RECONSTRUCTING IDENTITY THROUGH GEOGRAPHY: DISPLACEMENT AND ALIENATION IN JHUMPA LAHIRI’S THE LOWLAND

ABSTRACT

Jhumpa Lahiri is an Indian-American author who won international acclaim following the publication of her short-story collection The Interpreter of Maladies which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000. Her first novel The Namesake was adapted into a popular film and in 2013 she was short listed for the Man Booker Prize for her second novel The Lowland which is a fine testament to her creative powers and the depth of her engagement with the problems faced by the diasporic community. Her The Lowland is a novel that examines how one’s identity is constructed by the historic-cultural situation in which one lives. It is a highly sensitive analysis of the troubled lives of two brothers and the connecting link between them, Gauri, as their identities collide and clash against each other against the backdrop of Kolkata and then Rhode Island, causing ruptures in the belief-systems that hold them together and forging newer relations that challenge both their personal and cultural legacies. The Lowland is different from other writings of Jhumpa Lahiri in the sense that displacement and alienation of characters are not caused solely by their diasporic dilemma, but also they as a result of their personal choices and actions.

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