Ashoke remains busy in his career, it hurts her most. When the doctor examines her in the Hospital, she tells her everything is normal. “ But nothing feels normal to Ashima. For the past eighteen months, ever since she arrived in Cambridge, nothing has felt normal at all. It’s not so much the pain, which she knows, somehow, she will survive. It’s the consequence: motherhood in a foreign land”(TN 5-6). Ashoke’s migration is for economic gain and professional progress and he also wants to settle permanently there; permanent residence is also a reason for Ashoke’s migration. Hence, he is not troubled by the questions of belonging or not belonging to the host society. He behaves more like a materialistic person, he is living a satisfying life there. But he doesn’t have a thought about his wife; Ashima accompanies him to a country that is unfamiliar to her. She was caught between India and America and became homeless. Later, her son became the center of her life. The life of Ashima traces the autobiographical tone of Jhumpa Lahiri’s personal life, which is the very prototype of diasporic culture. Having spent more than thirty years in the United States, Ashima still feels a bit of an outsider.
Lahiri’s The Namesake portrays two generations in the Ganguli family. While the first generation, Indian-Americans cherish their past and consider their memories as an indispensable, integral part of their roots and their being; her second-generation Indian-Americans reflect both proximity and distance from it.
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Lahiri through Ashima and Ashoke portrays the first generation of immigrants and elaborately mediates on their state of solitude. Loneliness is the crowning effect of the novel. Ashima, while arriving at Cambridge, could not get herself psychologically settled down in that place, especially when she was pregnant. The tug-of-war between the distant past and isolated present is made further cruel by the absence of family and Society, community and culture are a shelter as well as a safeguard behind which an individual grows and finds his roots. For immigrants like Ashima, monitoring ties to India and preserving Indian traditions in America, means a lot.
Lahiri’s second novel, The Lowland discusses the family relationship between parents and children. It describes the story of two brothers and two female characters, who are alienated and isolated in America and how their nativity pulls them back to their roots through the feelings of loss and alienation in a foreign country. The first part of the novel is about a real political revolt that took place in some parts of India in the 1960s which is known as the Naxalite movement and the second part of the novel investigates the lives of middle-class Bengali immigrants either coming to America to seek higher education or brought by fate.
The novel begins with the description of Lowland, which refers to a marshy stretch of land between two ponds in a Calcutta neighborhood where two brothers Subhash and Udayan grew up. In the monsoon season, the marsh floods, and the ponds combine; in summer, the flood water evaporates. The two ponds symbolize the two brothers who are at times separate; and at other times inseparable. People often mistake them for twins, but their personalities are very different. Udayan is charismatic and adventurous, and Subhash is more cautious the solid and dependable type. “Subhash was thirteen, older by fifteen months; but he had no sense of himself without Udayan. From his earliest memories, at every point his brother was there” (TL, 6).
Two brothers Subhash and Udayan, have walked across the Lowland uncountable times. The two brothers were inseparable, they parallelly represent the two ponds in the Lowland, which are dry in the summer and flooding in the winter. The Animals in the Lowland were struggling to live in the dry season, which foreshadows the struggles that Subhash and Udayan will face as they grow. “ Certain creatures laid eggs that were able to endure the dry season. Others survived by burying themselves in mud . Simulating death, waiting for the rain”( TL, 3).
Subhash and Udayan used to roam around the Tolly club and watch the games from outside the wall. They never set foot inside the club. “ They’d never set foot in the Tolly Club. Like most people in the vicinity, they’d passed by its wooden gate, its brick walls, hundred of times” ( TL, 4). They were past their free time by doing repairing chores in the house. When the boys grew older, they were separated and admitted to different colleges. Udayan to the presidency to study Physics, and Subhash to Jadavpur to study chemical engineering.
One day, the boys heard about Naxalbari on the radio and in the newspaper. The conflict in Naxalbari is a struggle between the oppressed and the oppressors. As Subhash and Udayan take in the news about their small village in the Darjeeling District, they begin to understand that things are changing.“ Most of the villagers were tribal peasants who worked on tea plantations and large estates. For generations, they’d lived under a feudal system that hadn’t substantially changed. They were manipulated by the land owners” (TL, 23).
Now Subhash and Udayan have both begun their postgraduate studies. Subhash continues on Jadavpur, while Udayan transfers to Calcutta University. Subhash concentrates more on studies, while Udayan is involved in the political movement. Subhash knows that the Naxalbari movement spreading throughout India, he also suspects that his brother Udayan would involved in that. Subhash doesn’t like that Udayan participating in the political movement rather than studies.
One day, Udayan invites Subhash to a meeting in a neighborhood in North Calcutta. The small room was filled mostly with students. Subhash is neutral and uninterested in violence, a radical thinker, he is realizing his brother’s true extent of involvement in the revolutionary movement. “The room was silent. Subhash saw Udayan hanging on Sinha’s words. Riveted, just as he used to look listening to a football match on the radio. Though Subhash was also present, though he sat beside Udayan, he felt invisible”(TL, 33).
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