ISSUES FACING IMMIGRANTS: AN OVERVIEW OF RESEARCH ON JHUMPA LAHIRI

Abstract

The main themes of Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, an anthology of short stories, and her novel The Namesake are crises, which postcolonial critics have described as the diasporic experience of Indian immigrants in America. Lahiri's primary themes include identity crisis, rootlessness, alienation, nostalgia, the struggle to adjust to a foreign culture, assimilation, and rejection. Divergent perspectives have been used to evaluate and understand the characters and their experiences in the research that this paper reviews. While some academics focus more on the nuanced psychological elements of Lahiri's characterisation, some use post-colonial theory to describe the Indo-American diaspora, while many more attempt to comprehend their experiences via the lens of globalisation and cosmopolitanism.