Jhumpa Lahiri

La complejidad lingüística del mundo contemporáneo se refleja cada vez más en el ámbito literario. Este artículo pretende examinar los espacios multilingües de los llamados escritores translingües, que se sitúan entre fronteras y, por lo tanto, entre lenguas. En particular, se analizará el caso de la escritora Jhumpa Lahiri, la cual, desde su novela In altre parole (2015), decidió sumergirse en la lengua italiana y expresar su creatividad en este "tercer espacio", además del inglés y el bengalí. El caso de Lahiri nos lleva a reflexionar también sobre la relación entre migración, traducción e identidad.

A recent survey issued by the Pew Research Centre reveals that Asian Americans are “the highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group in the United States” (Pew 2013). They epitomize the neoliberal capitalist success of model minority migrants, embodying the values of economic entrepreneurship and successful mobility triggered by the 1965 Immigration Act. Asian Americans tend to be highly educated (61% of the adults aged 25-64 have at least a bachelor’s degree); they exceed American adults in median annual household income ($66,000 versus $49,800); they have a pervasive belief in the rewards of hard work; and, finally, successful marriages and being good parents play a central role in their lives.
Indian Americans, particularly, have higher shares in education and income with regard to the other Asian American subgroups (Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Vietnamese and Japanese). Furthermore, Indian Americans place a great importance to parenting and they are less likely to see themselves as typical Americans (the Japanese tend to be the more likely). Yet, they say that they can carry on a conversation in proficient English very well. Indian Americans, together with Filipinos, are among the most likely subgroup to define themselves as “model minority”. The term, which was introduced by William Petersen in a 1966 New York Times Magazine article to describe Japanese Americans, implies that they see themselves as more successful immigrants, even in comparison to Blacks and Hispanics.
Through emulation of white Americans and by drawing on notions of productive citizenship, Asian Americans tend to fill in the gap between their migrant status and the desire to adjust to the American society. They exemplify, through their neoliberal flexibility and high human capital, a model of “reproductive citizenship” that according to Susan Koshy “harnesses heterosexuality to the productivity of knowledge work to enhance national competitiveness in a globalizing economy” (Koshy 2011, 351). The obsession to accumulate economic resources and pass on human capital to second and third generations leaves a gap in the affective and filial dynamics that characterize Asian American families. Sometimes, these migrants fall in the cracks and the deal they pay is more expensive than they think. At what personal cost is such a productive neoliberal model reproduced and who bears its counter effects? Diasporic writers have focused on the tensions and contradictions that arouse from such a strict economic formula. Intergenerational conflicts are particularly strong when 1.5 and second generations tend to disrupt their parents’ expectations such as accruing economic success and neutralizing biases against minority status. The symptoms of psychic disturbance that Susan Koshy has labelled as “filial gothic” (358) convey schisms of family ties and unresolved grief, engendering simultaneously desire to escape and yearning for accommodation.
My paper intends to unveil Jhumpa Lahiri’s deep engagement with how neurotic desire and racial melancholia merge in the second generation migrants that populate her fictional world. In particular, I will explore “A Choice of Accommodation”, a story in Unaccustomed Earth, that will be investigated in dialogue with Mishra’s notion of the “diasporic imagery”, Lacan’s ideas on neurosis, and Eng and Han’s concept of “racial melancholia” as theoretical framework. Considered in this light, through the story of the protagonist Amit Sarkar, Jhumpa Lahiri reveals a multifaceted and controversial identity lying beneath silences, tacit codes and isolation.

Location: University of Essen - Bochum

Event Date: Oct 8, 2015

Organization: Postcolonial Narrations

Conference End Date: Oct 10, 2015

My presentation explores the interface of self-translation and translingualism through the examination of Jhumpa Lahiri’s works in Italian. The main idea of my paper is that if self-translation entails “rewriting” (Bassnett and Lefevere 1990) – a linguistic creative process that enables a text to move between languages and yet remain “original” – Lahiri’ s recent “voluntary exile” in Italian testifies a translingual engagement that complicates her Bengali-American identity. My aim is to illustrate how practices of Lahiri’s Italian non-fiction, in In altre parole (2015) and Il vestito dei libri (2017), offer insights on the question of subjectivity, as well as underlying a fluid movement between languages. While I contend that Lahiri’s translingual imagination, as Kellman (2000) argues, involves a sort of linguistic “matricide,” I also claim that such a condition of loss may be seen as an advantage. My case study beautifully demonstrates this paradox insomuch as the adopted language may become a “fragile shelter,” affording Lahiri creative distance and metamorphic opportunities. I finally suggest that Lahiri’s translingual wandering can be read as a compensative solution in the throes of a problematic construction of a sense of the self.

Book review included in the downloadable version of Recherche littéraire/ Literary Research of the International Comparative Literature Association/ (Volume 33, été 2017/ Summer 2017). Ed. Marc Maufort. http://www.ailc-icla.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Recherche-littéraire-2017-vol-33.pdf

Mira Nair attempts to portray a complex slice of life in an Indian family where displacement holds the key to each other's communicative being. The issue is poignant and relatable to a lot of hybridized minds who try and fail continuously to cater to the spatial redesigning of themselves. But the portrayal is neither an issue in its objective veracity nor in its attempt to de-classify the ontological anguish of displacement. When any adaptation becomes the strategic tool to tell a story, an entirely new politics comes to the forefront: politics of interpretation. Such a case becomes quite problematic for the director's macroscopic vision as comparison between its source and performance develops into a questionable affair which often mars the subjectivity of two different platforms. The struggle goes on to the extent of having to produce a single winner amongst the two texts. Often, a body of adaptation falls into the category of some categorical simulacra with a reductionist effect upon the body of source. Mira Nair attempts to handle such discursive ideas within her direction pretty well and builds up a connecting textual tissue with Lahiri's text. The Namesake expresses a reassuring faith in family solidarity. Avoiding the cliché of pitting disobedient immigrant children in pitched battles against tradition-bound parents from the old country, the film assumes that blood ties are the strongest bonds holding together the social order.

This dissertation examines Jhumpa Lahiri's representations of Indian immigrant femininity in her fiction. Exploring socio-historical constructions of Indian femininity, this dissertation demonstrates how Lahiri's early representations of first-generation female immigrants remain conventional while her second novel, The Lowland, radically breaks away from stereotypes through the complex character of Gauri, who crosses physical as well as ideological boundaries. Paralleling contemporary feminist and queer intersections within diaspora studies, which emphasise the importance of independent experiences, Lahiri depicts how individual female narratives rooted in specific socio-cultural contexts help to deconstruct homogenous and normative notions of diaspora and transnationalism.

Feminism and Feminist literary criticism are often defined as a matter of what is absent rather than what is present. Feminist literary criticism is considered to be a political discourse, a literary and theoretical commitment to straggle for women against patriarchy and sexism. It is concerned with the marginalization, repression, subjugation and representation of all women in Art and Culture. Jhumpa Lahiri is one of the most respected authors of our time. Essentially her tales paint a very intelligent portrait of upper-middle-class life. Her feminist approach is somewhat different from the other female authors. Jhumpa presents women’s marginalization in cultural context. Her female characters are not subjected to any economic exploitation by the patriarchy. Most of the women characters in Jhumpa Lahiri’s works are the victims of cultural identity; they often caught between the two worlds. The prime objective in this paper is to focus on an Individual and Family Strife / struggle particularly of female characters in Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘A Temporary Matter’ in the light of Feminist literary criticism.

Keywords:-
Feminism and Feminist literary criticism, culture, role of gender, position and difference of gender, object of male- desire and deprive of self- expression and self- determination, patriarchy, darkness, cultural practices of gender

Scholarly debates over immigration and “diaspora” have shifted in recent years to pluralistic approaches of critics such as Bhabha and Hall who argue that the “hybridity” and “in-betweenness” of immigrants’ life might function as a suitable ground for the social and cultural improvement of their life-conditions. Drawing on such ideas, writers of the present article contend that Jhumpa Lahiri presents a double-sided outlook about the “third space” of diasporic life in her stories, while most critics have considered her attitude toward immigration a negative one. We argue that though Lahiri portrays immigrants’ problems in her stories, a meticulous appraisal of her work reveals the fact that she opposes too much insistence on traditional definitions of home and motherland, and instead pays tribute to the fluidity and flexibility of hybrid identity. She foregrounds the efficiency and fertility of the “third space” of diasporic life in several cases in her fiction by giving centrality and priority to those characters that are flexible, renounce the restricting customs of the left motherland, venture experiencing the inexperienced, and consequently can match themselves with their changed social position to achieve the best out of it.

Literature is a creative expression of human imagination or wishes, which is hardly ever reflected in our actual life. A good story can, for example, offer a broad and inclusive picture of the range of human emotions. Jhumpa Lahiri is one of the most respected authors of our time. Her stories describe people and their lives, their problems, emotion, sentiments, actions, human affairs, day to day activities, family problems, their struggles, relations with inner and outer world. " A Temporary Matter " shows the cold and harsh realities of the humanity. Shukumar and his wife Shoba commits to spend their life together and find them unable to even utter a word with each other. The story focuses upon the man-woman relationship in context of bond of marriage, prime issue being the barrenness which has crept into the lives of the husband and wife.Literature reaches deep into the essential questions of human existence. It reflects the diversity of human experience, emotion and feeling. So generally literature is a creative expression of human imagination or wishes, which is hardly ever reflected in our actual life. A good story can, for example, offer a broad and inclusive picture of the range of human emotions. Several characters in the stories help us understand not only the suffering, but the affliction that stands as the great enigma of this human life. Literature portraits human life describing people and their lives, their problems, emotion, sentiments,

Inspired by Derrida’s concept of “untranslatability”, Michael Cronin’s theory of interpreters’ intrinsic duality and Homi Bhabha’s “location of culture”, this essay takes full consideration of the cultural turn in translation studies for the purpose of literary analysis. The aim is to investigate the failed attempts of achieving successful translation and adaptation to the norms of a new culture by discussing Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies. More specifically, the focus will be on three of the volume’s short stories. While “Mrs. Sen’s” and “This Blessed House” will be analyzed in terms of untranslatability, “Interpreter of Maladies” will be tackled in relation to the implications, responsibility and inescapable bias of being a mediator between cultures. These short stories transcribe into the literary realm the difficulty of inhabiting an interstitial, third space, of having to mediate between two worlds (in this case India and America), acknowledging the dangers of mistranslation and untranslatability.

This paper is a study of the cultural struggle and conflict survived by the protagonists in The Namesake (2003) by Jhumpa Lahiri as they move from their native land to America. It is an application of the theoretical concepts of hybridity and assimilation, as discussed in post-colonial criticism by critics such as Homi Bhabha. The researcher will discuss how the three main characters finally manage to develop new anti-monolithic models of cultural growth and exchange. As a result, they succeed in embracing a new culture while protecting their Bengali heritage. The novel depicts the life of an Indian couple (Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli) who settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1968. It describes the cultural challenges the heroine faces as she struggles to accommodate to a new Western society. Ashima clings tightly to her Bengali roots and identity, a fact which becomes apparent through the dilemma caused over naming their first baby. However, to survive the challenges of Massachusetts’ society, Ashima welcomes its culture to a certain extent. Thus, she succeeds in overcoming feelings of loneliness and displacement. On the other hand, Ashoke’s adjustment is less complicated. Although he copes with the new Western life faster, his respect for his native traditions is daily observed. His resentment of his children’s attempt to give up their native identity is heartbreaking. Early in the novel, Gogol rejects symbols of his Indian culture, and later he repudiates his parents’ style of life. Finally and after his father’s death, Gogol’s personal growth is associated not only with him welcoming his native culture, but also embracing both cultures in an excellent example of cultural hybridity.

The patriarchal societies that existed in India have compromised Indian consciousness in order to have great impact on the half of the women population. Men thought that women are not worthy of education and they themselves considered Independent, superior and omnipotent. Men have always been bread winners and women was to share what he gained. It was a totally masculine world. No We can see the characteristics of women in ancient India. There is tremendous potential, untapped and not utilized. Women were generally treated as 'Abla nari' means helpless women. Also women were confined to four walls of the household. But things have changed and slow transformation was seen within. As civilization changed, society Transformed, Indian women were to escape the shadows without proving themselves. Women were ready to reveal their splendour and the beauty of the world they lived in, where not doing anything productive and simply spending time inside. When we analyse the rise of women literature in Indian context, the country had a situation of not accepting independent, bold, brave and dominating women. They were against the prevailing social norms and social order. There existed unwritten rules like, women should be warm, gentle, decent, dependent, submissive, ready to accept anything that the patriarchy ask them to. When we look into one if the ritual that was performed in India includes 'Sati'. 'Sati' was a very problematic ritual. When we look that in the light of contemporary situation. It was self immolation of women by jumping into the fire that burns their husband, this practise evidently states that there was no standing for independent or single women, the unwritten law was to end their lives when the male partner dies. A very strange fact was that, when Sati was finally abolished by British law, there were women protesting against the abolition of the practice. From a society holding a very old consciousness, the women have developed into winning international recognition for writing and other contributions to the social distribution. The literature of women have a great role in development of women from that to this. Women got equal educational opportunities when the Colonial rule came and made education accessible to everyone.

If the twentieth  century afforded great change due to wars and decolonization, a great deal of the twenty-first century’s upheaval comes from globalization and technology on one hand and a new kind of warfare labelled terrorism on the other.
The purpose of the research is to examine against the backdrop of this development, to what extent the image or construct of a woman has changed in India for readers, particularly by studying the way it has been depicted in the writing of Indian women authors. The fact that recently these authors have received international acclaim in the form of awards makes it even more important to understand how readers all over the world and India perceive the image of an Indian woman. In short how are Indian women being positioned?
The texts studied are: The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, who is a second generation immigrant; The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai, a first generation immigrant; Ladies Coupé by Anita Nair and Difficult Daughters by Manju Kapur,  both of whom are Indian nationals residing in India with a certain amount of western education, the latter being  a ‘traditional’ intellectual. The last chapter deals with the ‘organic’ intellectual focussing particularly on two contrasting short stories—“The Hunt” and “Statue” by Mahasweta Devi. However, to substantiate the hypothesis and for the purposes of comparison, the study also takes a brief look at other novels by Arundhati Roy, Sudha Murty, Lalithambika Antherjanam, Sharmila Rege, Baby Halder and P. Sivakami, keeping in mind that many of these works are translations.
The approach adopted is a close reading of the texts focussing on the female characters, themes and attitudes. On this basis, the theoretical approach adopted is the writer’s interpretation of Hegel’s master-slave dialectics and Fanon’s reinterpretation of the same, Freud’s love-hate binaries, Gramsci’s differentiation between the ‘traditional’ intellectual and ‘organic’ intellectual and Spivak’s vision regarding the role of the humanities. 
According to Hegel, consciousness does not exist in isolation but is always dependent on another for a sense of selfhood. As there is injustice and an imbalance of power in this world, the two consciousnesses engaged with each other will assume the roles of master and slave with respect to each other. The injustice inevitably results in a struggle for selfhood on the part of the slave; one way this selfhood can be attained is through recognition of the slave’s labour. A defining emotion in this relationship is fear and it is only by overcoming fear that the slave can break free.  The ultimate fear is that of death. In addition to the instinct for domination, Freud does not see the true self as one entity but as in Marx, it is a balance between contradictory forces and in this case the dialectic is between Eros—the love instinct, and Thanatos—the death one. 
For Antonio Gramsci, a solution or an instrument of change is the ‘organic’ intellectual. The purpose of an intellectual is not to be “specialised” but to become “directive” that is one who is political and driven to bring about change. However, in the face of globalization and the crisis that it brings with inequality, war and terrorism, according to Spivak, hope is available through education in the humanities, for it is through the humanities that one can bring about “the empowerment of an informed imagination” (Spivak, “Righting Wrongs” 2).
The aim of the research is to try and understand whether western education helps to envision a new-age woman, whom this study defines as self-reliant, able to question roles and norms society has set for her, thinks independently and uses her own free will to choose to live life for herself rather than be subservient to the needs of her husband and family, or is this education an impediment. Thus in addition to intellectual and economic independence, she must be emotionally independent as well. It must be stressed that this concept of new-age is an ideal which is strived for but never actualized because it is dynamic and constantly changing over space and time. Also one must be wary of the tendency to generalize women who vary on the basis of geography, race, economics, caste and so on.
The thesis statement explored is that although in some cases western educated Indian women may ostensibly live more liberated lives, the characters or images of women in the novels by the selected writers are more circumscribed as women.
Another concern of the study is the difference between lived and written reality. A questionnaire based on the movie The Namesake taken by a community of informed readers in Pune indicated that in reality the image of the woman may have changed on the page but not in the minds of women and hence paradoxically in reality the concept of ‘new-age’ is a myth.
The key women protagonists analysed are Ashima and Moushumi from The Namesake; Sai, her grandmother Nimi and her mother along with Noni and Lola in The Inheritance of Loss; Akhila and her companions in the coupé in the novel Ladies Coupé and Mary in ‘The Hunt’ and  Dulali in ‘Statues’.
The research hopes to indicate, that the most revolutionary change in the image is captured in the characters drawn by the Indian woman who is an ‘organic’ intellectual. By working intimately with the subaltern, she is aware of the urgency for change unlike a more privileged woman. She functions as a “permanent persuader” who is an instrument of change. Thus perhaps one answer to the conundrum could be that the writing of the ‘organic’ intellectual has the potential to capture one of the myriad images of a new-age Indian woman. As for a definite final one, perhaps it can never be found as it will always be dynamically changing and evolving and hopefully aspiring towards an ideal concept akin to the one defined by the study

By engaging with multiview, multivocality, and transtextuality, as well as the dialogical process between writer and reader, I investigate how contemporary Indian fiction -- within the brackets of postcolonial literature in general -- articulates and negotiates meaning in our postmodern globalized world.

Migration and scattered occurrence end up amongst the most significant issues in the contemporary world where 'globalization' and 'postcolonialism', are ceaselessly scrutinizing the limits of national identity. So due to this highly ambivalent state of identity, there has been a need of very specific descriptive words so that people can identify themselves as who and what they exactly are. Words like transnationalism, transculturation, hybridity, creolization and diaspora find very common usage in the modern world. In the light of the terms stated above, this paper proposes a literary examination of Jhumpa Lahiri's works through the viewpoint of diasporic consciousness. After a concise examination of the word Diaspora with focus on the Indian subcontinent, this paper investigates the literary structure of Lahiri's The Namesake (2003) and The Lowland (2013), connecting them to diasporic discourse and scrutinises the social, cultural and national identity crisis that the characters face due to their ambiguous state of being.

The paper examines the title story of Lahiri's Collection "Unaccustomed Earth", highlighting how the male protagonist of the story turns some analogies between  Emerson's philosophy and Hinduism into integration strategies. Some life choices of the elderly widower may be explained both as semi-orthodox Hinduism and  as Transcendentalist simplicity.

All names have meaning and that is what makes them meaningful and symbolic in life as well as in literature. Names are symbols of identity. As identity becomes the core issue, the names become quite significant. In literature, dealing with the clash of cultures, countries, and races, names emerge as identity symbols. An individual's search for his place in the world around him is as old as human existence itself. Jhumpa Lahiri's works portray a lot about the experiences of the migrant families where we have both the first generations and second generations telling their stories separately and each of them has got that plight of living in a foreign land and for those of the second generations they have got their own difficulties of blending in with the culture of their ancestors and the culture of their own. Here in this paper I have tried to deal with the quest for identity and struggle of first generation. What they feel in the dislocated land, how they stand up in their life.

Cultural liminality is the condition of the immigrant. Jhumpa Lahiri has beautifully portrayed this condition in her novel 'The Namesake'.  My paper seeks to unravel the various dimensions of this condition like nostalgia,  sense of exile and in-betweenness, maladjustment, etc.

This paper attempts to analyse the concept of the Indian theoretical approach of Aucitya (Decorum) followed in the shaping of characters and the themes in the selected short stories of JhumpaLahiri, namely, "A Temporary Matter," "When Mr.Pirzada Came to Dine," "A Real Durwan" and "This Blessed House" which are compiled in the book, Interpreter of Maladies. The paper further analyses the structuralist distinction between "langue" and "parole" and to reassure the arbitrary blending of both in expressing the semantic relationship which leads to the norms of conception intermingled with the aesthetics of Aucitya. The paper tends to express the above-mentioned theme along with the uniqueness of the Homo sapiens in the way they create a cognitive revolution in the unification of the humankind and the evolution of language. The book titled, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari is adapted to elucidate the theme. The characters are approached by throwing more light on Aucitya and structuralistprinciples.This analysis, thus, tries to understand how these theories, both Indian as well as European, change our understanding of the mentioned literary works. The process of understanding literature with the help of Indian literary theory of Aucitya brings out explicit pleasure in the research.

Cultural liminality is the condition of the immigrant. Jhumpa Lahiri has beautifully portrayed this condition in her novel 'The Namesake'. My paper seeks to unravel the various dimensions of this condition like nostalgia, sense of exile and in-betweenness, maladjustment, etc.

Preguntas de lectura sobre “Una anomalía temporal [Una medida temporal]” (“A Temporary Matter”) de Jhumpa Lahiri (1967- ). Originalmente publicado en The New Yorker en 1998, es el primer relato de El intérprete del dolor (Interpreter of Maladies, 1999). El libro ganó el Premio Pulitzer en 2000.

ABSTRAK
Pingkan, Maria Kristina. 2014. Exploring Identities of Bengali-Indian Women in  Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake. Skripsi, Jurusan Sastra Inggris, Fakultas Sastra Universitas Kristen Indonesia. Pembimbing: Dr. Ied Veda Sitepu, MA.

Keywords : Identitity, Bengali – Indian, women, Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake, feminism

Identitas adalah suatu ciri khas, perasaan, maupun keyakinan yang membedakan seseorang dengan orang lain di sekitarnya. Identitas juga merupakan tema yang sering terdapat dalam suatu karya sastra karena keterkaitannya dengan manusia sebagai pemilik identitas. Suatu cara untuk mengetahui identitas seseorang disebut proses identifikasi yang terbagi atas dua, yaitu identifikasi sejak lahir dan identifikasi melalui proses dalam kehidupan. Identitas sejak lahir dapat terlihat melalui nama seseorang yang diberikan oleh orangtua atau keluarga karena nama merupakan identitas pertamanya selain jenis kelamin. Selain itu, sebuah nama memiliki arti bagi si pemberi nama atau harapan bagi yang dinamakan. Setelah dewasa, seseorang akan mencari identitasnya sendiri melalui pengalaman-pengalaman hidup yang merupakan proses pembentukan identitasnya sebagai seorang manusia.
Di dalam novel Jhumpa Lahiri yang berjudul The Namesake, Lahiri menceritakan tentang kehidupan seorang laki-laki bernama Gogol Ganguli yang identitasnya dibentuk melalui identitas dua orang wanita terdekat dalam hidupnya, yaitu Ashima Ganguli, ibunya, dan Moushumi Mazoomdar, istrinya. Kedua wanita tersebut menjadi pusat dalam pembahasan skripsi ini karena mereka memiliki tugas atau dharma yang harus mereka jalankan dalam keluarga dan lingkungan sosial yaitu sebagai anak perempuan dan isteri yang berasal dari suku Bengali-India, sehingga mereka harus tunduk kepada tradisi budaya tersebut yang diserap dari agama Hindu. Belum lagi bagi Ashima ia juga berperan sebagai ibu sehingga tugasnya lebih berat. Ashima dan Moushumi hidup sebagai imigran di Amerika namun hanya Ashima yang tetap menjalankan adat-istiadat Bengali-India sekalipun dia sudah menjadi mandiri dan mulai bersosialisasi dengan masyarakat Amerika setelah kematian suaminya. Sebaliknya, Moushumi yang hidup dengan gaya hidup masyarakat Barat, tidak mengindahkan budaya Bengali-India. Singkatnya, gambaran Ashima yang tradisional dan Moushumi yang modern dalam menjalankan peran mereka sebagai wanita Bengali-India mencerminkan identitas mereka yang mereka dapatkan melalui proses dalam kehidupan.


ABSTRACT
Pingkan, Maria Kristina. 2014. Exploring Identities of Bengali-Indian Women in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake. Thesis, Department of English, Faculty of Arts Christian University of Indonesia. Supervisor: Dr. Ied Veda Sitepu, MA.

Keywords: Identitity, Bengali - Indian, women, Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake, feminism

Identity is a hallmark, feelings, and beliefs that distinguish one person with another person in the vicinity. Identity is also a theme that is often contained in a literary work because of its association with humans as the owner's identity. A way to determine a person's identity is called identification process is divided into two, namely the identification of birth and identification through a process in life. Identity from birth can be seen through a person's name given by parents or family because his first name is an identity other than gender. In addition, a name meant to the giver's name or hope for is called. As an adult, someone will find her own identity through life experiences which is the process of establishing his identity as a human being.
In the novel Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake, Lahiri tells about the life of a man named Gogol Ganguli, whose identity is formed through the identity of the two women closest in his life, namely Ashima Ganguli, his mother, and Moushumi Mazoomdar, his wife. Both the woman to become central in the discussion of this thesis because they have a duty or dharma they must run in the family and social environment that is as girls and wives of the tribe Bengali-Indian, so they should be subject to the cultural traditions that are absorbed from religion Hindu. Not to mention for Ashima he also serves as the mother so that task is harder. Ashima and Moushumi life as an immigrant in America but only Ashima is still running custom-Bengali India even if he has become independent and start socializing with American society after the death of her husband. Instead, Moushumi who live a lifestyle of Western society, disregarding the Bengali-Indian culture. In short, Ashima overview of the traditional and the modern Moushumi in their role as a Bengali-Indian women reflects their identity that they get through the process in life.

"Jhumpa Lahiri’s culture-laden novel The Namesake (2003) is adapted in film version through ‘inter-semiotic’ translation by Mira Nair in 2006 and later released on March 9, 2007. Through this translation from a print medium (a text) into a visual medium (film), Mira Nair tries to show the Bengali diasporic sensibilities/culture. So, the issues raised during this process are: Is it possible to render all cultural aspects from a print medium (a text) into a visual medium (film)? What will be the place and status of culture after ‘inter-semiotic’ translation? How does Mira Nair succeed in localising or internationalising the Bengali diasporic sensibilities/culture via visual medium? In this process of translation, how has Bengali diasporic culture been presented in different ways?
My paper will try to answer the aforementioned questions. It will be a comparative approach among the original novel and the film. This paper also tries to show the ‘space’ in which Nair’s film occupies in literary ‘polysystem’.

[Keywords: ‘Inter-semiotic’ Translation, Diasporic Culture, Changes in Film, Internationalisation, ‘polysystem’ Theory, Nair’s Ingenuities]

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In Interpreter of the Maladies, food is used as a conduit between the English and Indian cultures; food serves as an expiatory offering, as a basis for assimilation, and as a source of cultural identity. Food is a universal necessity that has an important role in every culture across the globe observable through anthropological studies. Literature, just like a field of social science, aims to send its individuals out into a new land and immerse them in the local culture through the means of culinary endeavors. Although food has a similar level of significance within American and Indian Culture, some will still make the argument that the comparison between the two cultures of Interpreter of Maladies is actually explored through cosmopolitics and beauty ideals. Food, rather than beauty standards, has held a special place in Indian culture for centuries, holding sacred and social worth. In When Mr. Prizada Came to Dine, Lahiri uses an acute attention to the small-scale interactions between Mr. Prizada and an American-Indian family to illustrate how food can serve as an expiatory offering. In The Third and Final Continent Lahiri introduces a character, unnamed to the audience, who has just arrived in The United States from Great Britain to illustrate the social changes that both Indians and Americans experience when trying to engage in each other’s cultures. In Mrs. Sen’s, Mrs. Sen creates dishes from her native land to regain a sense of self and nationality. In Interpreter of Maladies, the collection as a whole, characters are able to both indulge in and pay respects to their Indian heritage by adhering to specific recipes and practices. Jhumpa Lahiri keeps audiences of Interpreter of Maladies tuned into the journeys in and out of cultures by creating situations that her audience can relate to. Jhumpa Lahiri is able to use food as the bridge, which she uses to cross the 8,431-mile gap between the United States and India for her readers.

Lahiri's 'Interpreter of Maladies' was her first anthology of short stories which garnered many accolades including the coveted Pulitzer in 2000. The anthology covers a plethora of themes including the 'cultural clash', which repeatedly figures in the eponymous short story. The implacable nature of the cultural differences evident from the stories reasserts the often repeated universal truth; Harmony between, say Indian and American cultures (two entirely different cultures) is either unachievable or if it's nearly achieved, is not worth sustaining as it would generate acrimony at one point or the other. The recrudescence of essentialist tendencies might bring the differences to light hampering the reconciliatory attempts no matter how seriously one makes an initial attempt (putting his/her prejudices apart). Lahiri was trying to prove the same (though a pessimistic one) through her stories, especially the titular one. "Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools."

Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies is a collection of short stories which, for the most part, deals with the identity crisis of the Indian Americans who are trapped in-between their Indian heritage and the American culture. The crisis is manifest in their unremitting struggle to preserve, to integrate, and to adjust. The collection, due to its dealing with the in-between-ness, ambivalence, hybridity, and marginality of the displaced Indian Americans, is receptive to the postcolonial studies. This essay draws on the relevant ideas and concepts in the field of the diaspora identity to examine Lahiri's " A Temporary Matter, " " When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine, " " Sexy, " and " This Blessed House " which portray identity crisis of the second-generation Bengali migrants. The ultimate objective is to investigate into the nature of the internal ambivalence of Lahiri's second-generation characters caused by the reciprocal influence of Host/Guest relationships. The significance of the present study is twofold; on the one hand, it accentuates the intellectual attention to the crisis of identity felt by the exponentially increasing second-generation diaspora; on the other hand, it attempts to attract concentrated scholarly interest in diaspora ambivalence which is one of Lahiri scholars' less addressed concerns.

Cultural alienation and consequent loss of identity forms a central issue in the diasporic discourse. The pain of displacement continues to pinch not only the immigrants but also their children who are rendered incapable of belonging to the country of their birth. The tragedy of alienation is felt as much by the immigrants as the next generation because the sense of estrangement is more intense in proportion to the sense of affinity with roots. Immigrants find themselves unable to adapt to their adopted country failing to adjust to the foster culture; however, their predicament is not as pathetic as that of their children. They are half-lost as there is at least one place where they wholly and absolutely belong whereas their children do not belong anywhere becoming truly and pitiably nowhere persons. There are two fictional characters that come to mind Willie Somerset Chandran and Nikhil Gogol Ganguli that occur in V. S. Naipaul's Half a Life (2001) and Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake (2003) respectively. I shall attempt to trace the dilemma of Lahiri's Gogol who is born to Indian immigrant parents but is a naturalized citizen of America by dint of his birth. My paper attempts to read how an Indian-American, Gogol lives like a pendulum till he finally attains maturity to move towards self-realization. Gogol's story is the story of a nowhere man searching for his rightful place in his home that remains for long a place of exile.

Questo libro - come si legge nella quarta di copertina - è la «storia di un colpo di fulmine, di un lungo corteggiamento, di una passione profonda: quella di una scrittrice per una lingua straniera». In altre parole, il quinto dell'autrice, celebre soprattutto per il romanzo La moglie, segna anche un esordio, è infatti il primo libro suo pensato e scritto in italiano.

This paper engages with how cultural identity gets represented in Lahiri’s works through an exploration of the notion of home/homeland for a diasporic individual by tapping the transformative potential of the nuances attached to the conceptual understanding of ecotone – a concept from physical geography. At the centre of this is the idea that home/homeland is a space that treads multifarious paths, among which geography culture and memory stand tall. Ontologically, diasporic sensibility is defined by the poetics of exile, which inadvertently strive by acknowledging the shifting terrains of cultural systems vis-à- vis ecosystems. The resultant ambiguous space(s) is a fertile ground for literature, and could be approached through the concept of ecotone.

It is now almost an acknowledged norm that any discussion on Jhumpa Lahiri's work will begin with a mention on her delineation of the first and second generation immigrant experiences of her characters. Frequently, Lahiri's characters are haunted by a sense of cultural alienation, the feeling of 'not belonging' or experiencing 'foreignness' and they constantly struggle to construct an identity of their own. Their feelings of displacement from their homeland often lead them to an anxious state while they strive to recreate a sense of home in an unfamiliar place. Jhumpa Lahiri's third work Unaccustomed Earth (2008) with its eight stories continues to trail its predecessors, Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake, in portraying the anxieties and plights of the Bengali immigrants caught in the crisis of identity in an alien culture. This article is an attempt to explore and examine the anxiety of dislocation and the sense of cultural alienation prevailing among the characters mainly through textual analysis. The focus is primarily on three stories: 'Unaccustomed Earth', 'Hell-Heaven' and 'Only Goodness'.

Writers who master two (or more) languages, are well-read in more than one literary tradition and therefore able to fine-tune their writing accordingly, view self-translation as either an opportunity to be seized or an obstacle to be avoided. Even when they refuse to self-translate, however, they ponder the (im)possibility of doing so, weighing the pros and cons of self-translation. Indeed, to the extent that the decision to prepare an other-language version is made by the bilingual individuals themselves (and not forced upon them by external forces such as political patronage or censorship), it remains an option without ever becoming an obligation. Non-self-translation, in other words, is part of the bigger picture of self-translation.