Jhumpa Lahiri
www.the-criterion.com
The Criterion: An International Journal in English
ISSN-0976-8165
The Treatment of Immigrant Experience in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Name Sake
D.Ebina Cordelia Assistant Professor in English Holy Cross College,Tiruchirappalli Tamilnadu.
Indian writing in English is one of the voices in which India speaks. It spreads the traditional and cultural heritage of India within India and also introduces it to the whole world. It is Indian in sensibility, thought, feeling and emotion and experience but submits itself to the discipline of English for expression. The contemporary novelists tread new paths and this shows the vitality of Indian fiction. Arun Joshi, Khushwant Singh, Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth depict the Indian social scene, the partition scene, the theme of alienation and the social, economic and psychological problems of modern man. Writers who are cultural hybrids like Maxine Hongkinstun, Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker, Bharati Mukherjee, Jhumpa Lahiri and many others take up issues like identity crisis, nationalism, alienation, marginalization, insider – outsider and the hegemonic power discourses in the fiction that they are writing today. Jhumpa Lahiri as an immigrant novelist clearly fits into the school of writers better known as the writers of the ‘Indian Diaspora’. The word ‘diaspora’ has been taken from Greek, meaning “to disperse”. ‘Diaspora’, is the voluntary or forcible movement of peoples from their homelands into new regions…. [Ashcroft, Griffiths, Tiffin] Normally, disapora fiction lingers over alienation, loneliness, homelessness, existential rootlessness, nostalgia, questioning, protest and assertions and the quest for identity; it also addresses issues related to amalgamation or disintegration of cultures, discriminating margins of two different social milieus, internalizing nostalgia and suffering a forced amnesia. We may call it a literary / cultural phenomenon with a distinct melting pot syndrome or that of a
The Criterion: An International Journal in English
ISSN-0976-8165
The Treatment of Immigrant Experience in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Name Sake
D.Ebina Cordelia Assistant Professor in English Holy Cross College,Tiruchirappalli Tamilnadu.
Indian writing in English is one of the voices in which India speaks. It spreads the traditional and cultural heritage of India within India and also introduces it to the whole world. It is Indian in sensibility, thought, feeling and emotion and experience but submits itself to the discipline of English for expression. The contemporary novelists tread new paths and this shows the vitality of Indian fiction. Arun Joshi, Khushwant Singh, Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth depict the Indian social scene, the partition scene, the theme of alienation and the social, economic and psychological problems of modern man. Writers who are cultural hybrids like Maxine Hongkinstun, Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker, Bharati Mukherjee, Jhumpa Lahiri and many others take up issues like identity crisis, nationalism, alienation, marginalization, insider – outsider and the hegemonic power discourses in the fiction that they are writing today. Jhumpa Lahiri as an immigrant novelist clearly fits into the school of writers better known as the writers of the ‘Indian Diaspora’. The word ‘diaspora’ has been taken from Greek, meaning “to disperse”. ‘Diaspora’, is the voluntary or forcible movement of peoples from their homelands into new regions…. [Ashcroft, Griffiths, Tiffin] Normally, disapora fiction lingers over alienation, loneliness, homelessness, existential rootlessness, nostalgia, questioning, protest and assertions and the quest for identity; it also addresses issues related to amalgamation or disintegration of cultures, discriminating margins of two different social milieus, internalizing nostalgia and suffering a forced amnesia. We may call it a literary / cultural phenomenon with a distinct melting pot syndrome or that of a