Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri, born in 1967 to Bengali parents in London, moved to Rhodes Island as a child. She feels strong ties to her parents' homeland as well as the United States and England. She now resides in New York. This colorful background has led her to a unique multicultural perspective. Her goal in writing she states is "a desire to be able to interpret between two cultures". Lahiri remembers her need to write as early as when she was ten years old and she has always used writing as an outlet for her emotions and so her aims were clear to be a writer. Lahiri has traveled extensively to India and has experienced the effects of colonialism there as well as experienced the issues of the diaspora as it exists. Growing up with ties to all three countries created in Lahiri a sense of homelessness and an inability to feel accepted. Lahiri explains this as an inheritance of her parents' ties to India, "It's hard to have parents who consider another place "home"-even after living abroad for 30 years, India is home for them. We were always looking back so I never felt fully at home here. There's nobody in this whole country that we're related to. India was different-our extended family offered real connections." Yet her familial ties to India were not enough to make India "home" for Lahiri, "I didn't grow up there, I wasn't a part of things. We visited often but we didn't have a home. We were clutching at a world that was never fully with us"1 . Lahiri further described this absence of belonging, "No country is my motherland. I always find myself in exile in whichever country I travel to, that's why I was tempted to write something about those living their lives in exile”. This idea of exile runs consistently throughout Lahiri's Award winning works, a short story collection Interpreter of Maladies and novel The Namesake.
She felt a combination of intimacy and distance with Calcutta and so her early stories were set up in that place. She quotes, “Still, though I've never