Immigrants’ Assimilation în Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland

Abstract: The process of assimilation in the case of an immigrant is a difficult one, especially when the transition from one country to another is hampered by the large differences between the two countries, as in the case of India and America. In The Lowland, Jhumpa Lahiri managed to capture the experiences and transformations of the self of the American Indian immigrant. The present work aims to capture all these processes.

Key words: assimilation, immigrant, identity.

Assimilation is the process of becoming part of a community or culture. (Macmillan 71)

Since the earliest times people did not allow a country's borders to limit their horizons. So either because of economic, social or political reasons, they left their homeland and went to new lands, looking for better living conditions. On the path of an immigrant can be most of the times found racism, hostility, distress and the lack of identity. A common feeling that can be found at characters that are in the position of an immigrant is the one of being caught between cultures. Since immigration is a subject debated and always topical, several writers have approached it in their works. Here can be mentioned: Zora Hurston, Doris Lessing, Bharati Mukherjee, Shaila Abdullah, Jhumpa Lahiri and many others.

Jhumpa Lahiri is the daughter of Indian immigrants who was born in London and raised in Rhode Island. She has a bio-cultural background, an American Indian one. From childhood she had to learn to combine the American cultural environment in which she grew up and studied with the Indian, which she acquired from her parents, especially from her mother, who taught her everything about Indian culture and customs and took her during the summer holidays to visit her relatives from India.

Her literary debut occurred in 1999 with a volume of short stories entitled Interpreter of Maladies. Then she published Unaccustomed Earth in 2008, her first novel, The Namesake, in 2003 and The Lowland in 2013. All of her books deal with the theme of immigration, presenting the condition of the American immigrant trying to adapt and assimilate the new cultural environment.

The Lowland is Jhumpa Lahiri’s second novel published in September 2013. Just as the writer herself confesses in one of her interviews, the novel is based on a true story heard from her grandmother. The story is about two brothers who were executed in front of their family, near her grandparents land in Calcutta, by the Indian paramilitary during the repression of a radical movement called the Naxalite. The writer was deeply impressed by this story and for many years she tried to make from it the subject of a book. And in this way appeared The Lowland, a novel about two brothers, Subhash and Udayan, who physically resembles, but with totally different personalities. Subhash is the older brother; he is peaceful, obedient and calculated unlike Udayan who is passionate, impulsive and unconventional. Subhash goes to study in America, and his brother remains in India and gets involved in a political movement called the Naxalite, which offered him the chance to protest against exploitation and corruption in India. Whereas Subhash was focused on his study, Udayan got secretly married with Gauri, became more involved in politics, getting to be killed by police, on the lowland, in front of his family. Finding out this news, Subhash returns to his homeland, marries Gauri who was pregnant and then both of them return to America. She gives birth to a girl they call Bela who grows surrounded by the love and attention of her father, the relationship with her mother being compromised by the events from the past.