The Immigrant Experience in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Unaccustomed Earth

Pages:93-96
Manjeet (Department of English, Adarsh Mahila Mahavidyalaya, Bhiwani, Haryana)

Since its inception, Indian-English literature has been predominantly influenced by the cross-cultural interaction. This is primarily for two reasons: firstly, India being a colony of the British, directly received a great amount of Western influence; secondly, most of the Indo-Anglian writers have either spent a considerably long period in the West or settled there permanently. As such, they experience the tinge of two entirely different cultures and often find themselves torn apart between the cultures of the land they adopt as their new home and the land they have left behind. This diasporic experience imbues in them a potential to depict authentically in their works the inherent dilemma which forms the centre of this cross-cultural interaction. It further enables them to convey to the reader their responses and reactions to such a situation. All notable writers belonging to the first generation of Indian-English authors Sri Aurobindo, Sarojini Naidu, Toru Dutt, Rabinder Nath Tagore, Nirad C. Chaudhary, Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan, Raja Rao, Bhabani Bhattacharya etc. at one time or the other went to Europe and apart from getting some new insights in social, cultural and political fields, they reflected in their writings the poignant emotional experiences of the Indian Diaspora