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Book Review: “The Lowland” by Jhumpa Lahiri

Posted on March 13, 2014January 9, 2019 By rayhanania No Comments on Book Review: “The Lowland” by Jhumpa Lahiri
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Book Review: “The Lowland” by Jhumpa Lahiri

By Barbara Nimri Aziz

Jhumpa Lahiri
Jhumpa Lahiri (Photo credit: IncMan)

Certain creatures lay eggs that are able to endure the dry season. Others survived by burying themselves in mud, simulating death, waiting for the return of rain.”

The Lowland, a beautifully crafted and compelling read about the divergent careers of two brothers begins with this scene in the gardens of Tollygunge in Calcutta where they play as children. The passage appears to be an innocent setting for the story. Re-reading this page after I finished the book, I now interpret these lines as a metaphor for the lives of these Bengali boys as we follow the fifty years of their lives.

Jhumpa Lahiri, author of Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake, is known for her unmatched skill in portraying the severe and tender intersections where India and America meet. As in her earlier work, New England is one setting Bengal in India is the other. Unlike them, however, The Lowland has a strong political element in that Udayan, the younger brother, joins the leftist anti-government Naxalite movement that emerged in India in the 1960s. (Naxalite politics lingers in the country’s ongoing Maoist rebellion today). The Lowland offers the most convincing, intimate portrait of the Naxalite movement I’ve read. And some might accuse Lahiri of devoting more attention than necessary to Naxalite history here. But she must have a reason for its inclusion, beyond building her plot.

Historical details aside, Lahiri shows us how a rebellion can penetrate the lives of even those (innocents) who flee a country. I can’t help wonder if she recalls this turbulent Indian period in order to contrast the challenges facing Indian youth at home with the politically insipid course they follow if they choose to emigrate to the West. Is she saying ‘We can never escape some realities about our homeland’?

The brother’s story moves from their childhood, when they’re engaged in seemingly harmless escapades, to old age. Although the younger of the brothers, Udayan is killed early in the account, his character and his political choices remain central to the plot. So much so that his mission and his death are never completely resolved. While Udayan chooses political activism, his brother Subhash elects to take up a scholarship in USA. Their lives which once seemed inseparable radically diverge. Udayan enters deeper into Naxalite activities; he marries Gauri, a union his family grudgingly accepts, and is assassinated before he knows his young wife is pregnant.

Jhumpa is huge!
Jhumpa is huge! (Photo credit: @superamit)

Subhash recognizes Gauri’s difficulties on his visit home following his brother’s murder and offers to marry her. She accepts, leaves her unhappy marital home, joins Subhash in the US and gives birth to a daughter, Bela whom they both raise, although from childhood Bela favors Subhash, never suspecting that he is not her real father. When Bela is 12, Gauri abandons both husband and daughter to take up a post at a university on the other side of the country.

We follow Gauri and Subhash through their estrangement, the decline and death of the parents in Calcutta and through Bela’s growth and motherhood, with Udayan’s ghost hovering over each life. Lahiri inserts him into the personality of her characters, and through regular flashbacks to India, piece by piece we learn about episodes connected to Udayan’s life and death.

The Lowland is a sad story although the characters themselves are not at all sad. We enjoy their joy and we care about what happens to them. While some readers may find the Indian side of the story foreign, the lives of Subhash and Gauri in the USA feel completely normal:— Gauri’s solitary pursuit of her career, the decision to hide the identity of Bela’s father, and Bela’s growth as a young American woman. Everything that happens, even to the boys’ mother alone in the decaying Calcutta home, seems logical.

There is no real cruelty or malice, no judgment, no heroism.

Therein lies author Lahiri’s wisdom and her superb literary skills. We feel affection for all her characters—the rebel Udayan, the self-interested Subhash, an erstwhile lover, the mean-spirited mother-in-law, and the loveless Gauri.

It is a gift to English-speaking readers that Lahiri and other artists from India and elsewhere are able to grasp and work so sympathetically with cultural disparities to create these engaging, rich characters. Given how many Americans embody foreign cultures and histories, we need many, many more writers with the depth, sensibility and skill of Jhumpa Lahiri.

(2013, A. A. Knopf publishers)

(Anthropologist and journalist Barbara Nimri Aziz, is the founder of Radio Tahrir and serves as its executive producer and co-host. Contact her by email info@RadioTahrir.org)

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rayhanania
rayhanania
Op-Ed writer, author, radio host, podcaster at The Arab Daily News
RAY HANANIA — Op-Ed writer, author, radio host, podcaster

Ray Hanania is an award winning political and humor columnist who analyzes American and Middle East politics, and life in general. He is an author of several books.

Hanania covered Chicago Politics and Chicago City Hall from 1976 through 1992 at the Daily Southtown and the Chicago Sun-Times. He began writing in 1975 publishing The Middle Eastern Voice newspaper in Chicago (1975-1977). He later published “The National Arab American Times” newspaper (2004-2007).

Hanania writes weekly columns on Middle East and American Arab issues as Special US Correspondent for the Arab News ArabNews.com, at TheArabDailyNews.com, and at SuburbanChicagoland.com. He has published weekly columns in the Jerusalem Post newspaper, YNetNews.com, Newsday, the Orlando Sentinel, Houston Chronical, and Arlington Heights Daily Herald.

Hanania is the recipient of four (4) Chicago Headline Club “Peter Lisagor Awards” for Column writing. In November 2006, he was named “Best Ethnic American Columnist” by the New American Media. In 2009, Hanania received the prestigious Sigma Delta Chi Award for Writing from the Society of Professional Journalists. He is the recipient of the MT Mehdi Courage in Journalism Award. He was honored for his writing skills with two (2) Chicago Stick-o-Type awards from the Chicago Newspaper Guild. In 1990, Hanania was nominated by the Chicago Sun-Times editors for a Pulitzer Prize for his four-part series on the Palestinian Intifada.

His writings have also been honored by two national Awards from ADC for his writing, and from the National Arab American Journalists Association.

Hanania is the US Special Correspondent for the Arab News Newspaper, covering Middle East and Arab American issues. He writes for the Southwest News newspaper group writing on mainstream American issues.

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Entertainment Tags:Gauri, India, Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kolkata, Lowland, Naxalite, United States

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