Chapter 1

Jhumpa Lahiri and Her Unaccustomed Earth

Issues and Context

Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth, paints a powerful picture focusing on

the lives of the first and second generation of immigrants who have settled in USA.

The characters in the stories are the offspring of parents who have migrated from

Bengal, India after 1965. The characters are depicted as children of well-off parents,

with access of good schools expected by their parents to hold on to Indian traditions

while succeeding professionally in the new society. The characters face the

opportunities and challenges of belonging to two different cultures, and must

continuously negotiate an intermediate position within and between two cultures.

They try to occupy a middle ground which could easily turn into a battle ground

between Indian and the American parts of their identities, but the characters in strive

to maintain ties to both cultures, identifying themselves as Indian Americans. Identity

is a common theme in most of the stories, but it takes on a special charge in the stories

in Unaccustomed Earth, because in each story a character or family is caught between

cultures and often between generations.

The collections of eight stories prominently emphasize the lives and diasporic

sensibility of second-generation immigrants who repent the problem of alienation,

loneliness, self-realization, marginalization, displacement and discontinuity in the

cultural discourse. It explores the trauma of the characters who are suffering from the

loss of traditional culture, death of family member, the sense of rootlessness and the

generation conflicts. Lahiri tries to describe almost exclusively of Bengali characters.

Unaccustomed Earth consists of eight stories, in all the stories the characters are

second generation Indian Americans. These stories show the obstacles that Indian
 Parajuli 2

Americans must overcome in order to pursue the lifestyle of their choice; they also

show some of the advantages that come with the territory.

Jhumpa Lahiri was born to Indian parents in London in 1967, and moved to

the United States at the age of two. Her parents were first generation Bengali

immigrants from Calcutta. She was originally named Nilanjana Sudeshna Lahiri.

Lahiri’s family maintained close connections to relatives and friends in India, and she

grew up in an atmosphere of well-educated, middle- class immigrants. Jhumpa Lahiri

received B.A in English Literature from Barnard College and continued her studies at

Boston University. She has completed M.A in Comparative Literature, and Ph.D. in

Renaissance Studies. She has won several literary awards, mostly notably the

prestigious Pulitzer Prize for best American work of fiction. Lahiri’s collection of

stories, Unaccustomed Earth, was released in 2008. Central themes in this book are

identity, belonging, and the intermediate position that second generation immigrants

occupy between the ethnic background of their parents, and the American society they

grow up in.

Unaccustomed Earth consists of eight short stories almost all are written from

the perspective of second generation immigrant characters. Temporal shifts are

common trope in Lahiri’s writing, and are used extensively in this collection of short

stories. This way the book is a portrayal of two generations of Indians in the United

States. The first story entitled ‘Unaccustomed Earth’ spans the visit of Ruma’s

recently retired and widowed father to Ruma’s new home in Seattle, where she lives

with her American husband and three years old son Akash. She has given up her legal

career to stay at home with Akash and is expecting another baby. The story dives into

old family issues and explores both father and daughter’s culture-related sense of

duty; Ruma feels obliged to ask her father to move in with her family, and her father
 Parajuli 3

feels pressured to accept, against his better judgment. Akash has a chance to bond

with his grandfather properly for the first time during the visit, and Ruma, who still

mourns her mother, discovers at the end of the story that her father not only continues

to wish living on his own, but also has a new partner.

‘Hell-Heaven’ explores the universal themes of love and jealousy, and the

difficult relationship between a mother and a daughter. As the story opens, Pranab

Chakraborty, a graduate student at MIT, feels homesick and considers returning to

Calcutta. On the streets of Boston he meets and befriends Usha and her mother

Arpana. Parnab becomes a regular visitor at Usha’s house, and Arpana neglected by

her own husband, falls in love with Pranab. Pranab, however meets and eventually

marries an American woman, Deborah. Arpana disapproves the marriage, her

jealousy affecting her impression of Americans in general, as well as her relationship

with Usha. Deborah and Pranab divorce after 20 years of marriage when Pranab falls

in love with a married, Bengali woman. Arpana and Usha’s relationship improves

over time, as Arpana begins to accept her situation, gradually settles in and grows

more tolerant of American culture. She eventually reveals to Usha how she nearly

committed suicide because of her unrequited love for Pranab.

‘Choice of Accommodation’ is another story which deals with displacement in

the marital life on the backdrop of the diasporic milieu. It indicates Amit’s experience

of displacement having been estranged from his parents and confronting his marital

life in fear and nervousness. It is a story about an interracial couple. Amit and Megan

attend the weeding of Amit’s college crush Pam Borden at his old prep Blurt school,

Langford Academy. The rising stress in their marriage is witnessed as Amit, in a

drunken condition discloses to a stranger at a wedding party that his marriage had

collapsed after the birth of his two daughters. Amit is the son of rich Bengali parents,
 Parajuli 4

and he had a privileged education in the high class boarding school, Langford

Academy in America. His anguish is revealed in the lines; “He could not imagine

sending his daughters to Langford- couldn’t imagine letting go of them as his parents

had let go of them” (Lahiri 86). Despite such fortunate background, he does not have

any self-confidence and is anxious and extremely nervous about himself. He feels a

profound sense of rejection by his parents for putting him in a residential school. He

feels no memories towards his alma mater and does not keep any contact with any of

his old classmates.

In all anticipated situations, he would obviously do something foolish and rash

or thoughtless which would result in the girls’ perishing under his supervision. He

would be the only survivor and his scenarios always concluded with Megan divorcing

him as she accuses him of what happened to their girls. In the end, he would lose it

all, his wife and family. This is a very disturbing thing that Amit involves in. It

reveals that he is an alienated soul suffering from an identity crisis. He lacks

confidence, does not appreciate his own worth and therefore feels that he is not good

enough for being loved. Despite his affectionate family, he seems to be always on the

periphery, almost as if he is making ready himself for them to discard him one day.

This may have to do with the sense of desertion he experienced through his parents

act of putting him in a residential school without his approval during his early youth.

Distress, alienation and isolation occur when there is an unexpected change in

surroundings and environment. In the case of Amit, the trauma had shocked him to

the level of showing physically in the form of premature gray hair while still in

school. This may be because unlike many diasporas or immigrants placing the foot in

the new land. He was not prepared psychologically for the change in environment as

his parents had haphazardly made the decision for him. Amit’s upsetting experience
 Parajuli 5

of loneliness and nostalgia is representative of the feelings of alienation which a

diaspora experience in a foreign land. In the end, he learns to survive without his

parents and slowly becomes accustomed to new life in Langford. As individuals

suffer between who they feel they are and how they feel they should act, their

individual struggles often act their relationships with others. In Lahiri’s works, these

very individualized struggles are presented in ability of characters to enter into

productive dialogue with other characters. It tries to prove that, “there are no words

with meanings shared by all, no words belonging to no one” (Lahiri 401). Through the

characters inabilities to communicate in a language that effectively crosses cultural

and personal barriers.

‘Only Goodness’ is a beautiful example of cultural assimilation. The

American culture seems to be so attractive and full of glamour that the younger

generation of India replicate and accept it almost blindly. Sudha, the elder sister, first

launched her brother, Rahul to alcoholism, later on she attempts to free him from his

habit. She wants to give an American upbringing to her younger brother, which she

did not get in her own childhood, by purchasing toys, making separate room for him,

providing a swing in the yard etc. However, as he enters into college life, she

introduces him to alcohol, a habit he acquires devastatingly. Meanwhile, Rahul’s

drinking habit proves to be a great barrier in his carrier. He could not clear his

examinations and was finally thrown out of college. Along with drinking, he had

developed a new habit of dating with girls. During the event of dating, he came across

a woman named Elena who was thirty-eight years older than Rahul. Once Rahul

invited Elna in his house and disclose his intention before everyone that he wanted to

marry Elena. This stunned and upset his parents. They opposed their marriage but did

not prevent it.

 Parajuli 6

Sudha moved to London to study, and finally marries an Englishman, much

older than her. Rahul goes away from home and her life for some years. Later, she

receives a letter from him. She instantly reacts and invites him to her home in

London. The story is about a sister and her guilt conscience, who tries to renew her

efforts to free her brother of the drinking habit for which she is exclusively

answerable. Since old habits die hard; Rahul’s addiction not only ruins his life, Neel,

by leaving him in the bath tub. Thus, the story revolves around Rahul. Jhumpa Lahiri

indirectly attempts to convey the lesson that blind replication of the American and

western way of living leads us nowhere and at last one spoil his/her life and career as

an absolute failure like Rahul.

In ‘Nobody’s Business’, Sangita, a second generation Bengali-Indian

immigrant, is the principal character of this story. Though her name is Sangita

Biswas, she loves to be name as Sang. Sang is of marriageable age. Therefore, every

so often men phoned for her with the desire to marry her. She studied Philosophy and

completed her graduation from New York University. Paul and Heather are Sang’s

roommates who always update her whenever there was a probable groom on the

phone. One day Paul noticed her boyfriend who wore entirely discolored jeans, a

white shirt, a navy blue blazer and brown leather shoes. His name was Farouk as Sang

introduced him to Paul, but he went to Freddy. Paul observed that Sang was never

home, and when she was she resided in her room, often on the phone having the

closed entrance. It was something of a shock to locate Farouk in the house. Whenever

she was not with Farouk, she did things for him. She used to read through proofs of

the articles he’d written, examining it for typographical errors. She also planned his

doctor’s appointment etc.

During one winter break when she went away to London to visit her sister and
 Parajuli 7

her baby boy, a woman called at their house a number of times to know about Sang.

She asked Paul whether Sang and Freddy are cousins. Furthermore, she began crying

and when she stopped crying she said that she loved him. She informed him that she

was Freddy’s girlfriend. When Deirdre asked once more about whether Sang and

Farouk are cousins? Paul told her the truth that they are boyfriend and girlfriend.

When sang returned, she asked Paul about Deirdre, he told her everything. Now she

began to avoid him; she criticized Paul for making all these stories about what he told

her about Deirdre. Paul did not say anything to Sang. One day he searches out

Deirdre’s number and phoned her and left a message on the answering machine, asked

her to call him back. When she picked up the phone, she said she will call him later

the same night at ten. Then the thought came him immediately; he brought a phone

and an adaptor with two jacks.

When Sang came home Paul told her that he called Deirdre and she will call

him at ten o’ clock and if she wishes to listen she can listen without her knowing as he

has hooked up another phone to their line, and she agreed. Exactly one minute past

ten, both the phone rang. They slowly picked up the both phones. Deirdre told that she

made Paul into an impostor because it was Freddy’s idea, he was furious because she

called Paul. He refused to see her and talk to her. She said that Paul should inform

everything about Freddy to Sang because she has the right to know that she is not the

only girl in Freddy’s life. Next morning Paul woke up with the sound of a car, Sang

was going to London. She left a note on the kitchen table that gave him thanks for

yesterday. Farouk called many times to know about Sang and Paul told him that she

left the country. In the end, we come to know that Paul has cleared his exams, and two

of his professors took him to the Four Season Bar for the drink and celebrated. After

the party when he moved out he saw Farouk and a woman. Through the story, Lahiri
 Parajuli 8

portrays the life of Indian migrant to America, encapsulating the diasporic views of

her characters tangled in manifold emotional twists.

Review of Literature

Different critics try to explain differently for the book Unaccustomed Earth

from different perspectives. There are diverse critical opinions regarding the

representation of cultural complexities. As diasporic predicaments it clearly shows the

ripples of cultural shock in the land of others. Almost all the critics have analyzed it

from their own perspectives. Following are some views about the cultural clash in the

book. Regarding the second generation diaspora living in western countries, it

portrayed the diasporic sensibility of second generation struggling to cope up with

family and society. In this regard Aitor Ibarrola-Armendariz says, “This identity

formation process proves especially challenging and often torturous for second

generation immigrants because, while they can rarely achieve a complete assimilation

into their host society, they cannot easily identify fully with their ethnic root or seek

the support of their co-ethnics, as their progenitors did” (44). In this case, the second

generations have to suffer because of the identity crisis and no whereness in the new

land of settlement as they entangle between the identity of the origin and the new

identity of the new society.

Stating about the diaspora Robin Cohen explains the ways which the term

diaspora has required a greater cultural significance. As he states, “All the features

will not be visible in diaspora and it will vary according to the nature. Diaspora been

classified variously according to ethnicities, nationalities, culture and lifestyle etc. and

due to that various categories the space of diaspora and its theme has become wider

and larger” (45). So the nature of diaspora can differ according to the variation in

cultures, yet the struggle exists for the people under diaspora. Talking about the
 Parajuli 9

cultural loss, the position and adaption is very struggling in the new world, and this

book deserves a mention for raising the question of cultural authenticity. In this

regard, A.F.M. Maswood Akhter acknowledges that “Lahiri’s theme include

displacement, the process of integration and the accompanying loss of one’s original

culture, as well as the search for one’s own identity” (99). He proposes that Lahiri’s

characters have a distinct feature that distinguishes them from other Diasporas.

Bengal has existed as a "distinct cultural formation within the Indian subcontinent,

embracing and synthesizing various religious, spiritual and philosophical

communities in the sub-continental social milieu” (101). Because of their position,

Bengalis have a special kind of adaptability and ability to accept external elements

without having to renounce their own individuality. In this regard Bengali people

have their own type of distinct culture which reveals their identity and individuality in

their own way.

Critics agree that there are migrations periods that create different diasporic

communities, which can be divided according to the reasons for leaving one's

motherland. Sudesh Mishra In his article “From Sugar to Masala” makes a clear

distinction between the old and the new Indian diasporas. The former one includes

people whose reasons for leaving their home were not totally voluntary, such as

indenture laborers from the colonial period, whom he calls “the sugar diaspora” (294).

The new diasporas, on the other hand, are the so-called technocrats along with other

intellectuals and workers who are looking for a better future in the land of

opportunities which in the case of Unaccustomed Earth is supposed to be the USA.

Often, this idea of a better life in a new country is smashed by harsh reality and turns

out to be a simple illusion. These new migrants he calls “masala diaspora” (294).

In Unaccustomed Earth, the story of Ruma illustrates this idea. It becomes

 Parajuli 10

very difficult for her to cope up with her daily routines after her mother's sudden

death and her move to Seattle. When her father announces that he is coming for a

week, she believes it will become even more difficult because she regarded her

mother to be the helping hand. “as the irretrievable loss of a culture-specific universe”

(Lahiri 2), Thus, it comes as a surprise when her father starts to look after Akash,

even teaching him some Bengali during his stay. This way, Lahiri reflects on the

passing away of a parent figure as having a great impact on second generation

diasporas which is that of the diasporic community.

Lavina Dhingra and Floyds Cheung talk the majority of Indian Americans as

living “on the coasts, mostly in select cities considered international centers” (247).

The characters who make up first generation in Unaccustomed Earth certainly

correspond to this pattern, all living in some proximity to Boston. There the men have

high-paying jobs within scientific educational institutions or major industrial

companies, the wives lead secluded suburban lives, and the children attend local

schools and go on to be accepted at prestigious colleges. However, Lahiri’s second

generation characters often find themselves spread across the United States and

outside too. This corresponds with their findings of how Indian Americans move to

developing regions such as Texas, which did not seen much Indian immigration so

far. Interviewees in Dallas noticed “how much they stood out….relative to more

cosmopolitan cities” (248). A similar sense otherness is experienced by several of the

second generation protagonists in Unaccustomed Earth, showing that geographical

setting is important to how comfortable they are in being and presenting themselves

as Indian Americans. Because Indian Americans are expected to be such high

achievers, it is all the more disappointing to themselves and particularly to their

families if they should fail. It is interesting that failure to live up to financial

 Parajuli 11

expectations is interpreted to be a failure not only in economic terms, but also in terms

of mortality. Economic failure thus becomes moral failure and, in, short the failure of

one family member becomes the failure of the entire family. Failure to live up to

expectations, whether in terms of career, family or home, can create strong dividing

lines between characters, and will be devoted much attention in different chapters.

According to Martein A. Halvorson- Taylor, distinctions could be made within

Diaspora and exile to further define the Diaspora literature. He suggests that the

distinction could be found in the attitude of the written piece towards homeland and to

migration. As he says, “Exile emphasizes the forced nature of the migration and the

freshness of the experience of leaving the homeland; exile is not neutral and exiled

peoples usually a single-minded desire to return to their homeland” (21). So, with

reference to the concept of exile, diaspora is caused by migration and is settled in the

new land living the homeland.

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Chapter 2

Diaspora and Hybridity

Concept of Diaspora

The term diaspora is derived from the Greek verb diaspiero in which Speiro

means “I scatter” or “I spread about” and dia means “between, through, across”.

Diaspiero means “I scatter between or across”. Diasporic consciousness means

awareness of being scattered. The verb diaspora became more widely used in the fifth

century BCE. Classical philosophers and Hellenist writers used it in the contemporary

period but it had a negative connotation. Epicurus, as reported by Plutarch, used

‘diaspora’ in the context of his philosophical treatises to refer to processes of

dispersion and decomposition, dissolution into various parts without any further

relation to each other. ‘Diaspora’ had an adverse, devastating meaning and was not

used to imply a geographical place or sociological group at that time. After the

translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, the term diaspora began to develop from

its original sense. The first mention of a diaspora created as a result of exile in the

Septuagint; a Greek version of the Jewish Scriptures redacted in the third and second

centuries B.C. by Jewish scholars and adopted by Greek-speaking Christians.

The term diaspora is reviewed with its development in detail by the scholar

Stephane Dufoix states that, after the translation of the Bible into Greek, the word

diaspora would have been used to refer to the northern kingdom exiled between 740-

722 BC from Israel by the Assyrians, as well as Jews, Benjaminites, and Levites

exiled from the southern kingdom in 587 BCE by the Babylonians and from Roman

Judea in 70 CE by the Roman Empire. After that it was used to refer to the historical

movements of the dispersed ethnic population of Israel. Stephane Dufoix focuses that,

“the modern use of the term diaspora stems from its appearance and as a neologism in
 Parajuli 13

the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek by the legendry seventy scholars in

Alexandria in the third century BC” (4). The word diaspora is explained in Greek as,

“Citizens of a dominant city state who immigrated to a conquered land with the

purpose of colonization, to assimilate the territory into the empire” (1-2). So, diaspora

can be understood as both migrated and forced exile.

The word ‘Diaspora’ has a religious meaning in the context of the Hebrew

Bible. It means to threaten the Hebrews if they fail to obey God’s will. In the

discourses of religion historians like Willem Cornelius, Johannes Tromp and Martin

Baumann, it is pointed out that the meaning of the term later changed in the Jewish

tradition and it designates scattered people of forceful dispersion. This reference about

Jewish dispersion is included in the Old Testament. However, in the Christian

tradition, New Testament explains church as a dispersed community (5).

Safran.W. defines basic characteristics in his definition of diaspora. According

to him, for something to be called as diaspora there should be a dispersal from

homeland to two or more foreign regions; those people who are away from their

homeland have a collective memory about their homeland; they have a belief that they

will always be outrageous in their host state; they idealize their putative ancestral

home; there is a belief that all members of that society should be committed to the

maintenance or restoration of the homeland and a strong ethnic group consciousness

with a belief in a common fate (2-3).

The term was coined theologically to form an integral part of a pattern

constituted by the fourfold course of sin and disobedience, scattering and diaspora,

repentance, and finally return and gathering. Whatever may be the case, the term

diaspora carries a sense of ‘displacement’. In diaspora, there is a sense of being

separated from its national territory, for whatever may be the reason. The people who
 Parajuli 14

live abroad away from their homeland have an aspiration to return to their ancestral

homeland. Some critics have pointed out that diaspora may result in a loss of

nostalgia for a single home as people re-root in a series of meaningful displacement.

Some people may have multiple homes to maintain their attachment to other

individuals in the group. Such groups have signs of their culture in their maintenance

of traditional religious practices and their resistance to language change.

Robin Cohen proposes nine features to explain the essence of diaspora instead

of six. He explores the categorical definition by suggesting an amendment in the list

of slightly changing the features. He states that the diaspora comes into existence by

“dispersal from an original homeland often traumatically” (161). Cohen has

emphasized the traumatic event which is responsible for dispersal or migration.

Secondly he has argued that the migration may be voluntary in nature because

diaspora is formed by migrants due to “alternatively, the expansion from a homeland

in search of work, in pursuit of trade or to further colonial ambition” (161). Third

category of Cohen is universal in nature as it explains that diasporic community has

“a collective memory of myth about the homeland” (162). The fourth category is an

extension of earlier category. Diasporic people in exile are always fascinated: an

idealization of the supposed ancestral home because they are under illusion of

collective memory of homeland and this constant feeling compels them to glorify the

dignity of homeland. In this fifth category, Cohen talks about the possibility of the

desire for “return movement or at least a continuing connection . . .” (162). In this

way, he has presented the essence of diaspora who feels a memory of the homeland

when there are the difficulties of adaptation.

Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Worrier, a memoir and a work of

creative non-fiction, is a blending of autobiography with old Chinese folktales based

 Parajuli 15

on complex portrayal of the 20th century experiences of Chinese American living in

the United States of America especially in the shadow of the Chinese revolution. In

her novel The Woman Worrier, she focuses on racism, identity crises, self-realization,

acculturation and biculturation. Maxine does not have satisfaction with her life in

America. This is expressed when she says, “My American life has been such a

disappointment” (54). Women and cultural minorities often do not have the privilege

of viewing themselves as individuals isolated from their gender or racial groups. He

illustrates this condition through her use of Chinese talk story, her mother’s traditional

Chinese perspective and her own personal view as an immigrant. This is expressed in

her novel when she writes, “She cannot gather the courage to speak up against her

racist boss, let alone save her people in China” (63). This clearly shows that the

Americans’ view towards the Chinese immigrants was never spacious and they did

not have courage to abuse them on face. So they spoke with contempt at their backs.

“Silence, both gendered and racially constituted necessity for speech; the discovery of

voice, the construction of identity and the search of self-realization; mother-daughter

relationship and the conflicts that it engenders; memory, acculturation and

biculturation and cultural alienation, these themes are treated here (101). Thus it tries

to shows the conflict between the parents because of identity crisis in the new

homeland.

The migrants voluntarily living in the foreign country suffer from isolation

and estrangement of exile. In this regard, Edward Said tries to focus that however,

some are benefited by their ambiguous status while others, surrounded by the

perpetual feeling of vagrancy, try to mimic in the foreign land the ideologies that

channeled their lives in their homeland. As Edward states:

Ruma, a combination of American modernism and Indian

 Parajuli 16

traditionalism, has succeeded in benefiting out of her ambiguous

identities. She married an American against her parents ‘wish. She

prefers wearing pants and skirts but keeps with her a few saris of her

mother. In her solitude, she always thinks of the abandoned old

acquaintances and the connections she built all those years. She speaks

Bengali over the phone to her relatives, cooks Indian food and at times

eats with her fingers. Like Ruma, her father, who has already started

living the American life, looks more American than Indian in Western

clothes. Akash, as he grows by, overcomes all the ambiguous identities

of her mother, hates Indian food though initially he ate Indian food

prepared by his mother and grandmother. Ruma‘s mother, a traditional

Indian mother seen always in sari, lives throughout as a dependent soul

with a unique identity of an Indian and with a lamentation that there

would be no one to whom to pass on her things. (17)

So, the diasporas, especially of the second generation, tend to be entangled between

the old and the new. Of course some of them can flourish easily, but the mixed culture

and identity somehow compels them to feel dislocated and isolated.

Some scholars even present diasporas as an example of transnational

communities that must also navigate the ever present tension between “Living here”

and simultaneously “remembering there”, and fields both certainly move beyond a

focus on assimilation and how migrants “fit in” to the host country. C. Nagel said that

an idealized conception of what “home” is, and the possibility of return is likewise a

salient feature in both areas of study. Also, both camps utilize the concept ‘imagined

community’ in asserting that the migrants engage in the long distance nationalism, as

they remain involved and engaged in the politics of the home country in same form
 Parajuli 17

.Another connection is that whether in a transnational migrant community or

diasporas, members form a community within which they often never engage in

frequent face to face interactions with each other. He views that one of the things that

makes the current eras is that “modern technology has intensified the rate and extent

of circulation between homeland and migratory destination” (20). It shows the tension

between the people living in one place but remember the place where they born and

focus on assimilation how to fit in others country.

Often quoted definition of diasporas which are “the exemplary communities

of the transnational moment” Khachig Tololian marks the shift from a national

paradigm towards a transnational. That the definition changes and adapts to new

contexts is a natural course of events in the global history of migrations. Diasporas

change due to different geo-historical conditions that shape them. Tololian explains

this phenomenon: Diaspora discourse is being widely appropriated. “It is loose in the

world, for reasons having to do with decolonization, increased immigration, global

communications, and transport – a whole range of phenomena that encourage multi-

locale attachments, dwelling, and travelling within and across nations” (306). It tries

to focus on the list of diasporic features, no society can be expected to qualify on all

counts, throughout its history. And the discourse of diaspora will necessarily be

modified as it is translated and adopted.

It is difficult to homogenize the experiences of diaspora. Diaspora is by no

means a stable formation, and the term is constantly redefined by various diasporic

communities in the world. Stuart Hall describes cultural identity as a production that

“is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, no outside,

representation” (222). It focuses on the diaspora experience as the recognition of the

necessary heterogeneity and diversity, a conception of identity which lives with and
 Parajuli 18

through, not despite, difference by hybridity. Diaspora identities are those which are

constantly producing and reproducing themselves a new, through transformation and

difference.

Hybridity

Hybridity emerged in the 18th century in the context of interracial contact

resulting from overseas conquest and population displacement in Britain, France, and

the United States. Hybrid cultures are phenomena of essential connections in the

present. They emerge from diverse and complex influences. Hybrid cultures are

mergers that combine past and present, local and Trans-local, space and place and

techno cape. Hybridity is expressed in various cultural contexts and in the in-between

spaces of arts, media, science and technology. Under the sign of the digital and the

global, hybridity connotes a cultural manifestation of multiple appearances, as in

cyberspace and multiple selves.

Hale C. states that hybridity took on new meaning in the wake of the

decolonization movements that emerged in the non-west beginning in the 19th

century, and saw their heyday in the post-World War II decades. In Latin America,

for instance, after protracted struggles over nationhood in which some elites attempted

to impose a white European national identity, nation-states adopted mestizaje as their

official ideology in their bids to forge national identities distinct from mere provincial

status in the Spanish Empire. The ideology of mestizaje was an attempt to mitigate

tensions between the indigenous populations and the descendants of Spanish

colonists, by positing the new nations as hybrids of both. However, mestizaje, as

formulated in the Latin American context, is a deeply racialized concept, which

concealed residual imperial relations to the same extent as it celebrated the racial

diversity of the new nation’s hybrid (112).

 Parajuli 19

Consequently, the concept of hybridity questions ideas of purity and

homogeneity and thus opposes essentialist notions of culture or identity; it is, as

Rosaldo R. states, “A key term in that wherever it emerges it suggests the

impossibility of essentialism” (27). He argues along similar lines and points out that

hybridity can be understood as the ongoing condition of all human cultures, which

contain no zones of purity because they undergo continuous processes of trans-

acculturation. Ultimately, he radically concludes that “Instead of hybridity versus

purity, this view suggests that it is hybridity all the way down. From this perspective,

one must explain how ideological zones of cultural purity, whether of national culture

or ethnic resistance, have been constructed” (15). So, hybridity exists even in the so

called pure culture and cultural spheres. It exists as there have always been the

cultural exchanges between or among different cultural groups throughout the process

of civilization.

It is this “active moment of challenge and resistance against a dominant

cultural power,’’ then, which Homi K. Bhabha conceptualizes as, “Hybridity thus

becomes a ‘third space’ between colonizer and colonized that effects the hybridization

of both parties rather than embracing both in however explosive a mixture. In doing

so, this ‘third space’ “enables other positions to emerge and displaces the histories

that constitute it” (126). So, hybridity is not imposed by the colonizers. Even the

colonizers have to adapt the culture of the colonized. In this case, hybrid is both

colonizer and colonized. He traces the word hybridity and its meaning to 19th

century’s attitudes towards race and thinking and obsession with miscegenation as

well as to the emergence of pidgin languages in the colonies, in his magisterial study

of early colonial interactions and the roots to contemporary images of racial and

cultural differences. He shows that the defining feature of culture is difference that
 Parajuli 20

"culture never stands alone but always participates in conflictual economy acting

out the tension between sameness and difference" (53). He talks that culture was

a mixture of two species, whether animals or human beings, as different races were

conceptualized as different species, and the state of hybridity was strongly associated

with degeneration, infertility and sterility.

Second Generation

In immigrant, the word first generation means the people who have actually

immigrated to a host country. On the other hand, the second generation diaspora

usually means the children who are born in a host country to immigrant parents. Alba

Richard and Mary C. Waters , contend that, “The term second generation is often

taken in a broad sense to encompass the children who grow up in immigrant homes,

whether they are born in the receiving society or enter it at a young age” (1). Going by

the above definition of the second generation diaspora, we can surmise that, those

children who are born outside the receiving society, America, but come to America

owing to immigration at a very young age, usually twelve years or earlier, receive

their education and grow up in America can also be termed as the second generation.

The second generation diaspora’s lives are embedded in a number of issues

which exercise a profound effect not only on their lives but also on the lives of their

parents. The second generation diaspora’s relationship with their parents is an

important and significant facet of their lives. For many Indians living in India, they

are the fortunate young generation. Pravin Sheth states that “For their parents, they

are the source of joy and hope as well as a difficult generation to raise and handle”

(54). It is amply clear from this observation, that, though the children of the

immigrant generation are source of “joy” and “hope” for their parents yet, it appears

that, the parents find it extremely difficult to deal with the children who are born and
 Parajuli 21

raised in America. This, it is important to bear in mind, is primarily because the

second generation children are exposed to the American way of a liberal life all the

time outside their home and hence they find it very difficult to accept and abide by the

strict and conservative views of their immigrant parents. In such a situation, friction

and conflict with their parents is inevitable.

The second generation diaspora, also grow up hearing the numerous anecdotes

of their parents which help them not only to identify with and relate to, but also to

have a secondary interaction with the land of their parents. However, it is interesting

to bear in mind the fact that though the second generation diaspora considers India to

be their country of origin, they do not feel the same sense of belonging towards India

as their parents. The second generation’s relationship with its homeland, i.e.,

America, is of great significance in their lives. Portes Alejandro and Rumbaut Ruben

elucidate the fact that, “Immigrants always have a point of reference in the countries

they left behind, and if they are unsuccessful, they can go back. Many actually return

home on their own after accumulating sufficient resources. In contrast, the U.S.-born

second generation grows up American, and the vast majority are here to stay” (17).

However, at this point it is important to bear in mind that, though the second

generation subjects are born or raised in America, at times they harbor ambivalent

feelings towards America.

The relationship of the second generation with the first generation by Padma

Rangaswamy points that “Indian “values” were constantly cited as the sacred mantra,

they were asked to accept them unquestioningly, and to defer to parental authority.

They wanted to decide things for themselves … The youth could not identify with

India or feel the same sense of belonging and closeness to the old country as their

parents did” (190). Such differences in views and opinions at times, lead to strained
 Parajuli 22

relations between the two generations. However, the second generation also realizes

that their parents are hardworking and willing to make sacrifices for their children.

Relationship of the second generation diaspora with their parents or the first

generation immigrants forms a central part of their lives. The younger generation, we

note, often appears to be in loggerheads with their parents. According to Madhulika

Khandelwal, “Marriage continued to be pivotal for Indian immigrants in the United

States. Indeed, in an alien culture and society, arranged marriage for the first

generation was an efficacious way to maintain continuity and stability” (151).

However, for the younger generation, marriage concerns their own lives and hence

they want it to be their own personal choice and desire that “They found themselves

caught between American values, which stereotyped and derided arranged marriage

as a restrictive social practice, and the values of their own parents, for whom arranged

marriage, including in most cases their own, was the central mechanism for

maintaining stable family life” (152). This state of mixed cultural sphere compels the

second generation diasporas to feel being nowhere. Neither they can adapt completely

new culture nor can they follow the old culture properly.
 Parajuli 23

Chapter 3

Indian American Identity in Unaccustomed Earth

Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth mainly focuses on the lives of the first

and second generation Indian immigrants who have settled in America. The characters

of these stories face the challenges of belonging to two different cultures and strive to

maintain ties to both cultures. The second generation Indian immigrants find

themselves caught between the culture and traditional values of their immigrant

parents and the mainstream culture of the American society they live in. In most of

these stories home and family has a crucial role in the formation and the development

of Indian American identity. Migrant families maintain their ethnicity through

preservation of the native language, religions and cultural traditions. Family, being a

visible social institution, its choice and representation allows the immigrants to

embrace or reject one of their confusing identities, either Indian or American.

This topic tries to focus that the characters are identified as how they suffer

from the loss of a traditional culture, death of a family member, the sense of

rootlessness, double consciousness and generation conflicts. In order to survive in a

American society, they begin to internalize the prejudice and values against the

minorities and see themselves as inferior. Their mind begins to shape by the

stereotypes from the main society. In the title story Unaccustomed Earth, Ruma a

thirty eight year old Indian American woman has just moved to Seattle with her

husband. She has a three year old son Akash. The sudden death of her mother makes

Ruma feel traumatic. Ruma and her mother have very close relationship with each

other so she is often nostalgic and recalls her childhood. She remembers the identity

of her mother what she had done in Indian culture. After her mother’s death she feels

that she has no way to return to traditional culture. She also feels very worried as her
 Parajuli 24

father offers to visit her because she is afraid that her father will move to live with

her. “Ruma feared that her father would become a responsibility, an added demand,

continuously present in a way she was no longer used to” (Lahiri 7). It means she

created her family in her own way but when there is the presence of her father she

thinks that he will try to bring his traditional ideas in her family. Ruma is torn

between the claims of the two cultures, the Bangali culture that she inherited, and the

mainstream American culture that she willfully accepted. She was forced neither by

her father nor Adam to make any choice. So the existence between Indian and

American culture is a continuous reconciliation between them.

According to Bengali culture, people enjoy an extended family where parents

and children live together to care for each other. Children should take then

responsibility to take care of their parents when they grow up. But many years of

independent life in America has deprived her of the traditional Bengali culture. She

feels that she has lost her Indian culture. She has married a white man against her

parent’s decision. She chooses to wear western clothes instead of Indian clothes given

by her mother. She forgets to use Bengali language because of using foreign English

language which becomes a stranger to her own culture. Ruma, both marrying a white

guy and loss of her identity originate from a sense of self-hate, an inferiority complex

a suffering. Hema and Kaushik both of them suffer from trauma because of their

rootlessness. But for Hema the suffering is only mourning because she can have a

negotiation with her past, but for Kaushik he can’t work through his loss in the past so

he becomes a person who always lives in the melancholy situation and dies at last.

The story recounts their initiation from young children to mature people, the

association between two families and the tragic love story between them. The two

families of Hema and Kaushik get to know each other when they are living as
 Parajuli 25

Bengali-Americans community in Boston. The conversation between Kaushik and his

neighbor depict the rootlessness Kaushik suffers from. Kaushik try to find out to

wander place and countries but fails to settles down. His state of mind could not make

peace with any place when he can call home. From his childhood he is living

temporary everywhere the only reason is he never settled down. His mother dies of

breast cancer when he was died. His father marries again and started new life. He

seems to be lacking the emotion of the human being and finally he died in Thailand.

Diasporic Study of Unaccustomed Earth

The diasporic experience of the central characters in the story is multiple as

the sense of exile, alienation, uprooted, continues to overwhelm them. The traditional

family relationship in the Ruma’s Bengali household is getting diluted with her

mother’s death, Ruma’s absence and her father’s solitary life. It is the garden

metaphor in the story that brings Ruma and her father deeply ponders over their

intricate life-concerns and predicaments. Gardening is an excellent way to bring

families together to build their emotional ties, giving an opportunity to share and learn

together. Ruma’s father lived alone. She was not familiar with her surroundings and

had only a peripheral knowledge of her life in America. It is a clear indication of lack

of intimacy in relationship, which is a diasporic experience in transition. The selling

of old house thereby wiping out her mother’s memory had been painful to Ruma.

Unaccustomed Earth portrays the problems and traumas that the second and

third generation Indian immigrants face. They are the products of a hybrid culture and

goes through alienation and miscommunication. The characters Lahiri created seems

to have failed relationships, broken family ties, rootlessness, double identity problem,

conflicts between two generations. Unaccustomed Earth examines the difficulties that

the central characters have in incorporating and relocating their identities to a place
 Parajuli 26

which is more privileged than their origins. These characters have dual identities but

they are not able to enjoy this status. Most of them are deeply troubled by the

complicated and unresolved issues connected to their hybrid state. Here the marriages

are mixed or inter cultural marriage. By marriage and relationships these two different

types of people from diverse socio cultural backgrounds are getting united.

Eventually, issues like miscommunication and detachment recurring into their lives.

Ruma, the protagonist in the story Unaccustomed Earth, suffers from double

displacement after moving to Seattle. Her feelings correspond to the loss experienced

by migrants; not only has she been “eternally banished” from her homeland India,

being a second-generation immigrant, but now she has also given up everything

familiar to her in America. In spite of not experiencing migrancy herself, Ruma’s

personality has been shaped by migration history. Ruma’s Bengali is halting and she

wears Western clothes, but, like her father, she carries loss and regret with her that

cannot be shaken. Ruma was close with her mother, and has defined her own cultural

identity in juxtaposition to her mother’s. She appears to have taken her mother’s

circumstances as a warning against what not to do, and always aimed for the opposite:

to have a career, to be self-reliant, to choose love over obligation.

As Ruma puts it: “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” (Lahiri 11).

Ruma is at a loss. Ruma has associated many of the aspects of her mother’s life –

staying at home to raise children, never cutting corners with Bengali traditions,

always attending to her husband’s needs first – as cultural traits rather than individual

choices. Ruma is shocked to find herself in a similar situation now, in spite of having

lead a life of more opportunities and equality as a woman. In addition, the

 Parajuli 27

displacement she feels in Seattle after spending most of her life on the East Coast is

probably not unlike what her mother felt during her first years in the United States.

Ruma is depressed and suffered from an identity crisis, resulting from the

confusion of being in a similar situation as her mother, and at the same time, unable to

fully identify with her mother. “She was struck by the degree to which her father

resembled an American in his old age. With his grey hair and fair skin he could have

been practically from anywhere. It was her mother who would have stuck out in this

wet Northern landscape, in her brightly colored saris, her dime-sized maroon bindi,

her jewels” (Lahiri 11). Ruma’s father is still alive and well, yet her main link to

Bengali culture has been her mother. Ruma even points out how American her father

new looks”. Everything Ruma knows about Indian culture has been passed on to her

by her mother; Ruma feels disadvantaged that she cannot do the same for her son –

Ruma’s cultural heritage has been diluted from one generation to the next, and she

feels guilty and sad for her involvement in this dilution: “When Akash was younger

she had followed her mother’s advice to get him used to the taste of Indian food and

made the effort to poach chicken and vegetables with cinnamon and cardamom and

clove. Now he ate from boxes” (Lahiri 23). Ruma’s language skills are a good

measure of the extent of her Indian identity, or lack thereof: “Bengali had never been

a language in which she felt like an adult” (Lahiri 12). So, the enforcement from the

parents compels the second generation diasporas to adopt the mixed culture.

Her mother had been very strict regarding the use of Bengali at home, but her

father had not minded her speaking English. This, again, is an illustration of how the

burden of cultural transmission appears to be the duty of the mother, also according to

Lahiri’s experience. In addition to mourning her mother and losing the link to Bengali

culture, Ruma is burdened by guilt of not having asked her father to move in with her
 Parajuli 28

family, and not really wanting to: She knew that her father did not need taking care of,

and yet this very fact caused her to feel guilty; in India, there would have been no

question of his not moving in with her. Ruma feared that her father would become a

responsibility, an added demand, continuously present in a way she was no longer

used to. It would mean an end to the family she’d created on her own. Ruma’s

relationship with her parents has been loving but complicated. She had always felt

“unfairly cast, by both her parents, into roles that weren’t accurate: as her father’s

oldest son, her mother’s secondary spouse” (Lahiri 36). Ruma’s feelings reflect the

different expectations for boys and girls in Indian culture – traditionally, oldest sons

carry a lot of pressure to succeed financially, and it is also their responsibility to look

after the parents in their old age. Ruma’s parents’ marriage was happy enough, but it

had been arranged by their families, and the couple had never been in love with each

other. Ruma’s mother had relied on Ruma to be her ally, and to provide her with the

emotional support she had not received from her husband.

“Only Goodness” highlights how the ultimate embarrassment or cause of

worry for model migrant parents is not their son’s addiction, but the more superficial

issues: his dropping out of college, working at a Laundromat, being arrested for drunk

driving, and dating a white American divorcee. Rahul’s parents fail to admit his

alcoholism, because it is a phenomenon they cannot grasp. What could there possibly

be to be unhappy about? Her parents would have thought. “Depression” was a foreign

word to them, an American thing. In their opinion their children were immune from

the hardships and injustices they had left behind in India, as if the inoculations the

pediatrician had given Sudha and Rahul when they were babies guaranteed them an

existence free of suffering (Lahiri 144). Rahul attempts to deny his ethnicity; Sudha

envies him for his non-Bengali looks, and for people being able to call him Raoul.
 Parajuli 29

Unlike Sudha, he does not feel he has a debt to pay or a dream to fulfill – he does not

feel any obligation towards his parents. He feels entitled to what he has, and exerts his

right to choose for himself. He turns to alcohol first to rebel, then to escape parental

demands and expectations, and eventually finds himself trapped in addiction.

Nostalgia, Alienation and Cultural Conflicts in Unaccustomed Earth

In the title story Unaccustomed Earth, Ruma, Indian American woman, has

just moved to Seattle with her husband. She has a three-year-old son Akash to take

care of, meanwhile waiting for the birth of her second child. The sudden death of her

mother makes Ruma feel traumatic. Ruma and her mother have very close

relationship with each other so she is often nostalgia and recalls her childhood. With

her mother’s death, she feels that she has no way to return to traditional culture. She

also feels very worried as her father offers to visit her because she is afraid that her

father will move in to live with her. Ruma, Usha and Hema are all illustrations of

hybrid cultural identities; they are code-switchers who can alternate between Indian

and American identities according to situational requirements. The stories

demonstrate that this alternation is not always simple or easy, and not necessarily

based on a conscious decision. However, in all of the examples studied here, the

protagonist, who is usually also the focalize at least for the majority of the story,

meets with a crisis that affects her cultural identity.

Supporting existing theory on the role of mothers as cultural transmitters, the

mothers of these three characters play a significant role in the formation of their

daughters’ cultural identities. Ruma experiences a crisis after her mother’s death,

Usha bonds with her mother and finds peace with herself after her mother shares an

experience from her past, and Hema struggles with feelings of inferiority that stem

from her childhood. Ruma, the protagonist in the story “Unaccustomed Earth”, suffers
 Parajuli 30

from double displacement after moving to Seattle. Her feelings correspond to the loss

experienced by migrants; not only has she been “eternally banished” from her

homeland India, being a second-generation immigrant, but now she has also given up

everything familiar to her in America. In spite of not experiencing migrancy herself,

Ruma’s personality has been shaped by migration history.

Ruma’s father is still alive and well, yet her main link to Bengali culture has

been her mother; Ruma even points out how American her father now looks.

Everything Ruma knows about Indian culture has been passed on to her by her

mother; Ruma feels disadvantaged that she cannot do the same for her son – Ruma’s

cultural heritage has been diluted from one generation to the next, and she feels guilty

and sad for her involvement in this dilution: “When Akash was younger she had

followed her mother’s advice to get him used to the taste of Indian food and made the

effort to poach chicken and vegetables with cinnamon and cardamom and clove. Now

he ate from boxes” (Lahiri 23). In addition to mourning her mother and losing the link

to Bengali culture, Ruma is burdened by guilt of not having asked her father to move

in with her family, and not really wanting to. “She knew that her father did not need

taking care of, and yet this very fact caused her to feel guilty; in India, there would

have been no question of his not moving in with her. Ruma feared that her father

would become a responsibility, an added demand, continuously present in a way she

was no longer used to. It would mean an end to the family she’d created on her own”

(Lahiri 6 -7). Ruma’s relationship with her parents has been loving but complicated.

She had always felt “unfairly cast, by both her parents, into roles that weren’t

accurate: as her father’s oldest son, her mother’s secondary spouse” (Lahiri 36).

Ruma’s feelings reflect the different expectations for boys and girls in Indian culture

– traditionally, oldest sons carry a lot of pressure to succeed financially, and it is also
 Parajuli 31

their responsibility to look after the parents in their old age. Ruma’s parents’ marriage

was happy enough, but it had been arranged by their families, and the couple had

never been in love with each other. Ruma’s mother had relied on Ruma to be her ally,

and to provide her with the emotional support she had not received from her husband.

Ruma now lacks the identity she “performed” with her mother – the role of the good

Indian daughter and reliable friend to her mother. However, in his celebration of

performative, hybrid identities, In Ruma’s case, her feelings of displacement have

clearly worsened, and she has sunk into depression. Ruma’s crisis culminates when

she discovers a postcard left behind by her father and addressed to his new travel

partner, Mrs. Bagchi.

“They were sentences her mother would have absorbed in instant, sentences

that proved, with more force than the funeral, more force than all the days since then

that her mother no longer existed. Where had her mother gone, when life persisted,

when Ruma still needed her to explain so many things?” (Lahiri 59). When Ruma

decides, against her first instinct, to post her father’s card to Mrs. Bagchi, she is

finally able to move on emotionally. By letting go of her mother, she is letting go of

her identity as a daughter, and her Bengali identity. However, with this act, Ruma will

be able to “arrive”, to strike down her own roots in Seattle, and embrace her Bengali-

American identity. The choice to move on is a conscious one, made concrete by the

posting of the card.

In “Hell-Heaven”, the narrator, Usha, looks back on her childhood and her

relationship with her mother. Usha feels estranged from Indian culture, and as a child,

could not accept how her mother Aparna attempted to raise her. Having been born in

the United States, Usha is able to “home in” on American culture; it is Indian culture

that feels foreign to her. Usha’s feelings correspond to the second-generation migrant
 Parajuli 32

identity. Deborah is strikingly different from Usha’s mother; Usha explains how she

“fell in love with Deborah, the way young girls often fell in love with women who are

not their mothers” (Lahiri 69). In addition, since Usha’s cultural identity is more

American than Indian, it was easier for her to identify and connect with Deborah

rather than her mother, She gave me the sorts of gifts my parents had neither the

money nor the inspiration to buy. “Deborah and I spoke freely in English, a language

in which, by that age, I expressed myself more easily than Bengali, which I was

required to speak at home” (Lahiri 69). It is painfully clear that Usha considers herself

to be American; her Bengali roots are a hindrance and an embarrassment.

Like Ruma, Usha too is no longer fluent in her mother tongue, and prefers to

speak English. She identifies with the Americans around her, and feels she has very

little in common with other Bengalis. Usha describes thanksgiving dinner at Deborah

and Pranab’s house. “As soon as I saw Deborah’s siblings joking with one another as

they chopped and stirred things in the kitchen, I was furious with my mother for

making a scene before we left the house and forcing me to wear a shalwar kameez. I

knew they assumed, from my clothing, that I had more in common with the other

Bengalis than with them” (Lahiri 78). Usha’s story demonstrates how her relationship

with her mother affects her cultural identity in its entirety – She represents all that is

Indian to Usha. Due to the difficult relationship between mother and daughter, Usha

rejects not only her mother, but also her ethnicity.

When Aparna eventually begins to feel more at home in the United States, her

relationship with Usha improves that; My mother and I had also made peace; she had

accepted the fact that I was not only her daughter but a child of America as well.

Slowly, she accepted that “I dated one American man, and then another, and then yet

another, that I slept with them, and even that I lived with one though we were not
 Parajuli 33

married. She welcomed my boyfriends into our home and when things didn’t work

out she told me I would find someone better. After years of being idle, she decided,

when she turned fifty, to get a degree in library science at a nearby university” (Lahiri

82). The narrator Usha was deeply attracted by the American lifestyle. Se she grew

up, she copied the American traits. Even she also drinks alcohol and kept boyfriends

also. There is no clash in her mind and heart. In the end, her mother has to adjust to

the fact that her daughter is not only a child of India but a child of America as well.

They have not shown the traditional Indian morals and values as such there are no

conflicts in their minds between East and West.

Sudha, the protagonist in “Only Goodness”, has been assigned the role of

cultural translator by her parents, and has voluntarily assumed the part of surrogate

mother for her younger brother Rahul. Sudha feels that as a child of immigrants, she

had slipped through the cracks of nationality and suffered for it, and now wanted to

ensure that her brother would “leave his mark as a child in America” (Lahiri 136). She

made sure he received “all the right toys”, and books she had been read by her first

teachers. Wanting to spare her brother from a sense of displacement, Sudha attempts

to pave the way for Rahul into an unbroken, American cultural identity. Most of

Sudha’s life, her focus has been on the well-being of others – of her parents and her

brother. This focus begins to shift once Sudha is accepted to do a second master’s

degree at the London School of Economics. London was where her parents had first

moved to from India; Sudha had been born in England. Photos from those years

illustrated that at one time her parents had appeared to be fond of each other instead of

the indifference they expressed now, and had still been intrigued and pleased by their

surroundings. Weariness towards their life sentence of feeling foreign had set in once

they had moved to Wayland.

 Parajuli 34

They relied on their children, on Sudha especially. “It was she who had to

explain to her father that had to gather up the leaves in bags, not just drag them with

his rake to the woods opposite the house. She, with her perfect English, who called

the repair department at Lechmere to have their appliances serviced. Rahul never

considered it his duty help their parents this way” (Lahiri 138). Sudha acts as a

translator between her parents and America, explaining norms and customs, and

ensuring that their family home is not an eyesore in the neighborhood. However,

Sudha has inherited her parents’ displacement, and in spite of being culturally fluent

in the United States, she never feels entirely at home.

The years that her family spent in London before Rahul was born represent a

happier time for her. Moving back to London offers Sudha the opportunity to

experience familiarity and freedom simultaneously. She was excited to be in London,

curious to know the land of her birth. Before leaving she had applied for her British

passport, a document her parents had not obtained for her when she was born, and

when she presented it at Heathrow the immigration officer welcomed her home.

Perhaps because it was her birthplace, she felt an instinctive connection to London, a

sense of belonging though she barely knew her way around. In spite of the ocean that

now separated her from her parents, she felt closer to them, but she also felt free, for

the first time in her life, of her family’s weight.

As her actual place of birth, London offers Sudha the possibility to truly

belong somewhere. Her readiness to accept London as home illustrates her need to

have roots, to originate somewhere. As a child of immigrants in America, she is stuck

in the in-between; “feeling neither here nor there, unable to indulge in sentiments of

belonging to either place devoid of the rightful claims to belong” (Lahiri 214). In

seeking refuge in a third location, Sudha’s dilemma of displacement is at least partly

 Parajuli 35

solved, and her exiled existence ends with her ability to return “home”. London

connects her with her parents in a special way, since they had lived there as a family

before Rahul, the favorite, was born.

Being in London also offers Sudha the opportunity to focus on her own needs,

and to put herself first. For her, however, moving does not merely provide an escape

from family, or from displacement felt in the United States, but it signifies a return to

the original homeland. Amit is the protagonist in the only story of the collection that

is written entirely from a male perspective, “A Choice of Accommodations”. He is the

son of Indian, cosmopolitan parents, who sent him to boarding school at the age of

fifteen, and he has felt estranged from them since. This traumatic experience has left

him with a fear of abandonment, now targeted towards his wife and children. “In each

of these scenarios, he saw himself surviving, the girls perishing under his supervision.

Megan would blame him, naturally, and then she would divorce him, and all of it, his

life with her and the girls, would end. A brief glance in the wrong direction, he knew,

would toss his existence over a cliff” (Lahiri 91). Amit is a classic representative of

Lahiri’s second-generation characters in his ambivalence towards routine; he is easily

bored and dissatisfied, yet craves security and stability. His main source of security is

his marriage to Megan; yet at the same time, Megan’s success as a doctor, absences

due to her profession, and ability to be more at ease with their daughters causes Amit

to feel inferior and even resent her. He admits to occasionally feeling as lonely as he

did in boarding school.

There was no escape at the end of the day, and though he admitted it to no

one, especially not his parents when they called from Delhi every weekend, he was

crippled with homesickness, missing his parents to the point where tears often filled

his eyes, in those first months, without warning. He learned to live without his mother
 Parajuli 36

and father, as everyone else did, shedding his daily dependence on them though he

was still a boy, and even to enjoy it. Still, he refused to forgive them (Lahiri 97).

Traditional male and female roles are reversed in Megan and Amit’s marriage; he is

the one who works regular hours, and spends more time at home with their little girls.

The role reversal highlights spousal loneliness, as Amit confesses to feelings more

often heard from wives whose husbands have demanding jobs. Amit’s attitude also

shows that he has not inherited a Bengali cultural identity, but has the mind-set of a

modern American man.

“Only Goodness” is a story of alcoholism in the family. As the only son to

Bengali parents, Rahul is under a lot of pressure to succeed. At the same time, every

effort has been made by his parents and his sister Sudha to ease his life. Sudha,

especially having stood out as a child of immigrants among her classmates, wanted to

make sure that Rahul got the perfect American childhood. ‘She told her parents to set

up sprinklers on the lawn for him to run through in the summer, and she convinced

her father to put up a swing set in the yard. She thought up elaborate Halloween

costumes, turning him into an elephant or a refrigerator, while hers had come from

boxes, a flimsy apron and a weightless mask’ (Lahiri 136). The American culture

seems to be so attractive and full of glamour for the younger generation of India

replicate and accept it almost blindly. Rahul to alcoholism, later on she attempts to

free him from his habit. She wants to give an American culture to her younger

brother, which she did not get in her childhood, by purchasing toys, making separate

room for him, providing a swing set in the yard etc.

Generation Gap and Transnational Identity in Unaccustomed Earth

The collection spotlights on the second generation children of the immigrants

have been nurtured in two cultures and have often married non-Indians. As they have
 Parajuli 37

started of their own, they have to fight both with tense filial relationships and the

burden of parenthood. The clash of two cultures has been added to the gap between

the two generations. Almost each story deals with children who struggle to fulfill their

parent’s traditional expectations as well as the cultural demands of their American

peers. In “Unaccustomed Earth” Ruma’s mother lived throughout her life in America

in her brightly colored saris, along with marooned bindi and jewels. She displeased

and fumed over Ruma’s wearing jeans. However, Ruma feels at ease in paints and

skirts. “The more they grow, the less they seem to resemble either parent as the text

remarks; they spoke differently, dressed differently, seemed foreign in every way,

from the texture of their hair to the shapes of their feet and hands” (54). In the case of

Ruma’s father, a widower, at seventy falls in love with a Bengali lady. He manages to

look like an American, who was often wearing a baseball cap that POMPEII, brown

cotton pants with a sky blue polo shirt, and a pair of white leather sneakers.

However, Ruma’s mother had vigorously pursued Indian clothes and jewelry.

For the next generation, the adaptation was easier, for being born in their parents’ host

land they were far removed from any emotional attachment to their supposed

homeland India. After her mother’s death Ruma circulated the saris among her

mother’s friends keeping only three for her. As the text narrates; “And she

remembered the many times her mother had predicted this very moment, lamenting

the fact that her daughter preferred pants and skirts to the clothing she wore, that there

would be no one to whom to pass on her things” (Lahiri 17). These lines actually

speaking of material things signify more. The first generation found no takers among

their children, of neither material nor cultural inheritance. The chain process of

heritage through generations ended at this point. The emotional outcome was pain and

nervousness for the first generation and irrelevant and indifferent for the second
 Parajuli 38

generation. For the next generation, the alienation is severe and strange. Unlike their

parents who share through community activities, they are introverts, having no

common grounds and they cannot open up to their parents.

‘Only Goodness’ the host land is a ‘conceptual outside’. However, do Ruma,

Sudha or Rahul feels themselves ‘inside’? For the diaspora, the stay may be

multigenerational, but they remain outsiders in the eye of indigenous. For the

‘insiders’, even if they are attracted towards the members of the Indian diaspora, it is

only because they carry an impression of a strange, mysterious land. “The

generational gap on the issue of language and dress code also been dealt in the story.

Usha a second generation expatriate feels at home in English as she informs;

‘Deborah and I spoke freely in English, a language in which, by that age, I expressed

myself more easily than Bengali, which I was required to speak at home” (Lahiri 69).

It shows that certain facts behind the lives of Indian immigrants in America in quest

of identity and happiness. Usha is so deep in the language relationship that she forget

her own identity of Bengali language and feel free to talk in English rather than

Bengali.

The first generation never concerns to master the master the grammar of the

language of their adopted land despite their stay there for a quite long time. In the

matter of dress, Usha is too enraged with her mother for making a scene before they

left the house for Pranab-Deborah’s home on the occasion of thanksgiving party as

she forced to wear shalwar kameez. “I was furious with my mother for making a

scene before we left the house and forcing me to wear a shalwar kameez” (Lahiri 78).

She was reluctant to do for an outing with her peer group in Indian dress as she felt at

ease in the jeans. As far as socializing is concerned we see that in contrast to Mrs.

Bagchi, Usha’s mother discouraged her daughter from freely mixing with American
 Parajuli 39

peers. She did not permit her to spend more time in dancing and singing songs at

Deborah’s marriage celebration. She was disguised and dejected at the thought of her

child being Americans.

Ruma is struggling between the sense of self and filial responsibility,

American civilization and inherited Bengali roots. She enjoys the bliss of American

individualism concerning the important decisions of education, marriage, job and

finally her way of life. However, there is a pull of innate culture and value system of

her parents’ homeland in her consciousness, creates stress within her and puts her in

an identity crisis. It is because of this pull; she favored to imitate her mother’s

lifestyle of a homemaker. “Growing up, her mother’s example moving to foreign

place for the sake of marriage, caring exclusively for children and a household- had

served as a warning, a path to avoid. This was Ruma’s life now” (Lahiri 11). Ruma

was exhausted by her household work with the lack of mother’s helpful guidance. Her

social alienation and her isolation lead to unhappiness and dissatisfaction. The death

of mother proved a great shock to her and brought a great effect on her married life

and feels the sense of emptiness in her life.

Intergenerational and Marital Problems

In the title story of Unaccustomed Earth, Ruma realizes that she has never had

any real communication with her widowed father, who now spends his time making

the best of his freedom from any family responsibilities and traveling around Europe,

which he had never been to before. But when Ruma invites him to visit her family in

their new place in the eastern suburbs of Seattle, a potentially explosive situation is

generated. On the one hand, she is afraid that because she and Adam, her husband,

have now spare rooms in the house, her father might decide to accept her offer to stay

to live with them:

 Parajuli 40

Ruma feared that her father would become a responsibility, an added

demand, continuously present in a way she was no longer used to. It

would mean an end to the family she’d created on her own: herself and

Adam and Akash, and the second child that would come in January,

conceived just before the move. She couldn’t imagine tending to her

father as her mother had, serving the meals her mother used to prepare.

(Lahiri 7)

On the other hand, because of the aforementioned communication problem between

the two, Ruma is not sure she will be able to cope with his criticism of the new

direction that her life is taking: She had never been able to confront her father freely,

the way she used to fight with her mother.

Somehow, she feared that any difference of opinion would chip away at the

already frail bond that existed between them” (Lahiri 37). It shows the father-daughter

relationship increases in tension during the visit, particularly when Ruma is forced to

recognize that her marriage is also stilted or when she discovers that her father is

having a secret affair with another Indian woman during his journeys around Europe.

Still, the brief sojourn is not without some tender moments of mutual understanding,

that allow both characters to come to terms with some feelings that had been

tormenting them, especially in connection with their deceased mother and wife,

respectively.

Helped mainly by three-year-old Akash and the old man’s fondness of

gardening, the two find ways to come out with some truths that they had foolishly

kept for too long from each other: “These days with Akash have been the greatest

gift,” he added, his voice softening. “If you like, I can come for a while after you have

the baby. I won’t be as useful as your mother would have been.” “That’s not true.”
 Parajuli 41

“But please understand, I prefer to stay on my own. I am too old now to make such a

shift” (Lahiri 56). Indeed, it is clear that the relationship between Ruma and her father

would have been completely different if, after her mother’s unexpected demise, either

of them had reached out for the other in search of emotional support and

understanding. Yet neither of them takes that first step to speak about the late mother

or the brother in the family, or Ruma’s difficult marriage and her second pregnancy,

or, for that matter, her father’s new life as a widower.

Very much the same could be argued about the narrator’s mother in “Hell-

Heaven”. Usha conjures up images of the loveless marriage and socio-cultural

isolation that her mother must have experienced in Boston when she was a child. “He

brought to my mother the first and, I suspect, the only pure happiness she ever felt. I

don’t think even my birth made her as happy. I was evidence of her marriage to my

father, an assumed consequence of the life she had been raised to lead. But Pranab

Kaku was different. He was the one totally unanticipated pleasure in her life” (Lahiri

67). Here silent is only partly relieved by the appearance of a young Bengali

immigrant, Pranab Chakraborty, who is accepted as part of the family out of co-ethnic

sympathy.

Of course, when Pranab meets an American student at Radcliffe and begins to

bring her over to their place, it does not take long for Usha’s mother to show clear

signs of resentment. At first, the narrator is unable to understand why her mother

should prove so critical and mean toward Deborah, who was polite, well-educated,

and much more fun than any of their other friends. When she gets to middle school,

though, the reality of her mother’s life starts to dawn upon Usha: “I began to pity my

mother; the older I got, the more I saw what a desolate life she led. She had never

worked, and during the day she watched soap operas to pass the time. Her only job,
 Parajuli 42

every day, was to clean and cook for my father and me” (Lahiri 76). Usha’s mother

keeps to herself her own suffering and that fact dooms her to a wasted existence. She

only gathers enough courage to reveal the whole truth to her daughter –a suicidal

attempt included– when the latter comes to her recounting how her own heart has

been broken by a man she had hoped to marry. All things considered, the reader is not

so sure that Usha’s mother real problem is related to the fact that she was born in a

distant country, since her experiences replicate those of many US-born women.

It is important to explain, though, that there were a number of earlier

connections between Usha’s mother and Pranab Kaku which obviously predisposed

them to spend time together: “They had in common all the things that she and my

father did not: a love of music, film, leftist politics, poetry. They were from the same

neighborhood in North Calcutta, their family homes within walking distance, the

facades familiar to them once the exacts locations were described. They knew the

same shops, the same bus and tram routes, the same holes-in-the-wall for the best

jelabis and moghlai parathas” (Lahiri 64). This tries to show the dilemma of

individuals attempting to establish their identity in the diaspora, looking for the

emotional fulfillment. Pranab and Deborah, both are from India have a good

relationship even if Deborah had already married. Most of the immigrated for

economic reasons, they required to live in between culture of their homeland and

adopted home.

“A Choice of Accommodations” also tells the story of a flawed marriage, but

in this case it is mixed and it has not been arranged by others. Amit and Megan have

been married for eight years and they jump on the opportunity of having been invited

to a wedding to drop their two daughters with Megan’s parents and to enjoy a

“carefree” weekend. It soon transpires, however, that the couple come to the
 Parajuli 43

celebration with too many resentments and insecurities for their exciting prospects to

come to their fruition. In the case of Amit, there are several chapters of his earlier life

that will come alive again when he and his wife reach the grounds of Langford

Academy, a boarding school he had attended as a teenager and that now is going to be

the setting of an old friend’s wedding.

We learn, for example, that he was severely traumatized when his parents

dropped him at the school and went to Delhi, where his father had been given a good

position in a hospital. “He learned to live without his mother and father, as everyone

else did, shedding his daily dependence on them even though he was still a boy, and

even to enjoy it. Still he refused to forgive them” (Lahiri 97). It is unclear whether his

parents’ untimely abandonment, his unfulfilling professional life, his fondness of

solitude or his wife’s successful career should be blamed for the growing distance

between the couple, but it is evident that Amit is finding it increasingly difficult to go

on with the masquerade.

“Megan had not been part of it. She lived in the apartment, she slept in his

bed, her heart belonged to no one but him and the girls, and yet there were times Amit

felt as alone as he had first been at Langford. And there were times when he hated

Megan, simply for this” (Lahiri 114). It seems propitious to having mutual feelings

unburdened, particularly after Amit leaves the party in search of a payphone to call

their daughters never to return. Megan took a step toward him, looking at the shirt that

clung coldly to his body, then directly into his eyes. “What, then? Something passed

between you two, it’s obvious.” “It was nothing, Megan. We were friends and for a

while I had a crush on her. But nothing happened. Is that so terrible? “The

information fell between them, valuable for the years he’d kept it from her, negligible

now that he’d told. Through the window he saw the workmen in the rain, folding up
 Parajuli 44

the chairs and stacking them onto a cart” (Lahiri 125). Amit and Megan are a mixed

couple seems of limited relevance to the outcome of their story, since there are other

factors related to their jobs, family responsibilities, and past experiences that

condition much more decisively their attitudes and behavior. It shows that the place to

which they feel the strongest attachment isn’t necessarily the country they’re tied to

by blood or birth.
 Parajuli 45

Chapter 4

Lost Identity in Unaccustomed Earth

Unaccustomed Earth is a clear picture of multiculturalism and hybridity, or a

model migrant story. It is a collection of short stories rich in dysfunctional families,

disappointments, unrealistic expectations, losses, unrequited love and missed

opportunities. Lahiri’s themes may be universal, but her perspective belongs to that of

diaspora individuals. Her characters’ displacement is the result of migration, and their

problems often the result of symptomatic behavior as they attempt to come to terms

with their dislocation. It is related to the experiences of Indian diaspora communities

have created a very popular and huge body of literature. Their experiences of moving

out of the borders of the homeland are necessarily similar in that they are displaced

from a homeland that is connected to language, religion and a sense of cultural

belonging.

In Unaccustomed Earth, the first-generation characters still view India as their

home. Bengali customs are maintained at home, and they visit India regularly, and

raise their children according to Indian norms. This is not to say that all first-

generation characters would be plagued with a constant longing for India or inability

to settle down in the United States. Primary immigrants, the instigators of family

migrancy, and in Lahiri’s stories usually the husbands, are consoled by the

satisfaction they take in their work, as well as their upward economic mobility.

However, as illustrated by Ruma’s father in the story, path of a migrant has not been

an easy one, and is instead filled with guilt and regret. The title story illustrates the

epigraph in a very concrete manner: Ruma’s father plants a flower garden in his

daughter’s backyard, including, symbolically, a hydrangea to honor his dead wife that

would bloom pink or blue depending on the soil. His young grandson plants a garden
 Parajuli 46

of his own, burying legos, wooden building blocks, a rubber ball and a pencil into the

ground. Increased affluence and a higher social status have come at a high cost to

secondary immigrants, wives and children. The position of wives in Lahiri’s stories is

perhaps the hardest. Violently yanked from their natal families and everything they

know, they often lack basic skills that would enable them to feel more at home in the

United States. Not having any personal motivation for migration (apart from

accompanying their husbands), they are slow to build networks and put down roots in

their new environment. Their social network mainly consists of other Bengali wives,

which helps them in learning daily routines, but keeps them apart from the culture of

the host land. They still refer to India as home, and live for visits to their old home

country.

In the last few decades, issues related to the experiences of Indian diaspora

communities have created a very popular and huge body of literature. However, each

case is somewhat particular because every diaspora identity, regardless their

generation, copes with the situation in different ways. In her short stories, Lahiri

shows the struggles and problems Bengali migrants face in America not only when

they interact with the host land but also the issues within the family and the inner

turmoil. As shown in the dissertation, the issues of origin and identity are never

completely defined in these diasporic identities because their location, sense of

belonging, and cultural affiliations are not always congruent. She rather focuses on

the family relationships and the different ways of coping with displacement.

Therefore, throughout the analysis of the two short stories by the Indian American, it

has been demonstrated how the individuals who have left the mother country are

affected by such a move, struggling to adapt and interact.

The protagonists of the short stories fight against their feeling of loss by
 Parajuli 47

forging a new identity which merges features of the mother culture and the new

culture, creating this way a hybrid identity. The act of physically migrating may be a

decision many people regret, but everybody takes decisions at some point in life

which have an impact on future generations. Once decision is made, they cannot be

reversed. It depends on oneself to make the best of the situation and change the fixed

views of the world. The hybridity of the characters from the stories directs attention to

the idea of multiculturalism- celebration of cultural diversity and preservation of

one’s ethnic roots.

 Parajuli 48

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