The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri  was born Nilanjana Sudeshna. She made her literary debut with a collection of short stories called Interpreter of Maladies that got her a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2000. The Namesake was a novel released in 2003 that captured the immigrant experience and in some sense branded Jhumpa as the patron saint of what is called “immigrant writing” – a term she is a little queasy about. The Namesake became a film by Mira Nair. You have to remember that this was only the author’s second book. The story described vividly the difficulty of assimilating into a new culture. This is a scenario Jhumpa is very familiar with and describes with the authenticity very few can match.Unaccustomed Earth had eight short stories around the issues that immigrants face in their adopted home. The Lowland is her fourth literary work. The book has been shortlisted for the Man Booker prize.There’s two of everything in The Lowland. There are two cities Calcutta and Rhode Island. India and US are the countries. There are two cultures. Two families in each character’s life, the dual existence they lead, the identity they give up and the identity they adopt. It is this duality that the novel excels in. Jhumpa Lahiri keeps rocking us between these dualities like a pendulum that moves from one extreme to the other only to return home.There are two brothers Subhash and Udayan who are born fifteen months apart and raised in a modest middle class home in the vicinity of the Tolly Club in Calcutta. The brothers are very different from each other. Subhash is cautious while Udayan is clearly reckless and forever testing boundaries. Subhash is compliant while Udayan challenges parents and professors alike. They look similar enough to be mistaken for the other even by their parents. That is where the similarities end.The brothers go to college in the Calcutta of sixties and Udayan gets drawn towards the ideology of Charu Majumdar and Kanu Sanyal the two pillars of the Naxal movement  who advocated violently annihilating the powers that be. The brothers remain unemployed even after their post graduate degree. Subhash applies to a few PhD programs in US, Udayan tries to dissuade him.Wait. I must not give away the story. So what is the story about? The story is not about the Naxal movement and how it scarred the psyche of the people who grew up in the sixties in Calcutta. Yet Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel can be a quick primer to learn about why the uprising happened and why it failed. The story is about the two worlds we all live in. The two lives that are often at odds with each other that we all have to balance.

He preferred the shade these days to the coastline. He’d been born and bred in Calcutta, and yet the sun in Rhode Island, bearing down through the depleted ozone, now felt stronger than the sun of his upbringing. Merciless against his skin, striking him, especially in summer, in a way he could no longer endure. His tawny skin never burned, but the sensation of sunlight overwhelmed him. He sometimes took it personally, the enduring blaze of that distant star.He passed a swamp at the start of his walks, where birds and animals came to nest, where red maple and cedar grew from mossy mounds. It was the largest forested wetland in southern New England. It had once been a glacial depression, and was still bordered by a moraine.According to signs he stopped to read, it had once been the site of a battle. Growing curious, he turned on his computer one day at home, and began learning, on the Internet, details of an atrocity.

The atrocity being referred to here is the story of the Narragansett tribe, three hundred of whom were burned alive in 1675. The marsh ground is the leitmotif of the novel.Those who read The Lowland, have marveled at her ability to write about the Naxal movement with the accuracy that even locals may find hard to match. It is almost as if she was there. It is exactly this ability that makes Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel so compelling. The descriptions flow effortlessly as she straddles one world she has grown up in and the world she has adopted from her parents who migrated from Calcutta to US. This novel was crafted over ten years by Jhumpa. The result is an awesome read you can’t miss.-----------Join me on twitter @AbhijitBhaduriRead my take on Unaccustomed Earth