JHUMPA LAHIRI

 Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa with her husband Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush attending state dinner in White House 

Child Jhumpa with her parents Amar and Tapati

A few days ago I was ruminating about myself being Lahiri and tried to identify which Lahiris made the cut in this world. A few names came up in my mind but I felt two persons are ahead of all, Yogi Shyamacharan Lahiri and the Pulitzer winning author Jhumpa Lahiri. Shyamacharan was distantly related to my family and his grandson once visited our house when I was young.  Of course Jhumpa also must be related to me because we are both Barendra Brahmins and Barendra Brahmins are all related to each other in some way. However I never knew her personally and I wanted to know about her work and life.So I ordered from flipkart .com her prize winning book Interpreter of Maladies.
 
As I waited for the book to reach me I went on to gather as much information I could from her interviews, reviews of books and of course wikipedia.First of all, she looks beautiful, both to a Bengali and an American. You would think this woman cannot be but a smash hit if she does a few things half as good as others. The biggest fact as of her life, as I found out, is that she is partly Bengali and partly American but neither fully Bengali nor fully American. This may seem obvious but this singular thing has shaped her life and work in a way that nothing else has.Her father, Amar Lahiri, started from a very humble beginning (lower middle class bengali family in Kolkata),migrated to United Kingdom in third class of  a ship possessing equivalent to 10 dollars  in total. He worked there as a librarian in London School of Economics and got married with Tapati. In 1967 Nilanjana Sudeshna Lahiri was born in London. Her mother gave the two names (could not decide which one was better) and called her Jhumpa at home. In 1970 Amar Lahiri got job from Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a librarian and flew to United States and settled in Rhode Island. When he took her daughter to school the teachers found Jhumpa as the least cumbersome of names and the name stuck to her for life.From the very beginning Jhumpa was pulled in two directions, one India (to be precise Kolkata) where her parents lived in their mind and second United States where she and everybody else she knew lived. Her parents always reminded her who she was, where her ancestors were and her traditions and wanted her to be like them culturally. But Jhumpa as a little girl found her parents different and somewhat weird compared to the rest of the world around her. For example they ate rice and dal with fingers unlike everybody else and her parents never kissed each other like every body else’s parents. She kept these little family secrets away from her friends in fear of rejection. In school she read American history, American civil war and at home she listened to Bangladesh war of 1971 and tried to figure out where it (Bangladesh) actually was. She had to come to Kolkata almost every year (sometimes for months at a time) and when her teachers in school learnt about that they told her how scary must that be to her. With her parents she spoke Bengali and with outside world she conversed in American English. To an American she looked foreign with her brown skin and way of life and when she came to Kolkata she looked foreign to relatives with her American English and way of life.This basic dilemma of neither a full Bengali nor a full American pervaded all her senses.As my book arrived I went through the stories (because Interpreter of Maladies is a collection of short stories) at one go. The book gripped me for three reasons 1) they were written so well, 2) the author had the same surname as mine, 3) she looked so well. Many of the characters of her stories are second generation Americans like her, i.e., whose parents have migrated from India to US and set in USA. Two are set in India, one particularly in North Calcutta (College Street and Bowbazar crops up).The language is plain ,narrative almost placid and although you are aware that you are not understanding all of it you become captive of it. Suddenly you are given a jerk, an emotional violence is committed and slowly you come to a much understated end and you want the story to go on a little bit more and reveal a little bit more. After the book ends you inevitably want to read more from the same author. Although the stories revolves around characters who are generally second generation Americans and sometimes reveal their alienation, the emotions of people are very general and real and there is no problem in empathizing with them.Interpreter of Maladies was the first published book of Jhumpa and although the stories appeared individually in different magazines earlier they appeared as a collection in the book first. To the utmost surprise of Jhumpa she got the highest honor for literary work in USA, the Pulitzer Prize in the year 2000. My interest heightened about Jhumpa after reading the book and I went ahead with my research about her.
Jhumpa did her graduation from South Kensington High School .She received her B.A from Barnard College in 1989. After that she had multiple degrees from Boston University; M. A in English, M. F. A in creative writing, M. A in comparative literature and PhD in Renaissance studies. She was a fellow of Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center for two years (1997-1998). She also taught creative writing at Boston University and Rhode Island School of Design.In 2001 she married Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush who is Guatemalan –Greek by origin and who was then Deputy Editor of TIME Latin America, and who is now Senior Editor of Fox News Latino. The marriage took place in Kolkata in proper Bengali style and I remember the marriage was highly publicized in Kolkata newspapers although no journalists were allowed at the actual wedding. According to her relatives the menu at the wedding contained luchi, mach, mangso, misti, doi among other things and the couple went to places like Belur Math for sight seeing.In 2003 her second book The Namesake was published. It became a bestseller within a few days in America. The central character of the book, Gogol Ganguly had parents who immigrated to USA (like Jhumpa’s parents) and his pet name became his real name accidentally as in Jhumpa’s case. The novel starts with immigrant parents’ life in USA,their alienation ,Gogol’s dual identity (one Bengali, other American) ,his struggle to become one of the mainstream Americans, his romance with an American white, then a wealthy British and finally another second generation immigrant Bengali girl whom he marries ( which was to some extent arranged) and later divorces. The novel is somewhat autobiographic and was highly acclaimed by both readers and critics.Gogol has to fight for usual American things like she did (things like wearing jeans and dating with boys).In 2007 The Namesake was made a movie by Mira Nair (where Jhumpa did a bit of acting as well) in Hollywood (starring Kal Penn, Tabu and Irfan Khan).The film was not as well received as the book and Jhumpa refers it to as Mira Nair’s own namesake.Jhumpa’s latest book Unaccustomed Earth is another collection of long short stories and like before focuses on second and third generation immigrants. They are increasingly assimilated with mainstream America and eventually do things as other Americans do. As for her bengaliness, Jhumpa, although she speaks Bengali at home cannot read or write Bengali very well. Her Bengali reading and writing is, as she herself says, is like a five year old’s. So we may conclude that she has not read Rabindranath or Bibhutibhusan in original Bengali although her mother was fond of Nazrul and Nazrul Geeti (songs by Kazi Nazrul Islam).She can speak Spanish (which is her husband’s native language) and I found one interview of her in Spanish in You tube although did not find any Bengali interviews.
She presently lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband, son and daughter Octavio and Noor. She says she encourages her children to be fully American while having a sense of respect for their own ancestry and all other cultures in the world.
President Barack Obama appointed Jhumpa Lahiri a member of President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities