Published: 02:19 AM, 02 March 2026
Jhumpa Lahiri and Kamila Shamsie: Two Indispensable Literary Envoys Typecasting South Asian Diaspora in Overseas Locations
Jhumpa Lahiri’s luminosity as an eminent storyteller radiated across the world after she won Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for her first anthology of short stories Interpreter of Maladies. Her another outstanding recognition was the Asian American Literary Award in 2009 for her book Unaccustomed Earth which includes some mind-blowing stories. Moreover, she received the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature in 2014 for her latest novel The Lowland (published in 2013). All her stories resonate with a strain of diaspora because of the fact that in her fictional works she mirrors the smiles and tears of South Asian immigrants, particularly Indians who have been living in the United States amid sporadic slices of illusions and agonies.
In The Lowland Jhumpa Lahiri tells the story of two brothers Subhash and Udayan and Udayan’s wife Gauri. Udayan gets involved in the Naxalite movement that rocked West Bengal and some other provinces of India during 1960s which aimed at building up a classless society. Subhash, on the other hand, lives in the United States and he does not endorse his brother’s connection with the Naxalite activists. As the novel proceeds, Udayan one day gets killed by the Indian police force, causing a long-standing trauma to his pregnant wife Gauri. Subhash flies back to Calcutta to console his bereaved family. He stands by his family to overcome the shock of Udayan’s death. He takes Gauri with him to America and raises Gauri’s daughter there. He gets into wedlock with Gauri and loves her profusely, but the haunting memories of Udayan hardly leave Gauri alone.
Kaushik, a protagonist in Jhumpa Lahiri’s book Unaccustomed Earth, is shattered by his mother’s death and his father’s leaning towards another woman. He moves away from the wealthy suburbs of Massachusetts. He drives northward, aimlessly, towards the desolate, craggy landscape near the Canadian border. After travelling through pine forests and contemplating over the ocean that “was the most unforgiving thing, nearly black at times”, he can sense an elusive power, a power he believes his deceased mother now possesses. For Kaushik, the great American wilderness is like a temple. It overawes and impresses him, like it did the American transcendental writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
This parallel does not come out of the blue. Jhumpa Lahiri, a Bengali-American author who’s been highly admired as a writer of immigrant stories, at core represents herself as a distinctive New England writer. Her new book begins with a quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne and this existential anthology recalls JD Salinger’s rather pessimistic vision of human bonds.
Her previous books, both glaring in their own ways, illustrate the pain and solitude undergone by Bengali immigrants in the north-eastern US, and Unaccustomed Earth relates to a similar ground. In the story Hell-Heaven, Usha, looking back on her Boston childhood, visualizes the socio-cultural alienation that encumbered her mother, a woman who wears “red and white bangles unique to Bengali married women”. Things radiate for Usha’s mother when she falls in love with Pranab, a bachelor Bengali immigrant who’s studying at MIT. “He brought to my mother the first and, I suspect, the only pure happiness she ever felt.”
Usha’s mother gets extremely upset when Pranab decides to marry a white woman. At Pranab’s wedding, Lahiri depicts various clashes between Bengali and American cultures, a diasporic trait from her previous works that enables her to venture a down-to-earth portrayal of race and migration to the western readers. Usha’s father, she explains, works “through his meal, his fork and knife occasionally squeaking against the surface of the china, because he was accustomed to eating with his hands”. His wife, on the other hand, behaves with a lack of maturity, “speaking in Bengali, complaining about the formality of the proceedings”. She is an archetypal female immigrant in Lahiri’s world, anachronistic and disoriented.
This disorientation trickles into the lives of Jhumpa Lahiri’s second-generation immigrant characters as well, as in the title story, Unaccustomed Earth. Ruma, whose mother died after an adverse reaction to anesthesia, has recently moved to the lonely suburbs of Seattle with her workaholic white husband and biracial son Akash. “Growing up, her mother’s example – moving to a foreign place for the sake of marriage, caring exclusively for children and a household – had served as a warning, a path to avoid. Yet this was Ruma’s life now.”
Her single father is about to visit their home for the first time, and Ruma is worried about the likelihood that he might decide to live with them permanently. But her father, who, like most of the book’s male characters, is remarkably multidimensional, has his own matters to remain preoccupied with. He has started dating a Bengali woman, and he cannot resolve whether or not to disclose the details of this relationship to his daughter. As father and daughter enjoy an unexpectedly blissful week, Lahiri comes up with a moving tale, which, like most of her stories, refers to the endeavors by most of her characters to overcome loneliness and to lead a happy life.
The quest for happiness in most of Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories remains unfulfilled. Death, disease and migration, among other things, keep people isolated from their roots. Despite this bleakness – or perhaps because of it – Lahiri’s writings are magnetic for the most part. She is highly skilled in making dialogues and has a knack for imaginative descriptions. “She would slouch in her chair, looking bothered but resigned, as if a subway she was riding had halted between stations.”
Death and mourning pervade through most stories in Unaccustomed Earth including the three linked ones in the final section, but Lahiri’s most illustrious story, Only Goodness, is rather different. Sudha, a Bengali-American graduate student at London School of Economics, receives an unexpected letter from her secluded alcoholic brother, Rahul, a Cornell University dropout. Sudha gets mentally uplifted by the note, but the reunification with her brother puts her relationship with her English husband, as well as her infant son’s safety, into trouble. This story towers over others in the collection, not only because of Lahiri’s dexterous, compact prosaic style, but also because the author liberates her writing from conventional cultural baggage and allows her characters to breathe in an individualistic manner.
What the characters in Only Goodness have in common with the rest of Lahiri’s sub-world, however, is the fact that they all inhabit the most elite rungs of North American society. Although most of her fictional figures are South Asian immigrants, some of them go to Harvard University and to expensive boarding schools. They study at Columbia’s Butler Library and talk about Greek classics. They are scholars and academics – apart from being plain housewives and hubbies. The portrait of the US sketched in Unaccustomed Earth is insular and antiquated and doesn’t differ broadly from the sensation evoked by Jhumpa Lahiri’s crotchety New England predecessors. She juxtaposes features like liberty and equity that most immigrants choose America as their destination for with the inherent anomalies of American society. Jhumpa Lahiri’s another few worldclass books include “Whereabouts”, “In Other Words”, “The Namesake” and “Roman Stories”.
On the other hand, Kamila Shamsie is a leading author from South Asia celebrated for her contributions to contemporary literature. She has authored eight critically acclaimed novels, including Burnt Shadows, A God in Every Stone, and Home Fire, which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and shortlisted for the Costa Prize. Her most recent work, Best of Friends, has received significant recognition, including the Karachi Literature Festival and Getz Fiction Award and a shortlist spot for the Indie Book Awards. Her novels have been translated into over thirty languages. Prior to joining Georgetown University, Qatar, she was a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Manchester. She also holds a lifetime honorary position as Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature in the United Kingdom.Kamila Shamsie was born on 13 August 1973 in Karachi, Pakistan. She acquired higher education from University of Massachusetts and Hamilton College, USA. Kamila Shamsie’s novels have been translated into more than 30 foreign languages.
During her residency, Kamila engages in a variety of enriching activities on our campus, including workshops, master-classes, special events, and public lectures. She offers students creative writing sessions and hosts public events, such as readings with renowned authors, informal discussions, and focused writing workshops designed to spark creativity and literary exploration.
Kamila Shamsie’s presence adds significant depth to the academic discourse in Georgetown University in Qatar and she contributes to the broader cultural vibrancy of Qatar and beyond. Both Jhumpa Lahiri and Kamila Shamsie are indispensable literary envoys who spectacularly described the lives and livelihoods, challenges and smiles, anguish and accomplishments of South Asian people leading a diasporic life in the western countries.
Mahfuz Ul Hasib Chowdhury is a
contributor to different English
newspapers and magazines.
