Jhumpa Lahiri as a ‘Global’ Author

One of the most well-known and popular representatives of contemporary Indian English fiction is Jhumpa Lahiri (1967-), who was born in London as the daughter of Bengali Indian immigrants and moved to the US when she was three. As an academic who received several degrees in literature, including a PhD in Renaissance Studies, she is also a successful author who won the American Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000 for her debut short story collection Interpreter of Maladies (1999). Her first (and until now only) novel The Namesake (2003) was adapted for the screen, and another short story collection, Unaccustomed Earth (2008), immediately reached the number one spot on The New York Times bestseller list on publication. Many of Lahiri's feelings about growing up in the US are reflected in The Namesake, and in this context it is significant to note that Lahiri, seeing herself as an outsider but not as a foreigner, has stated that she feels more comfortable in America than in India (Minzesheimer).

Given the fact that in her work she focuses on aspects of Indian immigration in America, including the ‘idea of India’ for second- and third-generation immigrants born in the US, Lahiri can be seen as a ‘global’ author whose output challenges any assigning of her work to a too-specific national, monocultural or transnational canon. Although globalisation or diaspora studies or intercultural studies may suffer less from a too-strict adherence to national or cultural boundaries, in their approaches there is often the danger that any text is turned into a sort of sociological or political or anthropological document at the expense of its literariness. In this I agree with Ruediger Heinze who has argued that the use of diaspora as an exclusive framework to read texts labelled as diasporic fails to take into account some key aspects. Most importantly, as ‘the sole overcoat’ or ‘ontological and/or epistemologically privileged site of analysis’, it ‘cannot possibly do justice to literary texts’ (Heinze 2007: 199).

The Namesake: A Return to a More Modernist (Neo-)Realism

This is not to deny that much valuable work has been done by critics approaching Lahiri's The Namesake from various theoretical angles, especially in terms of diaspora, but in this chapter I want to look at the adopted literary techniques in the novel, thus treating it in terms of its literariness.