CULTURAL DISLOCATION AND CHANGING IDENTITIES IN JHUMPA LAHIRI’S 'THE LOWLAND' (Pages 01-06) by Ms. K. Nagalakshmi in THE ENGLISH RESEARCH EXPRESS / ISSN:2321-1164 (Online); 2347-2642 (Print)

Jhumpa Lahiri born Nilanjana Sudheshna was the child of Bengali Indian immigrants in London. She moved with her family to the United States when she was three years old. She was born in London and brought up in South Kingstown, Rhode Island. In 1999, Lahiri published her first short story collection Interpreter of Maladies. It dealt with the issues of Indians immigrants, including their generation gaps in understanding and values. In 2003, Lahiri published her first novel, The Namesake, originally a novella in The New Yorker magazine. It is the story of the Ganguli family, who immigrated to the United States from Calcutta. She published another collection of short stories called Unaccustomed Earth in 2008. She has won many awards, including the Transatlantic Award from the Henfield Foundation (1993), the O. Henry Award for the short story Interpreter of Maladies (1999), the PEN / Hemingway award for Best Fiction Debut of the year for the Interpreter of Maladies collection, and most recently the Frank O’Connor International Short story award (2008) and the Asian American literary Award (2009), both for Unaccustomed Earth. Her book The Lowland, published in 2013, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award for Fiction. It follows the fortunes of four generations of a family in Calcutta and Rhode Island across 60 years. Its starting point is an archetypal relationship between two brothers. The identities of diaspora individuals and communities can neither be placed only in relation to some homeland to which they all long to return nor to that country alone where they settle down in. They, by all means, face the crisis of hybrid or dual identity, which makes their existence all the more difficult. This is an experience universal to all Indian diaspora, irrespective of their caste, region and religion. During their stay in the new country and in interaction with the representative culture the subjectivities and modes of thinking of the diasporas also changes and they too intervene in the cultural discourse of the dominant culture. Thus there comes a considerable change in the outlook and identities of diasporas with the changed global economic, political and cultural scenario. The cultural dislocation happens in the life of Subhash, the eldest son of the family. He goes abroad to continue his studies and settles there. His parents sometimes feel the solitudeness in their life through their son’s departure. The dislocation of Subhash made them feel miserable. On the other hand in Tolly Gunge, his younger brother falls in love with a girl named Gauri and indulges himself in Naxalite movement, but he pretends as a very good son, brother and husband to his family members. Being a Naxalite he was trapped by the policeman and was shot. After Udayan’s death, Gauri was treated badly by her in laws. Subhash who was in Tolly Gunge to attend his brother’s funeral, discovers the torture made by his parents upon Gauri. In order to save her and the inborn child of Udayan, he decides to marry her. They moved to Rhode Island to lead a new life. There Gauri wants to be alone; she wants to do her work in an independent manner. She decides to depart herself from Subhash and her daughter Bela and moves to California to continue her philosophy course. There she becomes a professor and performs as a mentor for the students. Finally she lives apart from everybody and identified herself through ignoring everyone. The transformation and her role had changed at many points, from wife to widow, from sister-in-law to wife, from mother to childless woman. Key Words: Indian Women Writers, culture, dislocation, Diaspora, identity, consciousness