Negotiating Borders of Culture:Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction

In Indian English Literature:A Critical Survey 1980-2000, M.K. Naik and Shyamala A. Narain praise Jhumpa Lahiri for creating “history in becoming the first Indian author to win prestigious Pulitzer Prize in the USA for her collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies.” (1999: 36) Though Jhumpa Lahiri belongs to the second generation of an Indian family abroad, she retains her links with India even today, as amply proved by her subsequent work in the form of a critically-acclaimed novel, The Namesake (2003). In her work, Indians going abroad negotiate the borders and fringes of a foreign society in various ways and seek to establish their identity on alien shores. It is this movement across continents and cultures that I intend to map here.