family is being chauffeured by an Indian man named Mr. Kapasi who is a translator in India that learns more about himself and the Das family on this journey. The trip turns out to be more than expected when Mrs. Das makes a confession and her sons life is put in danger. Interpreters of Maladies has much symbology that foreshadow many elements.

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.

Bharathi Mukherjee’s later novels Jasmine(1989), The Holder of the World(1993) and Leave It to Me(1997) comprised her last creative phase conveniently termed here as the phase of immigration. By now she has travelled a long distance in terms of thematic perception and character portrayal. Beginning with an expatriate’s uprooted identity in the early 70’s, her creative faculty explored the transitional dilemma of characters in early 80’s, whose acculturation bids were occasionally thwarted by the complexity of cultural plurality in the adopted land. However, after the publication of The Middleman(1998), the process of cultural acclimatization appears to be complete and the characters betray the confidence of an immigrant, almost a naturalized citizen, in facing the challenges of human life.

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.

The Namesake, by Jumpa Lahiri, is a story of misfortune that strikes a family of Bengali immigrants who came to live, to give birth, and to raise a family in America. Through different themes, Lahiri portrays the struggle and conflict revolving around family and the notion of one's identity. It is these themes that are use to emphasizes the role of identity asserted on the Gangulis. In this story, Lahiri’s uses food as a central theme to shows the Gangulis' conflict of hybridity. Hybridity refers to the Americanization and improvisation of the Ganguli’s Bengali culture, tradition, and food.

The first similarity between Lahiri’s parents and Ashima and Ashoke, is their distance with Americans. Based on her interview with NPR, Jhumpa Lahiri reports that, “My parents didn’t really mixed with my friends’ parents in that

Jhumpa Lahiri’s characters in her anthology ‘Interpreter of Maladies’ do face moments of unhappiness, however her characters are not always isolated in darkness. Many of Lahiri’s characters suffocate on their migrant experiences, struggling to let go of their home culture; India. Despite this, Lahiri suggests that the light can indeed be found in migrants’ lives if they maintain their connections with their birth place and accept their new fates, evident by incorporating and exploring happy moments for her characters who do so. In Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story Mrs. Sen’s, character Mrs Sen is Lahiri’s study of the classic case of a migrant who fails to adapt to their new life and fit into new culture; experiencing the inability to let go of the old culture.