Abstract
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.
Highlights
We live at a time when people around the world are urged by many varied forces to leave their homeland to start a living in a new region leaving most of their belongings behind; what does not remain in the mother land and immigrates along with them to the new land is the sense of belongingness to home which is attached to the soul of every migrant individual, a sense that is instigated mostly by the nostalgic memories of the people and places who/that address those memories and intensify the desire for home, occupational, political or cultural issues, ethnic conflicts, sheer boredom, etc
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
Exploiting the relevant short stories that mainly address the second-generation migrants, “A Temporary Matter,” “When Mr Pirzada Came to Dine,” “Sexy,” and “This Blessed House,” there will be an attempt in the up-coming pages to give exclusive attention to the inherited confusion of these migrants as heirs of diasporic ambivalence
Summary
Most of the similar studies of Lahiri’s stories show a tendency for the analysis of the ethnic, racial, or cultural issues shared by all the characters homogeneously, no matter whether they belong to the first or second generation, i.e. Indian-born or American-born. Delphine Munos, in her book which deals mostly with The Namesake, says that the hyphenated identity of these children and the manifested crisis demonstrate the “grief and guilt” which they have inherited from their parents With her term, “entangled genealogies,” she asserts that “the buried narratives of the parental generation, embedded in the fates and psyches of their offspring, produce a second generation that is ‘always already buckling under profound feelings of inadequacy and guilt’” This is indicative of the fact that closure cannot be reached when dealing with an issue as fluid and perpetually mutating as identity among the displaced, a tour of Lahiri’s second-generation-migrant-based stories of Interpreter of Maladies
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