Amitava Kumar on Jhumpa Lahiri
Colorlines, September 30, 2000
The Indian Is Coming:Amitava Kumar reads between the lines of Jhumpa Lahiri's Pulitzer Prize triumph.
This past winter, only a few days before Christmas, I sat in a theater in New York City watching a play called "The Indian Wants the Bronx."
This award-winning work written by Israel Horovitz was first performed in 1968. In this play, Gupta, an Indian man who is a newcomer to the U.S., waits at a Manhattan bus stop hoping to find his way back to his son, who lives in the Bronx.
While watching the play, I could not but ask how much has changed in this country.
Gupta has his son's name and address written on a card. He is accosted by two delinquent youth who cannot decide whether Gupta is a Turk or an Indian. At one point in the play, one of the boys snatches the card with the son's name from Gupta and calls the telephone operator. He finds out the son's number easily enough -- there is only one Gupta in the whole of the Bronx.
Today, the telephone book will yield an unimaginably higher number. It is estimated that there are now nearly 1.7 million Indian Americans. An Indian father might not be able to find his son in the U.S., but he will find many others who have the same name.
Discovering Itself Anew
There are also now many Indian writers giving voice to the broad South Asian (or desi) experience in North America. Over the past decade or more, many Indian writers who were born in India and write in English have begun living in the U.S. or Canada. Anita Desai, Amitav Ghosh, Robinton Mistry, Vikram Chandra, Bharati Mukherjee, and Anjana Appachana are only the better-known among them.
Recently, Jhumpa Lahiri, who was born in London and grew up in Rhode Island, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her first book, The Interpreter of Maladies, a collection of short stories. Lahiri is the first writer of Indian origin to receive this honor and one of the few to win such a prestigious award in her first outing.
No writer wins acclaim in a vacuum. For a writer's words to mean much -- especially if the writer is, in any ostensible way, marked as foreign -- his or her difference must also be wholly familiar or easily recognizable. This, I believe, is true of Lahiri, and also of the place called India in the American imagination.
But there is a greater appeal behind Lahiri's writing. This writer allows mainstream U.S. culture to discover itself afresh through its encounter with the new immigrants on its soil. Those who are not immigrants may find this narrative to be redemptive because it makes this culture youthful again. For them, Lahiri generously grants the U.S. a certain innocence which it has not enjoyed for a long time.
It could be polemically suggested that if more ordinary Americans were to read Lahiri's fiction, they would perhaps grant the flesh-and-blood South Asians they encounter on the streets the dignity of a narrative or a life story. Unless, of course, mainstream America finds immigrants more attractive as characters in a short story than as real people on the streets.
We can also add that the Indian writers in America who came to prominence in the earlier era -- Bharati Mukherjee is a good example -- were not feted in similar ways. It is as if the current moment is a shared one that announces the arrival in the U.S. of both India and Indian fiction. Indians are more and more a part of the modern U.S. landscape: Indian cybertechies fill about 46 percent of the H-1B quota for skilled workers in this country. With the opening of the Indian market to Western capital in recent years, the circuits of exchange between India and the West have become wired almost overnight to yield greater profits for those who were already rich. An emerging pattern of greater cultural exchange is only a part of this larger picture.
Nevertheless, the question that remains is about the manner in which an immigrant -- especially one who does not enjoy the power or the privilege to grant prizes -- responds to Lahiri's writing.
Indian immigrants have not seen themselves portrayed in mainstream U.S. media except as spokespersons for stereotypical identities with awkward sentences and funny accents. In many of Lahiri's stories, they're likely to find their presence not only as sentient beings but also as voices registering a record of their transplanted lives. As a result, they are likely to consume books like Lahiri's with a hunger that I feel is familiar to those who until only a decade or two ago had not seen the stories of their lives told except through the stamps and signatures in the pages of their passports.
Allegiance to What Flag?>
The Interpreter of Maladies ends with a short story that, told in the first-person, is a testimony of an Indian immigrant who has spent 30 years in America. On the day of the narrator's arrival in the U.S., Nixon had declared a national holiday because two Americans had landed on the moon. The new migrant finds lodging at the house of an old woman, born in 1866, who keeps declaring with a fixed astonishment: "There's an American flag on the moon, boy!"
But it is not allegiance to the U.S. flag that the immigrant offers. Lahiri allows our elderly narrator to plant a different flag, one of memory and imagination, on the very last page of her book: "I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far away from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination."
In another story, "Mrs. Sen's," we discover, in slow, poignant detail, the loneliness of a woman who knows that there is only one Sen in the telephone book for her small East Coast town. She likes to buy fresh halibut for her fish curry, but must wait for her busy husband to take her to the store because she herself cannot drive.
Mrs. Sen is babysitting a quiet, white American boy. She asks him if anyone would come if she screamed loudly. A lonely Mrs. Sen explains to the puzzled boy that at home -- by which she means Calcutta, not the room in which they are sitting -- if you raised your voice to express joy or grief, the whole neighborhood would show up at the door in a gesture of genuine sharing. The boy is thoughtful about this and replies that if Mrs. Sen were to scream, her neighbors "might complain that you were making too much noise."
In several of the stories, laced with the intensity of felt experience, Lahiri is able to make the reader -- whether born in Bombay or Boston -- enter the process of discovering what it means to be Indian in America.
In a nuanced tale entitled "When Mr. Pirzada Came To Dine," an Indian American schoolgirl rubs up against her ignorance of what weighs heavily on the minds of her immigrant parents and indeed the collective psyche of their home country -- the Partition in 1947 when the British divided India, and later, the war for Bangladeshi independence from Pakistan in 1971.
Her father wonders aloud whether they teach her history and geography in school. The child's mother protests with a line that speaks volumes about the new needs of the diaspora: "Lilia has plenty to learn at school.... We live here now, she was born here." The rest of the story is about what Lilia must learn about her past and its estrangements, despite her distance from the country her parents left behind. Or perhaps couldn't leave behind at all.
In Bed with the Other
In yet another of her stories, sexily entitled "Sexy," Lahiri spins an account of an affair between a Midwestern white woman called Miranda and a married Indian man named Dev. We read: "Dev was Bengali, too. At first Miranda thought it was a religion. But then he pointed it out to her, a place in India called Bengal, on a map printed in an issue of The Economist."
Here, Lahiri speaks in the voice not of the immigrant, but the one supposed to be less alien. In places like this, white Americans get to reveal, not without pathos, their vulnerability because they are less equipped than the immigrant. They struggle to learn more about the Other who sometimes shares their bed.
This is the desired truth of the multicultural moment. The dominant culture suddenly experiences the limits of its own confidence about what it knows or controls.
What is less clear, however, is how this politics plays itself out also in relation to the immigrant culture. In other words, beyond finding our own space of assertion, do we under multiculturalism also discover our own limits, our hierarchies, our unimagined possibilities?
One way to answer these questions in relation to Lahiri's fiction is to recognize that the immigrant reader finds in Lahiri a "seasoned translator." A seasoned translator is described by Pico Iyer as a global soul -- Kazuo Ishiguro and Salman Rushdie are the exemplars -- who commutes between cultures and writes from a space of "in-betweenness." As hybrid souls, these writers give voice to hyphenated identities. Lahiri, and others like Iyer, citizens of the West who have easy access to the East, are able to make sense of either part of the cultural equation in terms of the Other. Seasoned translators are seasoned travelers between cultures. This is a privilege, in all senses of the term.
At her best, Lahiri would strike an immigrant as one he can never be: one who is able to speak in his own language as well as the language of the immigration officer.
Never a Single Story
For the Indian community, largely affluent and politically still conservative, Lahiri might become a symbol of middle-class mobility: one who speaks Bengali and writes flawlessly in English. This is why it is imperative that while we rightly celebrate Lahiri's success, we also ask ourselves what gets left out of the fiction called "Indian writing."
Indeed, the phenomenon of cultural travel is mined with politics. The task of seasoned translators is likely to become more, not less, perilous in the newly global world. We live in a smaller world, we cannot doubt, but our divisions are more ruinous. The fratricidal struggle between Indians and Pakistanis, for example, is not necessarily diluted in the diaspora. It sometime surfaces here in new, even more distorted ways. Also, the recent influx of working-class immigrants from the Indian subcontinent -- in grave contrast to the post-1960s entry, almost exclusively, of the professional elite -- has introduced complex, new dynamics. Shamela Begum is an illiterate maid from Bangladesh living in New York City where she is currently fighting a legal case against her former employer, a high-ranking diplomat from Bahrain, who abused her. Isn't Ms. Begum producing a different, less familiar, narrative of being desi in the U.S.?
John Berger has written, "Never again a single story will be told as though it were the only one." In the Indian context, we cannot afford to read a single story without knowing that there are a million more.
Therefore, we should go on dreaming of possibilities of cultural emergence. I don't have in mind the storming of the bastion of the American Academy of Letters. Rather, I imagine a more interesting scenario. The coming to life of a band of thieves who, in the silence of the pale immigrant dawn, pick the locks in the prison of the Indian model-minority status. They leave a smear of vermilion on the scene and a sign that says "The Indian Is Coming."
