The Asian Conference on Literature and Librarianship 2015

The Asian Conference on Literature and Librarianship 2015

The Asian Conference on Literature and Librarianship 2015

Jhumpa Lahiri was able to share with the world her first book, a collection of nine
stories, Interpreter of Maladies, published in 1999. Brought up in America as well as
her Indian heritage make her a genuinely interpreter of themes such as, cultural
multiplicity, memory of homeland, the search for identity and the sense of belonging.
Lahiri received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Interpreter of Maladies. Ever since
Interpreter of Maladies was published, she has been variously proclaimed to an
“American writer” and “an Indian American author”. Her writings are described as
“diaspora fiction” by many Indian scholars and “immigrant fiction” by American
critics. Thus, it can be said that Lahiri’s fiction is a unique addition to the existing
Asian American Literature.
This paper focuses on the various concepts of home. It exposes the sense of home
from different perspectives as it appears in several short stories. The study relates the
sense of home to literature in relation to human relationships and to the sense of
place. We pose several questions in our efforts to study the sense of home in Jhumpa
Lahiri’s selected short stories: Does psychological home have any significance in the
well-being? – How does making a physical surrounding “home-like” benefit
someone? And how does an immigrant make a house a home? What is the difference
between physical and spiritual sense of home? All these questions will be examined
through the analysis of Lahiri’s “A Temporary Matter”, “When Mr. Pirzada came to
Dine”, and “Mrs. Sens”. In conclusion, the paper aims to show to what extent Jhumpa
Lahiri succeeds in conceptualizing the sense of home in diverse ways and how she
skillfully allows her characters and her readers to glimpse small perceptions into
human nature while presenting familiar, everyday events in life.

Shaden Adel Nasser