Chapter 2

Cultural Crisis and Conflict

 Chapter II
Cultural Crisis

Conflict occurs between individuals or groups that are separated by

cultural boundaries can be considered cross-cultural-conflict. Lahiri's all
works are influenced with immigration problem. Cultural conflict occurs,
when first generation in emigrated in foreign country. There, they don't
forget their cultural values, identity. They celebrate their cultural festivals
there, and teach their off-springs about the cultural values from they are
emigrated. But their children do not like to live between two cultures. The
second-generation prefer to that culture, where they are living. By dint of
their cultural values and identity are collided. They have to struggle with
cultural conflict. In Lahiri's works the characters of first-generation are
emigrated from India to U.S. Their children live in foreign culture.
Cultural crisis is the main problem there.

Jhumpa Lahiri is a such as new post-colonial South Asian diaspora

writer. She wrote her debut works on immigration, cultural crisis and
identity loss. She is also emigrated from India to Rhode Island. First of all
Jhumpa Lahiri's collection of short stories Interpreter of Maladies seems
to offer an image of the complicated cultural relationships between India
and the west, investigating the troubled position of the displaced
individual caught between two cultures which, in most cases, he/she finds
unfamiliar. Out of the nine stories, three are set in India, where as Six are
set in America, focusing on the lives of first or second generation
Americans of Indian Origin.

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 Many of Ms. Lahiri's people are Indian immigrants trying to
adjust to a new life in the United States, and their cultural
displacement is a kind of intex of a more existential sense of
dislocation (48) (Michiko Kakutani)
Lahiri's collection seems to resist the stereotypes of Indianness and
the cliches associated with the inevitable clash between the East and the
West The Third & Final Continent who looks at himself from the very
beginning as the typical migrant:
A left India in 1964, with a certificate in commerce and the
equivalent, in those days, of ten dollars to my name (...) I
lived in north London, in finsbury Park, in a house occupied
entirely by penniless Bengali bachelors like myself, (...) all
struggling to educate and establish ourselves obroad (173).
It is also the case of 'Mrs. Sen's or Shoba and Shukumar in A
Temporary Matter. Lahiri's attempt is to see beyond the visible frontiers
and to plunge deeper into the springs of human action. That is why she
frequently deals with problematic relationships between individuals
within one and the same society, be it American or Indian. Many of her
stories treat marriage and the tense relationships within couples.
This Blessed House focuses on the troubled relationships within
the couple. "At the urging of their match makes, [Sanjeev and Twinkle]
married in India, amid hundreds of well-wishers" (143) just to realize
soon how different they are and how lonely they felt. Miranda, the
protagonist of Sexy also feels insecure in the relationship. She has with a
married man, the story being about her becoming aware of her
displacement and loneliness. A Temporary Matter is about a couple

22
growing estranged from each other after the death of their child and how
they "become experts at avoiding each other in their three-bedroom
house, spending as much time on separate floors as possible. (4)
A Temporary Matter is fiilly set in America, but Shoba and
Shukumar are of Indian origin. The story is far from analyzing their
inability to adapt to a hostile culture environment. It rather focuses on the
deteriorating relationships between a husband and a wife after a death of
their child and, although the two would be expected to stick together
given the tragic incident and the threatening cultural environment, the
walls separating the young couple become even thicker in spite of their
common origin. They find it impossible to communicate and get
estranged to the point of separating.
A Real Durwan is set in India and features only characters whose
origin is not commented on since they are natives in their own country.
The protaganist of the story is as sixty-year-old woman, departed to
Calcutta as a result of the partition, whose problems of adaptability to a
new culture are brought to the fore. "No, one doubted she was a refiigee;
the accent in her Bengali made that clear" (72) which is why she is
always inclined "to exaggerate her past at such elaborate lengths and
heights" (73) in order to protect herself against the aggressiveness of the
new cultural environment. From the point of view of the westerner
indined to prejudice and stereotyping, the story might be read as focusing
on the cruelty of the Indians and their indifference to the others, since
Boori Ma, accused of theft by those whom she had served for years in
exchange for a shelter, is cruelly thrown into the street. Yet, if one forgets
that the story's setting is Calcutta, one realizes that the story is about

23
failed human relationships, about indifference and cruelty caused by
poverty.
Out of nine stories, one seems to have a more accentuated political
content, in the sense that, because of an explicit reference to the
Bangladeshi war of independence in 1971.
[Mr. Pirzada] came from Dacca, now the capital of
Bangladesh, but then (1971) a part of Pakistan. That year
Pakistan was engaged in civil war. The eastern frontier,
where Dacca was located, was fighting for autonomy from
the ruling regime in the west. (23).
The story, however, narrated from the point of view of the child
Lilia, definitely resists politicizing, bringing to the fore instead issues
related to identity and intercultural communication. It is the child's way of
perceiving the world and her consciousness that represents the story's
main interest. Lilia is the one whose initiation depends on her becoming
aware of the difference between the self and the other accross the visible
and the invisible frontiers.

Like my parents, Mr. Pirzada took off his shoes before

entering a room, (....) drank no alcohol (....). Nevertheless
my father insisted that I understand the difference and he led
me to a map of the world taped to the wall over his desk.
(....) "Mr. Pirzada is Bengali, but he is Muslim" My father
informed me. "Therefore he lives in East Pakistan, not
India." (26)
Yet although Lahiri's work may be interpreted as essentially
focusing on the problems of immigrants, "her real subject is

24
miscommunication. The relationships in her stories are a series of missed
connections." (Brians 196) Lahiri's stories is not simply Indian or
American, Indian in American or Indian in India, or American of Indian
origin in India. The individual is rather the locus of much more
complicated cultural relations and tensions. Culture, therefore, for Lahiri,
is not understood is an essentialist manner, as national culture,
homogeneous and unitary.
The cultural clash is central to Lahiri's stories. Its treatment is not
limited, however to the encounter between India and America, but the
clash can occur on both sides of the frontier. "Interpreter of Maladies",
the collection's title story, deals with the encounter between an Indian
cabdriver and tour guide, also a gifted linguist, Mr. Kapasi and an Indian
American family touring India. The Dases are perceived by Mr. Kapasi
from the start a foreigners as they "looked Indian, but dressed as
foreigners did" (44). During their first encounter, Mr. Das has an air of
confidence given by the fact that "Mina and I were both bom in America"
(45). The Das family cannot be mistaken for Indian, although they do
look so. They are and behave American Mr. Das cannot do without his
tour book, which provides the information he thinks he needs to acquire
knowledge of Indian. The Das family's encounter with India an example
of failed intercultural communication. Mr. and Mrs. Das donot try to
recover a sense of belonging, but they are rather been on reasserting their
identity as Americans. Yet, during the trip they take to the sun Temple in
Konarak, Mr. Kapasi feels he identifies with Mrs. Das. He sees in her the
same unhappiness he felt about his own marriage. "The signs he
recognized from his own marriage were there the bickering, the

25
indifference, the protracted silences" (53). But communication is
hindered again, as Mr. Kapasi was looking for a friend, while Mrs. Das
was looking for some one "interpret her common trivial little secret, "(66)
which is why he felt deeply insulted. Mrs. Das misinterpreted 'the
interpreter of maladies.' She wanted some remedy to cure her
consciousness, expecting to feel better and relieved. Mr. Kapasi wanted
instead to "fuUfiU his dream, of serving as an interpreter between
nations." (59)
Lahiri's main concern is the status of the Indian immigrant in
America, or at best, the precarious condition of the Indians in India would
mean to over-simplify and ignore many of the issues from which much of
the artistic vigour of Lahiri's stories is derived. Critics themselves found it
difficult to produce a consistent evaluation of Lahiri's stories and to
unerringly identify the writer's position to the Indian or American
community.

Ever since Interpreter of Maladies was published. She has

been variously proclaimed to be an "American writer", an
"Indian-American author," an 'NRI (non-residenatial Indian),
and an ABCD (American bom confused desi). Her writings
are described as "diaspora fiction" by Indian scholars and
"immigrant fiction" by American critics. (Shuchen 126).
Lahiri's stories bring to the fore issues related to intercultural
communication, the cultural clash, sterotyping and otherizing and see all
these problems as hailing to do with human nature rather than being
strictly associated with the condition of the immigrant or Indianness.

26
 The nine stories have in common certain themes and motifs, such
as exil, displacement, loneUness, difficult relationships, and problems
about communication.
Lahiri's The Namesake is about a Calcutta family, settled in
America but attempting to do the best they can by not only transforming
into true Americans but at the same retaining their Bengali customs and
heritage. The writer skillfully investigates the intricacies of the diasporic
feelings of strangeness, the conflicting ways of life, cultural
bewilderment, the struggles of assimilation and the intervening ties
between generations. The parents struggle with raising their children in
America while maintaining their culture. The children struggle with being
American, but still having parents who are from India, thus facing the
crisis of dual identity.

Lahiri says that the novel is definitely about those who are
culturally displaced or those who grow up in two words
simultaneously. {Interview released by Houghton Mifflin
company)

Lahiri says "I think that for immigrants, the challenges of exile, the
loneliness, the constant sense of alienation, the knowledge of and longing
for a lost world are more explicit and distressing than for their children."

The family traverses a long journey where all the characters

encounter difficulties in different spaces and undergo transformation of
identities through the drama of cultural conflicts that create pain and
passiveness and anxieties and alienation. Trans-culturation begins with
Ashok and Ashima and shifts to their next generation. Ashima attempts to
cope in the alien culture by reading the Bengali novels. She brought with

27
her or retreating with her familiar world. The dilemma becomes acute
when her son Gogol is bom for the difficulty,of raising the child there.
They adopt first the process of acculturation for the sake of their child
and simultaneously start losing many of their own thus undergoing a
process of transition, hybridization and the conditions of diasporas there
of all at a time Gogal too in his career suffers bears the brunt of cultural
alienation and identity crisis. His very name epitomizes the confusion of
cross-cultural dilemma. Just to fit into the American cultural he not only
adopted their culture but also started hating his own name, culture and
roots. He distances himself from his family, Indian acquaintance and
values. He takes India not as his homeland but as a country the way other
Americans view it to be. While he tries to become more an American,
dates with American girl Maxine, adopts her life style and changes his
own name little does he realizes that it is difficult to realize fiiUy the alien
culture. The name still remains of Indian origin. Further, he fails to
understand that an identity is not in change of life style or name; it's
something more than that.

Jhumpa Lahiri is herself suspended between two cultures and

attempts to find the interrelation of the world in a post- modem and post-
colonial situations. Both post modemity and post colonialism share a
common concem of the sentence of history on common man, the
distinction of centre and periphery Ashima could never settle to her
hybridized identity in her attempt to belong to an alien culture. She found
herself to belong nowhere. This sense of non-belonging is rooted into the
deep psyche of the protagonist. Ashima tries to set back to her own
culture. Her love of family, for instance, influenced her to create a close-

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knit web of immigrant friends. This group practices Indian custom,
speaks the Bengah language, and in many respect become a substitle
family for the vast collection of relatives back in India. To a large degree
her Ufe is consumed by recreating Indian culture in America. Ashima's
Calcutta linage constantly haunts her and makes her a sojourner in
America. Her Home is a meta-American home from the outside, but
typically Bengali from inside.
Lahiri throughout her novel looks at her Indian counter parts, from
her own diasporic lenses. The characters, in a trans-cultural situation,
attempt to belong while celebrating their roots. The characters struggle
with the memory of their homeland as it happens for the author herself or
many other diasporic author, like Rushdie and Naipaul as India is a
homeland in their imagination. Rushdie in his imaginary homeland has
shown the vexed issue of cultural displacement when he says "A full
migrant suffers, traditionally a triple disruption. He loses place. He enters
into alien language ... what makes immigrants such a pathetic figure."
(Imaginary Homeland - Rushdie).

In An Unaccustomed Earth, Lahiri explores the theme of migration

and displacement with her typical poetic style and immense emotional
involvement. The title of the collection is taken from a passage of
Nathaniel Hawthorne's The custom-House suggesting that transplanting
people into new soil might, in fact be beneficial; yet Lahiri's stories are
mostly dominated by an omnipresent sense of loss or insecurity.
Portraying the lives and struggle of second-generation immigrants.
Unaccustomed Earth challenges our nations of belonging identity and the
significance of one's roots. Her personal experience of growing up in an

29
immigrant community has been widely utilized in her writing career.
Living in between two different cultures as a child of Indian migrants
who had settled in the United States, Lahiri, too, has had to struggle with
a split identity.
As a young child, I felt that the Indian part of me was
unacknowledged, and therefore somehow negated, by my
American environment and vice versa. I felt that I led two
very separate lives.
In A choice of Accomodations, for example, a middle-aged couple
attends the wedding of an old college friend. The wedding reception and
the whole stay, described in impressive details and representing the core
of the narrative, uncompromisingly points to the couple's insecurities and
alienation that springs from deeply buried reasons. Suddenly, the ordinary

situations during the visit uncover the inner struggles of the characters, of
which they themselves are unaware.
The title story is based on the same principle. It introduces the 38
years old Ruma, now expecting second child with her American husband,
who is visited by her recently widowed father in her home in Seattle. The
visit occupies the central space in the narrative, yet again it points to
discourse beyond its borders. The father's stay uncovers Ruma's personal
leading to an identity crisis and her cultural background plays a very
crucial role in her life that she is willing to acknowledge, cultural
identification thus proves to be a problematic concept of second
generation migrants as well. Ruma finds herself in a conflicted position
since she has inherited a sense of exile and loss from her parents. The
father-daughter relationship in Unaccustomed Earth is rather

30
complicated; Ruma has always been closer to her mother, a tradition
Bengali woman, strictly adhering to all habits and customs even after
moving to the United-States. After her sudden death, however, the
distance between Ruma and her father seems to grow even bigger. While
her mother's death shocked Ruma and left her totally unprepared for life
without her, her father appears to be lightened but it. After selling the
family house, a cruel act of "Wiping out her mother's presence" (6) In
Ruma's eyes, he started traveling all around Europe, enjoying the freedom
of a widower. The impersonal postcards Ruma receives fi-om him from
time to time remind her of her father's openness to the possibilities of the
wide world that starkly contrast his reserved behaviour towards his own
daughter. The fragmented and incomplete sentences referring to his
schedule and travel updates aptly exemplify the shattered father daughter
bond.

During the week long visit, feared by both sides, Ruma and her
father scrutinize each other, yet neither of them is willing to talk openly
about their relationship and furture plans. Ruma's father who remains
nameless till the end of the story, gradually realizes how much his
daughter resembles his deceased wife as the difference between mother
and daughter gradually blur and disappear.

Like his wife, Ruma was now alone in this new place,
overwhelmed, without friends, caring for a young child, all
of it reminding him, to much, of the early years of his
marriage, the years for which his wife had never forgiven
him. He had always assumed Ruma's life would be different.
(40)

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 Ruma's social isolation and her preference for solitude, which
inevitably leads to her discontentment and frustration, contrast immensely
with her father's socializing and traveling adventures. Unaccustomed
Earth discusses the problem of complicated intergenerational
relationships viewed from the migrant's perspective. Belonging to the
second generation of immigrants, Ruma displays typical signs of
assimilation and gradual alienation from Bengali customs, a change
noticed by her father as his children grew up.
The more the children grew, the less they seemed to
resemble either parent. They spoke differently, dressed
differently, seemed foreign in every way, from the texture of
their hair to the shapes of their feet and hands. "(45)
Shedding many "habit of her upbringing (...) in her adult life"
Ruma's perspective on her parent's culture and its significance for her
own life undergoes some crucial changes.
Hell-Heaven, story in the collection which might remind of Mrs.
Sens' from Interpreter of Maladies, explores a complicated parent-child
relationship. The narrative perspective shifts to the more personal, first-
person voice of the, already adult daughter Usha, who recounts the
piteous story of her mother as she recollects it from her childhood
memories. An arranged Bengali marriage and subsequent emigration to a
foreign country have placed the protagonist of the story, Usha's mother
Apama, into a no-win situation. With a stranger by her side, with whom
she has almost nothing in common, and thousands of strangers all around
her, Apama's sense of isolation and loneliness threaten to escalate. But
the accidental meeting with another Bengali, Pranab chakraborty, triggers

32
her vitality and restores the balance in her life. Pranab appears to be the
very opposite of Apama's husband - the shared love for music, film,
poetry, common memories of their neighbourhood in Calcutta, the
willingness to listen to her and spend time with her make him an ideal
partner. Apama clings to pranab's attention and companionship
desperately. Usha, who begins to understand the intensity and the reasons
for her mother's transformation only years later, Pranab's influence on
Usha's mother, of which he is unaware, is symbolically reflected in one of
the pictures made during their small trips.
In that picture, Pranab Kaku's shadow, his two arms raised at
angels to hold the camera to his face, hovers in the comer of
the frame, his darkened featureless shape superimposed on
one side of my mother's body (64)
Apama's place in Pranab's life is, however, soon supplanted by his
fellow student Deborah, an American girl who is the complete anthithesis
of Usha's mother and who eventually becomes his wife. Deborah's
presence violates the already established harmony in Apama's life and she
perceives Pranab's decision to marry as an act of betrayal. Usha, who falls
in love with Deborah as well, unconsciously triggers her mother's
disintegration. This double betrayal is symbolically preserved in the
pictures from their trips -Apama's world is as shattered to pieces as
Pranab's ashtray which she smashes up. Only years later Ushas finds out
that her mother's desperation lead to an unsuccessful suicidal attempt.
Hell-Heaven, in this respect, unveils the arduous migrations' condition.
The uprootedness and displacement result in a personal crisis which
threatens the very life of the migrant in this case.

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 In the short story Only Goodness Lahiri explores sibHng
relationship in diasporic life in such a resonant way that even in a brief
space she can be dense in the intricacies of depiction. Sudha finds herself
helpless as she watches her brother, Rahul, succumb to alcoholism and
the gulf between him and their parents increasingly widens. She is
reluctant and incapable to tackle the situation, and takes an escapist view
of it. But some year later when Rahul comes to London to visit his
newborn nephew. She sees signs of his redemption. And yet again Rahul
betrays her belief leaving herno choice but to reject him finally.
In the Last story of part one Nobody Business, paul an American
housemate of sang/Sangeeta, finds himself getting involved in the sticky
web of love- relationships of sang, her egyption boyfriend farouk, and
Diedre. Paul is a confidant of both Sang and Diedre, and unwittingly
bcomes farouk's rival.

The title story of part two, Once in a Lifetime, is narrated by Hema,

whereas the second story, Year's End has kaushik as the narrator. Once
in a Lifetime deals with the tragic death of Kaushik's mother due to
cancer, when Kaushik's family moves back to America from India, they
stay with Hema's family for sometime until a new house is got. Hema,
when six years old, had not liked Kaushik, but now as a thirteen year old.
She is infatuated by him. She also learns to appreciate the sophistication
of Kaushik's mother. Then one day Kaushik confidents to her about his
mother's illness, revealing the pain that hides behind the glamour of their
life.

The next story Year's End is about Kaushik's coming to terms with
the presence of his step mother, chitra, who is nearer his age than his

34
father's and lacks all the elegance that his own mother possessed. More
intriguine is Kaushik's growth of affection for his kid step-sisters, Rupa
and Piu, until the girls retrieve from its hiding place the taped box that
concealed Kaushik's mother's photographs purposely banished from sight.
The girl's mischief enrages Kaushik.
All affection drains out of him and he acts emotionally and rather
cruelly to abandon the girls alone in the house. Far away he digs the earth
and buries the box.
The last part is depicted by both protagonists as they met again in
Italy after two long decades. Hema is tormented about her previous affair
with a married man while planning to settle down by marrying someone
she hardly knows. Kaushik has decided to lead a completely different life
as a world traveler and photographer. In spite of all that, they felt
reconnected and spent time together even though Hema is going to be
married soon. They have a brief affair, but go their separate ways. Hema
marries the man she was planned to. The day before her wedding Kaushik
dies in Thialand in the Boxing Day Tsunami.

To conclude, Lahiri's stories outline the tensions of preserving

one's cultural background in a foreign environment (in the narratives of
the parents) and the conflicts of assimilation (in the narrative of the
children). At the same time, they articulate the difficult positions of
second generation migrants who do not face displacement directly,
physically, but have to struggle with the legacies of their parents
neverthless. Unlike her debut novel The Namesake which finally drifts to
a satisfactory happy ending, Unaccustomed Earth is not that unequivocal

35
summing up her own immigrant experience, Lahiri voices the very theme
of her second short story collection.
I think being an immigrant must teach you so much about
the world and about human beings, things you can't
understand if you are bom and raised and live your whole
life in one place. It must be an amazing experience in many
ways, but it has a price. {Lahiri)

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