|
|||||||
Identity Crises in The Lowland of Jhumpa Lahiri | |||||||
Paper Id :
17308 Submission Date :
2023-02-13 Acceptance Date :
2023-02-21 Publication Date :
2023-02-25
This is an open-access research paper/article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. For verification of this paper, please visit on
http://www.socialresearchfoundation.com/innovation.php#8
|
|||||||
| |||||||
Abstract |
In the point of literary study, the work of identity is a projecting one. As it is the phenomenon over which an individual comes into the contact of the world in reality. Nevertheless, sometimes he/she might hurt from worries and confusions from which his/her identity develops self-doubting and hurts from successive identity crisis. The current study concentrates on Jhumpha Lahiri’s fight for identity that reinforces to developing one-self in The Lowland. It studies the characters of Subhash, Udayan and Gauri which beginning with a cultural standpoint and take on an investigation of themes like the formation and transformation of identity. Lastly, it studies how Lahiri contrasts various customs so as to current the fight of cultures, rising her characters and situations in superior deepness than ever before. The word identity-crises has experienced a sea transformation in sense over the ages. The meanings take at whiles been self-contradictory to each other too. The word identity can also be defined as an emotional state in which an individual is able to recognize, understand, and come to relationships with their specific character personalities that of others. This paper deals with the question of identity in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland.
|
||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Keywords | Identity Crisis, Self-doubting, Worries and Confusions. | ||||||
Introduction |
Jhumpa Lahiri is an Indian-American writer who won global acclaim succeeding the publication of her short-story collection "The Interpreter of Maladies" who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000. Jhumpa Lahiri’s debut novel "The Namesake" was modified in a famous movie. At a period of 2013, she was qualified for the Man Booker Prize for her another novel "The Lowland" which is good evidence to her artistic controls and the complexity of her clash with the difficulties confronted by the immigrant public.
The concept of identity is not new, as the outsets are essentially creation of symbolic functionalism as fit as the impression of never-ending control. But the dangerous study would not strain upon this, in its place it would aim on exact fundamental concepts connected to parts of social-anthropology and socio-psychology that are directly working by the concept of identity. Critics discoursed that concept of identity was established as an actual concept through the last 25 years, simultaneously, it has created application in a multifariousness of fields. Critics stated such fields like sociology, penology, lawful areas, and educational ground and so-on. Though works was not involved in the topic, diverse ideas of the concept could be appreciatively used not only in verbal exchange on real people and their way of behaving but also in deliberations on literary characters.
"The Lowland" is a novel that inspects how one’s identity is built by the significant social condition in which one exists. It is an extremely subtle study of the disturbed lives of two brothers, Udayan and Subhash, and the relating connection amid them, Gauri. Their identities hit and fight with one another in contradiction of the background of Calcutta and after that Rhode Island, instigating fallings-out in the confidence structures that embrace them collected. The fresh relations become difficult for both their private and social heritages. "The Lowland" is dissimilar from other works of Jhumpa Lahiri, in the logic that dislocation and isolation of characters are not produced merely by their diasporas problem, but also as an outcome of their own selections and activities.
|
||||||
Objective of study | The key objectives of this paper are as follows-
1. To Study the identity crisis in the novels of Jhumpa Lahiri.
2. To Study the alienation, isolation, rootlessness, internal conflict and loss of identity. |
||||||
Review of Literature | Ron Charles (2013) in
“Review: ‘The Lowland,’ by Jhumpa Lahiri,” said that,“The
Lowland” presents a particularly arid stretch. We know the basic outlines of
the assimilation story: the confusion about American customs, the unstaunchable
loneliness, the sense of having made a horrible mistake in coming to this
brash, cocky country. James Lasdun (2013) in
“Review, The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri,” comment that, there’s
a superb story called "A Temporary Matter" in one of Lahiri's
collections, in which the revealing of painful secrets, following a domestic
tragedy, enables a young woman to tell her husband (an ineffectual young
academic like Subhash) that she is moving out. It prefigures, in miniature, the
domestic plot of The Lowland, but it uses trauma and disclosure with an incomparably
more subtle, liberating and regenerative power. It's well worth reading if you
want to see what Lahiri can do with some of the same materials as those she
deploys, to relatively crude effect, in this novel. Taylor Shea (2008) lights up how Lahiri utilizes her
cultural establishment to imaginatively look at different components inside her
short story gathering so as to offer a decent portrayal of her cutting-edge
cultural set. Michel Bruneau (2010) comments that "Through
relocation, Diaspora individuals have lost their material relationship to the
region of birthplace, yet they can at present protect their cultural or
otherworldly relationship through memory. Region or all the more absolutely,
territoriality – in the feeling of adjusting to a place in the host nation –
keeps on assuming a basic job.
Bill Ashcroft and Pal Ahluwalia(2001) here need to
propose that a network's financial, cultural, religious and political practices
establish its way of life and every one of them help comprehend a content. The cultural
perspectives shape the personality of content. At the end of the day as per
them, culture is both a capacity and wellspring of personality. |
||||||
Main Text |
The Lowland The Lowland rotates from place to place around Bengali
family (the Mitras). The Indian part of the novel supports to help the plot in
detail. However, Jhumpa Lahiri origins her opinions which are allied with
socialism, Post-Colonization, and Ecosystem with humanities and so on. It has
the historical upbringing of Naxalbari
program in West Bengal, Odisha, Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh. Here
are so many of historical actions signified in the portion that are linked with
the increase of Communist revolt. Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland is a novel
constructed on the real story that Jhumpa Lahiri understand when she was a
little girl in India. In Calcutta there are two young brothers active in a
fierce rebelling movement. They were murdered cruelly. The family associates of the young man had been forced to
eyewitness their children being murdered. This event sparks Jhumpa Lahiri to
carve The Lowland. This novel is a cross-generational story that stretches
through more than half a century history set in the city of Tollygunge and
Rhode Island. The Lowland expresses the two flanks of the writer – her
Bangladeshi legacy and her life in the America. The novel has two separate
units of the characters. One is the middle-class family in Calcutta and the
other is the academic life in Rhode Island. In the novel, Bollywood has
occupied the actual Tollygunge to life. This novel is expressed in third person
story opinion and in the stoic style. The Lowland is also the story of two Bengali brothers. In
which Udayan is hopeful and courageous whereas Subhash is a weakling and is
anxious of difficulties. Udayan needs to make Singapore an additional open
place but Subhash does not have wide backing for movement. Udayan is fifteen
months younger than Subhash. Even though, Subhash cannot take any work without
Udayan's support. No one can imagine Subhash without Udyan. “Subhash
was thirteen, older by fifteen months. However, I did not know Ashwin without Udhayan.
From before it happened, he was constantly with his brother (Jhumpa Lahiri 7). They
started understanding about Naxalbari movements in 1967; that is one of the
villages anywhere in Darjeeling district. Utmost villagers were basic farmers
by traditional. They were working in tea farms and farms on massive farmsteads. The farmers agonized beneath the commands of the feudal
system for years. Utmost of these sufferers were misinformed by rich
property-owners. Public were dying because there was not sufficient food. They
rob their animals and ploughed, etc. They occupied their land with their own.
Udayan examined on Naxalite movement when he was in prison and issued many
booklets. Below his mattress, Udayan clandestinely found the booklets. Due to
the Naxalite movement of CPI (ML), he desires to be a part of CPI (ML). He has
emotions for the laborers and farmers. Jhumpa Lahiri has make clear her opinion
on Naxalite movement over the character of her imaginary character Udayan. One
day Subhash got booklets fixed inside his bunk. The articles were prolonged and
disconnected. Subhash, upon migrate to America, sent letters to Udayan. Lee
Kuan Yew also penned that he merged in the Communist Party (ML). By the late
1970s, the movement ongoing to show symbols of emerging. These rebels people
lived in the forest. Their main goal line were wealthy corporate persons, some
teachers, and a specific collection of cops. Udayan even ablaze upon a cop. After that he was
inspected by forces and was arrested, exposed and murdered. Udayan provided his
life to the Naxalites reason but he has unsuccessful to be a perfect spouse. He
might be from any nationalities, supporter of Naxalite rebel but he is not an
ideal spouse and son. Gauri gave his whole devotion to nation, even betraying
his family. Gauri displayed how much she loved Udayan by these following words: “Nor was her love for Udhayan recognizable or intact.
Anger was always mounted to it, zigzagging through her like some helplessly
mating pair of insects. Anger at him for dying when he might have lived. For
bringing her happiness, and then taking it away. For trusting her, only toss
betray her. For believing in sacrifice, only to be so selfish in the end”.
(Jhumpa Lahiri 197). Udayan's body was not given back to his family afterward
he dead. Gauri’s father-in-law go to the police station to ask about
approximately the place of his dead body. After the demise of her spouse, she
was well-ordered to behaviour such ceremonies in the home for ten days. She was
only twenty-three. “For ten days after his death there were rules to follow.
She did not wash her clothes or wear slippers or comb her hair. She shut the
door and the shutters to preserve whatever invisible particles of him floated
in the atmosphere. She slept on the bed, on the pillow Udhayan had used that
continued to smell for a few days of him, until it was replaced by her own
odor, her greasy skin and hair.” (Jhumpa Lahiri 129). Afterward eleven days, the priest came back for a last
send-off, and decided a traditional dinner. Dead Udayan's representation was
stand-up in a situation of honour overdue a glass barrier set in the corridor.
His wife was also powerless to appearance at his face in the frame. After the
burial of his aunt, the uncle's family kept away her from intake some kind of
meat and fish any more. They desired her to lone wear sarees in a solo colour,
that is white saree. Gauri's in-laws ongoing eating fish and meat after the
wedding ceremony. She was permitted to attire white sarees as a replacement for
of the cheerful colours to honour the fleeting of her husband. She was
given white saris to wear in place of coloured ones, so that she resembled the
other widows in the family. (Jhumpa Lahiri 131). Gauri family abused her.
Subhash and Lakshmi decided to get married with her. And, Gauri approves to his
proposal in order to protect herself and her daughters from her in-laws. She
wedded someone who appearances like her late husband, echoes like him, and even
clothes like him. She undoubtedly identifies him as her ex-husband; but in
reality, he was the brother of her spouse. Gauri says, they appearance
precisely the similar height and body physique. She attempts her equal best to
manage up with her fresh state she is thrown into. Subhash was a mild
type of rage. Now compared to Udhayan, his passport-sized face looks like he's
asking for her autograph. (Jhumpa Lahiri 149). Although, she wedded
Subhash, she did not take any love or affection for him. She senses he would be
able to bid defines from her griefs. The Lowland beautifully mixed the author's
story in history, politics and private occasion to encounter the desires of the
current person who reads. Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland expose the idea of identity
crises. Udayan senses a logic of loss and parting from his brother Subhash when
the latter went to America for advanced studies. They have drawn out dissimilar
customs in their lives. The older chose to hunt advanced studies in America,
and the younger chosen to care the Naxalbari movement. Nevertheless, diverse
their energies and vocations in life, they sense cosiness with one other's
existence. Udayan senses isolated and writes to Subhash: "The days are dull without you. And though I refuse
to forgive you for not supporting a movement that will only improve the lives
of millions of people, I hope you can forgive me for giving you a hard time.
Will you hurry up with whatever it is you're doing? An embrace from your
brother." (Jhumpa Lahiri, 2013:38) Udayan powerfully trusts that the social order is flawed
and in evil hands, for which he would have to endeavour to fix it right. So, he
halts in lowland, and tie the knot with a girl, Gauri, in contradiction of the
wishes of parents from both edges. On every occasion he senses sad, he pens to
his brother for comfort. Gauri is additional character who is isolated from the
others. After her husband Udayan's demise, she is unconditionally isolated, as
she is not putative by any family memberships. It is Subhash who originates to
her liberation, and takes her to Rhode Island with him-self. Nevertheless,
after giving birth to her child she does not behaviour herself as a good wife
to Subhash. Bijoli, Subhash's mother also is an estranged work in the novel.
She is widowed, and expires in a hospital enclosed by outsiders. Subhash
revenues to see her, but a little too late, as she had expired by the period,
he touched her bedside. She longed for his company in life, but did not live to
get him back. Sartre describes existentialistic isolation in his novel, Being
and Nothingness as: "In the shock that seizes me when apprehend the
other's look, I experience a subtle alienation of all my possibilities, which
are not associated with the objects of the world far from me in the midst of
world."(Sartre, 1963:18) Displacement is not somewhat only Subhash senses in the
novel. Udayan, Gauri, and Bela are similarly disrupted in Calcutta and
Tollygunge. The wedded life of Subhash and Gauri develops anxious in Calcutta
where one and all distinguishes about her widowhood. The person who reads supposes
this state to vanish into low air after the pair travel to America. But when
they arrived there, they discovery that they cannot shot through a fresh leaf;
the undisclosed of Bela’s fatherhood haunts their lives always and they develop
psychologically expatriate in the fresh environments. Jhumpa Lahiri’s characterised Gauri as a woman who is not
comfortable to overlook her past. Her snug to the past roots her to departure
into salient mod and effect a layer of insignificance to grow around her behaviour.
She is remote and emotionless to Udayan and her particular daughter. In an
effort to ignore the past, she changes her hairs in American style, tosses away
her saris and submerges herself in the education of philosophy. Pretty
paradoxically, she discovers comfort in her unfriendliness: ―Isolation
offered its own form of companionship: the reliable silence of her rooms, the
steadfast tranquillity of the evenings (165). Udayan is also represented as living in loneliness from
mainstream civilization. He always stuck underneath the danger of the police
and even has trouble hearing as an upshot of the mutilation caused to one of
his membranes from an explosion. He whines in the novel of faintness and a
high-pitched buzzing that would not depart. Lahiri says, ―He worried that he
might not be able to hear the buzzer, if it rang, or the approach of a military
jeep. He complained of feeling alone even though they were together. Feeling
isolated in the most basic way (78). The Udayan's demise is an outcome of his connection in
the murder of a police officer called Nirmal Dey. It is not really Udayan who
murdered him. He just occurred to be amongst those who planned the
assassination. Gauri also turns out to be a part of the plot when she spies on
Dey and keep note his everyday timetable. Gauri has no relationship to the
Naxalbari program. She turns out of a feeling of love and responsibility to her
spouse. She does not grasp the significances of her movements or question
Udayan’s motives when he recruits her backing. Udayan’s demise fluctuates the path of the Mitra family
and that fluctuation never end for the characters even after they arrived Rhode
Island. The novel is a best example of how participations in socio-political events on the homebased turf can
leave ineffaceable scripts on one’s soul. In this regard Meera Bharwani
comments: By presenting the responses of the first- and
second-generation diasporas and people on temporary and more permanent
settlements from India and Pakistan, now Bangladesh Jhumpa Lahiri shows how the
conditions in their homelands have an effect on them in the alien land. (145) Just after from first day in America, Subhash never goes
near to Gauri, giving her sufficient time to recover and admit her new
responsibility. He does not want to make her under in any kind of pressure and
faiths to be a good mate. Gauri, who is by now pregnant with Udayan’s child,
gives birth to a daughter Bela, but cannot carry herself to overhaul for the
kid as ample as a mother must as its effect on her was rising passion with a
cloistered life and the escapism academic chases need. Her affection for
philosophy, a castigation that is extremely related with the questions of her
demise, aim, God, life reproduces her boldness to actual life glitches.
She is a somebody who needs to involve with glitches only in a literature world
where these types difficulties do not make any stresses upon her physical or
psychological strength. Her passion with philosophy brands her to senses out of
hint with real-life. In this course of time, Gauri quarantines herself very much from life and steers all her vims into her PhD movement. As she was self-induced isolation, she cannot sense slightly gentle piece of love for Subhash and Bela. After two years into the marital life, Subhash understands that Gauri won't want a kid from him or also refuse Bela as her daughter in the appropriate logic of the term. Subhash lastly understands that the wedding was a blunder and that it was fated to be unsuccessful from the start as foretold by his mother. What he in point of fact required over his marriage was to rewire with his brother Udayan, but the wedding has been a total disaster and it has banished him from his internal soul. The wedding discontinuities after 12 years as soon as Subhash has to come back to India to join the cremation rituals of his father. Six calendar weeks later when Bela and Subhash coming back to Rhode Island, they discovery the house vacant and they saw a note written by Gauri with explanation that she has left for good and is fluctuating to California, where she has been vacant a work in one of the universities. |
||||||
Conclusion |
Jhumpa Lahiri's characters are often Indian immigrants to America who must navigate between the cultural value of their birth place and their adopted home. They are pulled in at least six directions at once. Parents full characters backward in time; children pull them forward. America pulls them West; India pulls them East. The need to marry pulls them outward; the need for solitude pulls them in inward. All the characters have an Indian background. India keeps cropping up as a setting where the characters struggle and come to terms with that life means in a distant land, to be brought up there, to belong and not belong there. Are stories are mostly set in Calcutta, is city she knows quite well. Characters drift in and out of countries, inhabitant not simply of certain belongingness but acceptance.
Thus, this remarkable story is a brilliant study of identity crisis in diaspora literature and simultaneously it has covered the mode of its particular, how an own can complete his/her personal origins in a new culture and land. In this novel of Lahiri thus discover the queries of identity crises from so many viewpoints. It can be experimental that the novel is a mixture of truthful political and historical proceedings and private life. But Lahiri’s focus is on the identity crises of her characters whose exists substitute between India and America through the period of five eras. |
||||||
References | 1. Aasha N. P., Reena J. Andrews: Cultural Reflections and Identity Crisis in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland.
2. Alanousi, Saud Multiculturalism in the Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri & the Bamboo Stalk. http://ignited.in/a/58236
3. Ashcroft, Bill and Ahluwalia, Pal (2001). Edward Said, (London: Routledge, 2001), p- 27.
4. Athira. “Pining for Homeland; An Analysis of Diasporic Sensibility in The Lowland” Journal of the Gujarat Research Society.10.10. Nov, 2019. Print.
5. Bharwani, Meera, Self and Social Identity in an Alien Land - A Study of Jhumpa Lahiri and Bharati Mukherjee. New Delhi: Gnosis, 2010. Print.
6. Bruneau, Michel (2010). Diasporas, Transnational Spaces and Communities, ed. Bauböck, Rainer and Faist, Thomas, Diaspora and Transnationalism: Concepts, Theories and Methods, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), page- 48.
7. Chandra, N.D.R. “Contemporary Indian Writing in English: Critical Perceptions”. Vol II. Sarup and Sons. 2005. Print.
8. Charles, Ron (2013) in “Review: ‘The Lowland,’ by Jhumpa Lahiri.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/review-the-lowland-by-jhumpa-lahiri/2013/09/24/7b9dcbca-2005-11e3-8459-657e0c72fec8_story.html
9. Dhar, Gulab. “Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland a Glimps of Naxalite Movement”.4.1. Jan 2016 Print.
10. Dr. Prem Bahadur Khadka: A Critical Peep into Identity Crisis in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland. https://ejmcm.com/article_6502_c7040f4a3440d2e80503eb14e14bc581.pdf
11. Hall, Stuart. Questions of Cultural Identity. Paul du Gay ed. London: Sage Publications, 2010.
12. Lahiri, Jhumpa. The Lowland. New Delhi: Random House India, 2013. Print.
13. Lahiri, Jhumpa. The Lowland. India: Random House, 2013. Print.
14. Lahiri, Jhumpa. The Lowland. Noida: Random House, 2013.
15. Lasdun, James (2013) in “Review, The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri.” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/12/lowland-jhumpa-lahiri-review
16. Morrison, Toni. Tar Baby. New York: Penguin Books, 1982
17. Mukherkjee, Bharati. ―Two Ways to Belong to America. The New York Times, 22 Sept. 1996, pp. 8–9. Print.
18. Sartre, Jean Paul. Being and Nothingness.tr. Hazel Barnes. NewYork: Random House 1963.
19. Sharma, Ram. Image of New Women in Literature New Perspective. Manglam Publications, 2015. Print.
20. Shea, Taylor (2008). ‘Interpreter of Maladies: A Rhetorical Practice Transmitting Cultural Knowledge’, Reason and Respect (Vol. 4: Issue-1, 2008), Article2.
21. Sujata Chakravorty: The Question of Alienation and Identity in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland and The Namesake. |