BRAHMINS BLESSED BY BOSTON
Interpreter of Maladies: Short Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri
210mm, 198 Pages, Softcover, HarperCollins, ISBN 0 00 225900 1, £9.99
The blurb on the cover describes the content as ‘stories of Bengal, Boston and beyond.’ And the eulogy on the back cover describes the author as ‘a dazzling story-teller with a distinctive voice’ with an eye for nuance, an ear for irony. Without disagreeing with either of those comments, I feel that the English-wallah are patting their own back for having discovered a bright young alien with some brain-power and for ‘successfully having converted another heathen into a Christian’. After all, had the same stories been written in Bengali by the same author, would any one in Boston have bothered even to read them, much less proffer fulsome praise on them?However, coming back to the content of these stories, one cannot but be impressed with the quality of writing, and Boston deserves some credit for having matured her sensitivity and granted her the deeper vision whereby she could absorb the dichotomy of an immigrant dilemma. "Where are you from?" Author tries to explain by saying she is from Rhode Island which proves less than satisfactory for those asking the question. Her appearance and name oblige her to say she is from India (but that is a lie: She was born in England of an Indian parentage; and that is the only connection she has had with India; she was neither born there nor has lived there).
She said in her first press interview –"America is home to me but I feel an outsider too. I have observed a sense of exile in my parents…. That can never go. We are still going through life-long trans-cultural voyages." Even with the progressive generation, will this journey ever end?
This is a crisis of identity which most immigrants have to face and live through and these stories give full expression to this identity problem. Her perspective remains American, without abandoning the richness of her sensuous narrative prose. She brings forth, in a highly pulsating manner the alienness of her characters on American soil. In the last story, America itself is portrayed as the "Third and Final Continent" where the process of immigrants’ cultural transplantation and adaptation reaches completion. His or her absorption into the Western system is granted the fatwa of ‘success’.
Through these short stories she is navigating between cultures. Even those 1.5 million well-off Indians cutting a high profile in the social landscape of the United States, doing a lot more things than just running street corner grocery stores does not dilute the Indianness of her characters. Maladies is a riveting mosaic of uprooted characters at various stages of what is called ‘success’ in American vocabulary. Even the title of the book INTERPRETER OF MALADIES hints at the abundance of Indian doctors practising their skills in the West. One can optimistically look forward to her forthcoming novel which she is reported to be writing.
She has won a Pulitzer Prize for the year 2000 for this collection of short stories. Much has been said about the fact that she is the first Asian writer to have won this prestigious award. Pulitzer-winning critic Michiko Kakutani wrote about her last year in The new York Times: " Lahiri chronicles her characters’ lives with both objectivity and compassion while charting the emotional temperature of their lives with tactile precision. She is a writer of uncommon elegance and poise……" I wish this critic had read some other works of fiction written in Bengali. Sharatchandra Chatterjee….Bibhuti Bhushan Bandyopadhyaya…. Tara Shaknkar Bannerjee… objectivity, compassion, elegance and poise are common features of Bengali character and fully reflected in most Bengali literature. It is a pity, and yet another sign of Western world’s cultural imperialism that all that talent and creative genius of most parts of the world only gets recognised when it is either expressed or translated in English.
-Shashi Bandhubh
