Jhumpa Lahiri is not at home, but she is not out of place either. The eldest daughter of a generation of Indians and Bengalis who moved out of India in the ’60s into the New World, Lahiri found success in English with her short story collection Interpreter of Maladies (1999, Houghton Mifflin) that explored diaspora stories of displacement and identity. In 2012 and several books later, she moved to Rome with her family, and has found herself in Italian. As she told a packed hall at the Italian embassy in Delhi on Friday, “In between the hexameter of Ovid [ she is translating his Metamorphoses from Latin to Italian] and 8th century Rome…that’s where home has been in the last five years.”
Beautifully turned out for the evening, Lahiri was also in India for the first time with this new aspect of her identity—“the Italian side” for which she shed skin, so to speak, adopted a new grammar, and put herself on a willing journey of expatriation—some would say, like Italo Calvino’s Baron who abandoned living on the ground one day to live on the trees.
The reaction to her ‘Italian Project’ certainly set off major alarms, revealed Lahiri at a gathering before the panel discussion between her and translator Gioia Guerzoni, moderated by Andrea Anastasio, director, Italian Cultural centre, New Delhi.
Why leave English?
The Anglosphere was aghast—why leave the English language? But Lahiri was “ready to set down everything” she knew and learn to write again. In this way, she was also glancing at an older experiment of reinvention – that of her parents who left home to raise their children in the UK and then the US, and pass on a language with middling success – and see what could be found if she scraped around the area of her first dislocation. The space created between a mother-tongue and an immigrant child who belonged imperfectly to it.
As she put it, Bengali is her “parents’ language”. She felt nervous about speaking it with her friends, she said. As for English, she was given to understand by her parents that it was best left outside the home, it being “other people’s language”.
Home and elsewhere
Lahiri recognises no mother-tongue and says no language is foreign; learning to speak a new language is “simply a way to cross boundaries”. The question of where home is, belonging, and ‘mother tongues’ fatigues her beyond a point, even though her writing has been singularly focused on various aspects and tensions of the crossover life —from The Namesake (2003, HarperCollins), her debut novel, to Roman Stories (2023, Penguin) her latest short story collection, which was first written in Italian, and which she later translated into English herself.
“Where is home...why is it even a question...? Why not life as positive drift and a largely nomadic experience?” she asked. It is a pertinent question at a time when national boundaries are being tightly defined around the globe and when powerful and dominant languages are seeking to criminalise dialects deeming them ‘minor’ or ‘foreign’.
The quest for belonging is not my quest, said Lahiri. “Though yes, I may get attached to a place, there are places I miss….” Language as a project of nationalism or the prospect of “a monolingual centre of gravity is a dangerous one”, she cautioned.
Nuanced outsiderism
Roman Stories has shown a shift in the way Lahiri has so far written the outsider experience. Perhaps because it is too close to the bone, some of the Bengali characters in her earlier works were verbose and identitarian, bent on needless unpeeling of the particularities of their culture.
In Roman Stories there are no whiners; the writing is tighter and the conditions of immigrant life, having to negotiate language, culture and alienation feel real. Even the Immigrant Kid —it is implied that many of them are from the global south—is hard boiled.
In ‘Boundary’, the first story of the collection, the immigrant child, whose parents manage a holiday home patronised by city people, knows what is generosity and what are leftovers, and takes it on her chin. In ‘The Steps’, an aged Italian widow hazards a walk to the market as she does not want her groceries delivered by boys from another country. The anthology thus uncovers what it looks like from the other side, from the point of view of those who already live in a city, when they encounter difference in the form of immigrants or feel unsettled when a new wave of people come into their spaces.
The discussion moderated by Anastasio also touched on the various layers and “possibilities of not belonging”, the role language plays in that process, and Lahiri’s moving in between languages as expressions of her “search, curiosity and attentiveness”.
The rights to a city
During her Delhi visit, the Ghalib library in Nizamuddin was one of Lahiri's stops. “I felt inspired and at peace. Books are my gateway to everything. I can live in a library for years,” she said.
Lahiri said she is drawn to big cities for a reason. “In that urban mix, there is safety,” she said. “The question of who you are, and where you come from, is diluted.” Otherwise, it has always felt as not having “full rights” to anywhere. In Rome, the situation is helped because she speaks Bangla; some of these conversations have seeded the germ of a story. “There are a lot of immigrants in Rome…. I speak to them and ask them how they are,” she said. “And I get to hear a lot of interesting things.”