Jhumpa Lahiri, whose real name is Nilanjana Sudeshna Lahiri, was born in London, England, in 1967 to Bengali parents from Calcutta. Her father was a librarian at the University of Rhode Island, and her mother was a schoolteacher. Her family immigrated to London before settling in the United States when Jhumpa was three years old.
In 1989, Jhumpa Lahiri obtained a B.A. Degree in English literature from Barnard College, plus three M.A. degrees in English, Creative Writing, Comparative Literature and Arts and a doctorate in Renaissance Studies from Boston University in the 1990s.
Lahiri has written novels, short stories and essays. She writes in English and Italian and has received several awards for her work. Her books have been translated into many languages. Her second novel, The Lowland, published in 2013, was nominated for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award and gained Lahiri the 2015 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. In 2005, she became Vice President of the PEN American Center. Lahiri has taught creative writing at Boston University and the Rhode Island School of Design. She has two children from her journalist husband, the Guatemalan-American Alberto Vourvoulias, and she lives between New Jersey and Rome, Italy.
The story starts between the 1950s and 1960s in Tollygunge, a neighbourhood of the West Bengal city south of Calcutta, with two inseparable young Bengali brothers, Subhash and Udayan Mitra, who are close in age (born fifteen months apart) but different in character.
Subhash is the older brother; he is conservative, introverted, gentle, studious and devoted to his parents. He disagrees with his brother’s violent, politically risky beliefs. The younger brother, Udayan, is daring, idealist and passionate about his political cause, ready to give up anything for it. As the two brothers reach maturity, they follow different paths.
Subhash goes to Rhode Island, USA, to study oceanography, while in India, Udayan is ready to sacrifice his young life for his ideals. He is a Marxist-Leninist and becomes a member of the Naxalite-Maoists, a communist supportive group of Maoist political ideology, rebellious against inequalities and poverty and consequently justifies violence against the government. Udayan is arrested and executed by the police in front of his family.
The Naxalbari uprising was an armed poor peasant revolt in 1967 in the Naxalbari Indian village against local landlords who illegally dispossessed and brutally beat a peasant over a land dispute. The police opened fire on a group of villagers who demanded their share of the crops and legitimate land redistribution to working peasants. The firing killed nine adults and two children. The uprising led to the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) in 1969 and is still, until today, an ongoing conflict between Maoist groups known as Naxalites and the Indian government.
Udayan’s death is a pivotal point in the story that will affect the future of three generations: his parents, his elder brother Subhash, his young, newly married, pregnant wife, Gauri, and later his unborn daughter Meghna. Following this significant event, everybody’s life around Udayan will be ruined, as illustrated throughout the story, which spans several decades for nearly fifty years and four generations.
His parents will never recover from his brutal killing. Subhash, out of loyalty to his younger brother, marries his widow to save her from living with his family that never liked her and consequently condemns himself to an unhappy life, a loveless marriage on both sides. The author writes about Gauri: “She married Subhash as a means of staying connected to Udayan. But even as she was going through with it she knew that it was useless”.
The author is never clear about Gauri’s character, which is never analysed in depth despite being one of the main characters. By striving to make her a martyr, a tragic victim of circumstances, in order to attract readers’ sympathy, Lahiri makes her a loathsome, cold-hearted, vapid, and unsympathetic person, creating unhappiness around her. Firstly, Subhash, who rescued her from a future grim life with her in-laws, and second, her unloved daughter, Bela, born from Udayan, the beloved husband she mourned throughout her life but nevertheless could not love Bela, the daughter she had from him.
Another puzzling character is Subhash. How can a person remain placid, insensitive, and apathetic throughout his life without being affected by the daunting experiences of so many decades, like heartbreaking events and exile, without revealing meaningful feelings even when provoked?
The Lowland (the book title) refers to a marshy stretch of land between two ponds in a Calcutta suburb where Subhash and Udayan played as children. It is a bleak family saga with a historical background. The story is divided between Tollygunge, a neighbourhood of Calcutta and Rhode Island in the New England region of the northeastern United States. The book is flawlessly written, conveying profound emotions and empathy mainly oriented towards a storytelling description of surroundings rather than characters’ spontaneity and psychological depth, which curtails its strength.
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