The Indian Diaspora in America as Reflected in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction

Introduction

The formation of self-identity is a multilayered phenomenon. It is situated in the core of an individual as well as in the core of the community he/she is part of. For migrant people, who are exiled from their land, this process of identity formation can be tricky, as it rests not on firm soil, but on shifting sands of external perception by a foreign society. Path-breaking social psychologist, Erik H. Erikson, in his book Identity: Youth and Crisis, states thus:

In psychological terms, identity formation employs a process of simultaneous reflection and observation … by which the individual judges himself in the light of what he perceives to be the way in which others judge him in comparison to themselves … while he judges their way of judging him in the light of how he perceives himself in comparison to them. ²

Identity formation thus is heavily dependent on external surroundings. These external surroundings change in an abrupt manner when migration happens. According to the latest United Nations estimates, 244 million people or 3.3 per cent of the world’s population live in a country other than the one where they were born. By far, the most popular destination has been the USA.

The USA has always been a magnet for immigrants. It is in fact a country built by immigrants. The migration of Indians to the USA can be seen in two parts. The first wave of migration by Indians took place in the early twentieth century. These were mainly young men from the Punjab region of India. They came from working-class backgrounds and worked as labour in the agriculture, lumber and railroad industries. A special act passed by the Congress in 1917 brought this migration to a complete halt. But the greatest change was brought about by the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which fundamentally changed the background of Indians migrating to the USA. This second wave of immigration was of professionals like doctors, engineers, professors and scientists from some of the most elite educational institutions of India. They came from a different stratum of Indian society and brought with them the Indian middle-class values of hard work, pursuit of academic excellence, thrift and close family ties. They also brought with them parochialism and a churlish refusal to adapt to the different conditions of their new country. The older Indian immigrants and their children and the newer Indian immigrants and their children collectively form what we call the ‘Indian Diaspora’.

When does an expatriate minority community becomes a diaspora? It is when members of the dispersed community make a collective effort to build a shared identity based on the memories of their homeland. Indians make up the largest diaspora in the world. Around 16 million Indians are scattered across the globe, which partly reflects the country’s demographic size (1.2 billion).

The Indian diaspora is different from other minority groupings in the USA, in that they are products of a colonial past. In this sense, the literature, especially literature written in English, emerging from the former colonies falls under the ambit of postcolonial literature. Peter Griffith and Helen Tiffin in their path-breaking book, The Empire Writes Back, define postcolonial literature thus:

The literatures of African countries, Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, Caribbean countries, India, Malaysia, Malta, New Zealand, Pakistan, Singapore, South Pacific Island countries, and Sri Lanka are all postcolonial literatures. The literature of the USA should also be placed in this category. What each of these literatures has in common beyond their special and distinctive regional characteristics is that they emerged in their present form out of the experience of colonization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with the imperial power. It is this which makes them distinctively post-colonial. ³

The use and spread of the English language in India is because of the British rule in India. And the man directly responsible for it is Thomas Lord Macaulay. He was a Whig politician who held important political offices and played a major role in introducing English and western concepts to education in India. In the mid-nineteenth century, he supported the replacement of Persian by English as the official language of India, the use of English as the medium of instruction in all schools and the training of English-speaking Indians as teachers. Macaulay divided the world into civilised nations and barbaric nations, with Britain representing the high point of civilisation. He was, in effect, one of the leading lights of the ‘civilising mission’ that the British Empire had so seriously taken upon itself. He stated in his Minute ‘We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern–a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect’. This controversial Minute was passed in Parliament, and through a resolution, English-medium education came to stay in the schools of India. This resolution of 1835 had long-term effects, right up to the twenty-first century. So much so that the students passing out from English-medium and especially Christian Missionary Schools in India are referred to as ‘Macaulay’s children’!

One of the unintended effects of this imposition of English language and literature in the education system was that it made its students bilingual, often multilingual, giving them access to knowledge of their own country as well as that of the west. This has made the educated Indian uniquely bicultural. As Makarand Paranjape states in the wonderful Introduction section of the book, Indiaspora: Theories, Histories, Texts

I no longer believe that being diasporan is necessarily to be in an anguished state. It may actually be a form of bi-culturalism, a richer and more complex way of being that is equally at home and abroad...sometimes reversing or inverting the one for the other...thus, we might actually be witnessing the birth of a new global Indian identity that is as comfortable in New Delhi as it is in New York. ⁴

In this article, I have focused on one such modern diasporan writer–Jhumpa Lahiri. She has exceptional credentials. Winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her collection of short stories titled Interpreter of Maladies, she has also published The Namesake, a novel (2003), a collection of short stories titled, Unaccustomed Earth (2008) and the latest novel The Lowland (2013). Her most recent award came just a few months ago. On 10 September 2015, in a glittering ceremony organised in the White House, President Barack Obama conferred the 2014 National Humanities Medal to her, stating, ‘The 2014 National Humanities Medal goes to Jhumpa Lahiri, for enlarging the human story. In her works of fiction, Dr Lahiri has illuminated the Indian-American experience in beautifully wrought narratives of estrangement and belonging’.

Lahiri is a second-generation immigrant to the USA, so she does not have the same pangs of separation from the homeland as first-generation immigrants have. Yet, her close identification with the sentiments of her parents and her focus on their angst and sense of dislocation in her books has made her a popular literary figure in India as well as in the USA. Born in England to Bengali parents and raised in the USA, she grew up in two worlds–American outside the house and Bengali inside. This gives her a unique perspective of her adopted land–a perspective which balances the overtly parochial pronouncements of her parents. There is polyphony of voices in her books, which highlights the immigrant experience from all angles. The unique ‘I’, especially in her short stories, is not just the Indian who gazes at America, but also the American who looks at the Indian characters with wonder and puzzlement.

One point that needs to be stressed here is that Lahiri does not call herself a diasporic writer or somebody who should be making a case for the Indian community in the USA. She stresses the fact that she writes stories which have a universal appeal. That they happen to be about Indian characters is merely because of her unique bicultural upbringing. In one of her interviews to the news channel NPR, she states this quite clearly:

I don’t appreciate this sort of reading of my work but I also understand that it’s natural, I suppose, that there’s a sense in which my stories, my novels, are being held as, sort of, you know, almost sociological studies of the Indian immigrant community, which in my opinion, they’re absolutely not. You know, I don’t think that’s my responsibility as a writer. My responsibility isn’t to paint a flattering portrait, my responsibility is to paint a real portrait, a true portrait. ⁵

There are a number of issues that she picks up and the wide scope of her stories never ceases to amaze. Her first book especially, which she has dedicated to her parents and to her uniquely Indian childhood, is a tribute to the sheer guts of middle-class Indians who risk all in order to take their chances in a foreign land. But, even while she sympathises with their attitude towards American society, she does not necessarily agree with them. She gives us protagonists who defy the stereotype. In the short story ‘Hell-Heaven’ in the book Unaccustomed Earth, she writes ‘My mother and I had made peace. She had accepted the fact that I was not only her daughter but a child of America as well’. ⁶

This slow assimilation of the first generation of immigrants into American society is what Jhumpa Lahiri tackles with great sensitivity and knowledge. In the eponymous short story ‘Unaccustomed Earth’, it is the older generation which shows greater assimilation of American values than the younger generation. In this short story, the children have grown and gone away. Ruma’s mother can now foreground her own desires and dreams for the first time, and for the first time think of herself as an individual, rather than a part of a unit–family, country, culture and community. Stealthily, the value system of her adopted land, of fierce individualism, has seeped into the psyche of Ruma’s mother, and she lets down the barriers of ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’ and learns to see the world as a garden of delights.

But it is Ruma’s father, as he grows older, who shows the strongest traits of assimilation in American culture. After his retirement and after the sudden death of his wife, acquaintances asked him if he has planned to move in with his daughter. But he finds his unexpected solitude highly desirable. When his daughter offers him to live with them in Seattle, he refuses. And the reasons are directly indicative of his total assimilation into the individualistic culture of his adopted land ‘He did not want to be part of another family, part of the mess, the feuds, the demands, the energy of it. He did not want to live in the margins of his daughter’s life, in the shadow of her marriage’ (53). ⁷

While much of the diasporic literature focuses on the themes of cultural identity, cultural hybridity and cultural conflict, Jhumpa Lahiri’s fiction has a complexity that defies easy categorisation. I would call it the ‘paradox of assimilation.’ The first-generation immigrants in her books are the carriers of cultural memory. They try hard to pass it on to the next generation, but at the same time desire their offsprings to integrate into the American system. It is a complicated tug-of-war of alienation and assimilation. This paradox of assimilation that Jhumpa Lahiri highlights in her fiction emphasises that it is not as simple as it seems, that there is a complexity involved that social commentators might blithely miss.

This complexity is more completely highlighted in Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, The Namesake. In this novel, the protagonist, Gogol, on a short break from college, while visiting his parents makes the grave mistake of referring to his college as ‘home’. His mother is outraged at the remark. ‘Only three months there, and listen to you’, she says, telling him that even after 20 years in America, she still cannot bring herself to refer to America as home. This dislocation of the self therefore, this confusion about where ‘home’ is becomes problematic, not only with the first generation of immigrants but also with the second generation. As Sunil Bhatia states in his wonderfully researched book, American Karma: Race, Place and Identity in the Indian Diaspora:

The idea of living in a diaspora with a hyphenated identity and inhabiting a “double consciousness” has forced us to redefine the development of the migrant identity as a negotiated and a contested process rather than as a movement towards a fixed, singular, developmental end goal. It also enables us to analyse how new identities are being constructed as a result of travel and movement between “here” and “there”, home and elsewhere, home and abroad, and the centre and the periphery. ⁸

Thus, even if the second generation of immigrants regard America as home, the society at large does not think so. Their race, their looks, their names and their heritage, all mark them out as different.

Perhaps it is this sense of being excluded that makes first-generation Indians stick to each other. In all of Jhumpa Lahiri’s books, the parents always fraternise with other Bengalis. In an interview with the news channel, NPR, Lahiri said in April 2008, just after the publication of her book of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth

I think there is the group that clearly connects to the work, or sometimes they don’t connect to the work, but it’s because they have more or less experienced the same or very similar upbringings, so that, sort of, Bengali immigrant community here and by extension the Indian immigrant community–though within India each region has such a strong identity so, you know, sometimes I’ll hear from an Indian who isn’t Bengali saying well, these seem very Bengali to me, you know’. ⁹

This Bengali parochialism defies even national boundaries. In the beautiful story in The Interpreter of Maladies, titled, ‘When Mr Pirzada Came to Dine’, Jhumpa Lahiri highlights the complex geopolitical realities of the Indian subcontinent, of which America remains blissfully ignorant.

However, here I would like to point out the difference between cultural identity and national identity. Mr Pirzada and Lilia’s parents share the same cultural identity. It is, more specifically, a Bengali identity. West Bengal in India and Bangladesh may be divided by national boundaries, but they share the same language, food and love for Tagore. Similarly, to the west of India, the region of Punjab may be half in Pakistan and half in India, but they share a common language, music and cuisine, and the people have similar facial features and physique. Thus the two Punjabs may have separate national identities but similar cultural identities. An Indian Punjabi will share more characteristics with a Pakistani Punjabi than with an Indian from Kerala. These are subtleties that only people from the subcontinent realise. A country as diverse as India cannot be described in a homogenous fashion. This is the fact that Lahiri is aware of.

The narrator in ‘When Mr Pirzada Came to Dine’ is a 10 year old girl. Her father, a university professor, lives with his wife and daughter on the small campus, which is on the fringes of an even smaller town. In search of compatriots, they trail their fingers, at the start of each new semester, through the columns of the university directory, circling surnames familiar to their part of the world. ‘Their part of the world’ means Bengal. It is in this way that they discover Mr Pirzada and invite him to their home. It is interesting that their bonding happens over meals. He comes every evening for dinner, because it is food and language that link them together.

It is 1971, and Pakistan and India are at war. Finally, East Pakistan is sliced off from West Pakistan, and a new country is born. Mr Pirzada is now a citizen of a new country–Bangladesh. Lilia, the little girl who is the narrator of the story, is unaware of all this and refers to Mr Pirzada as ‘Indian’. Her father then explains to her that in 1947, India gained her freedom from British rule and the next moment India was sliced up—Hindus here and Muslims there. Dacca no longer belonged to India:

My father told me that during Partition Hindus and Muslims had set fire to each other’s homes. For many, the idea of eating in the other’s company was still unthinkable. It made no sense to me. Mr Pirzada and my parents spoke the same language, laughed at the same jokes, looked more or less the same. They ate pickled mangoes with their meals, ate rice every night with their hands. Like my parents, Mr Pirzada took off his shoes before entering a room, chewed fennel seeds after meals as a digestive, drank no alcohol, for dessert dipped austere biscuits into successive cups of tea. Nevertheless my father insisted that I understand the difference. ¹⁰

Based on the cultural work of Ketu Katrak, Anita Mannur shows how, what she calls, culinary citizenship allows for the creation of diasporic identities though food. Using cook books as well as narratives which revolve around food, Mannur shows the way in which displacement and identity are articulated and negotiated, with food as a symbolic centre of diasporic experience, particularly in so far as it projects the nostalgic memories of the way home is remembered. The ‘Culinary discourse’ for Mannur, ‘sets in motion an extended discussion about the imbricated layers of food, nostalgia and national identity’. ¹¹

Mr Pirzada is worried, as the situation in the subcontinent is tense. India and Pakistan are drawing closer to war. Troops from both sides line the border. The war is to be waged on East Pakistani soil. War is declared officially on 4 December 1971 and 12 days later, the Pakistani army surrenders to Indian troops in Dacca. What penetrates the consciousness of even this little girl is that while these momentous things are happening in the Indian subcontinent, America continues to operate in its own bubble. At school, she learns about American history and about the Revolutionary War. For a project, she is sent to the library by her teacher to borrow a book about the surrender at Yorktown. Unable to concentrate, she wanders to the shelf labelled ‘Asia’. From there she pulls out a book and sitting on a little stool starts to read about Dacca. So absorbed is she in reading the book that she does not notice the appearance of her teacher ‘Mrs Kenyon emerged and lifted the book by the tip of its spine as if it were a hair clinging to my sweater. She glanced at the cover and then at me. “Is this book a part of your report Lilia?”’

No Mrs Kenyon

‘Then I see no reason to consult it’, she said, replacing it in the slim gap on the shelf ‘Do you?’ ¹²

This wilful silence on the part of the American education system about the history and geography of the Asian subcontinent, from where many of their students are drawn, the Eurocentric slant to the study of history in school is disturbing to South Asian children and contributes greatly to their feeling of marginalisation. American school children have chapters on Luxembourg and Belgium but nothing on that massive subcontinent which surely cannot be invisible. The syllabus in American schools leans heavily towards the study of Europe. World history is the history of Europe. The erasure of the history of the Indian subcontinent is the erasure of the past of these Indian students. The theory of assimilation into American mainstream society is understood to be a wilful forgetting of Asian pasts and assimilation into Protestant, white, European culture.

Yet, for all of Jhumpa Lahiri’s awareness about the defensiveness in the immigrant Indian mentality, her books speak overwhelmingly about the adventure of migration. She persists in seeing the glass as half full and not as half empty. As a second-generation immigrant, she has already grown into the system. And although her colour and name will continue to mark her out as the ‘other’, she is, like Macaulay’s ‘children’, brown on the outside, but white on the inside. But her parents’ story will remain with her, part of her inheritance. This is what makes Jhumpa Lahiri a suitable candidate for the medal from the Academy of Letters. This is what makes the President of the USA call her a true representative voice of the immigrant population. With the following words Jhumpa Lahiri ends her book The Interpreter of Maladies. And those same words will conclude this article because they are words of belief, hope and faith. It is Jhumpa Lahiri’s tribute to the pioneering spirit of her father. The narrator of the story, ‘The Third and Final Continent’ in The Interpreter of Maladies, could be her father:

As for me, I have not strayed much farther. My wife and I live in a town about twenty miles from Boston, in a house we own … we are American citizens now … we have a son who attends Harvard University...we often drive to Cambridge to visit him …. Whenever he is discouraged, I tell him that if I can survive on three continents, then there is no obstacle he cannot conquer. While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary … still I am bewildered by each mile I have travelled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination. ¹³