Aestheticism, Postmodernism and Displacement in Jhumpa Lahiri's Fiction: A Novel View of the Search for Fulfillment by Obliviating the Past

This research explores how the desire to break with the barriers of tragic past and seeking survival in another world gives a new perspective to Diaspora. It is not the existence in the new world which causes the disaster of individuals; rather it is the tragic past which destroys their lives totally. Moreover, the rejection of old habits, traditions and conditioning, and a merging with the culture of the new context is an existing issue of the postmodern transcultural world. The feeling of home is like something haunting and dark which frightens the people. Their quest of survival in a transcultural world, and their will to sacrifice their relations for that reason is an insight into situations of fast changing social fabric in India. The male and the female agency works in order to build an individual identity, and it constructs individual realities based on personal experiences. the old world and the changing perceptions of the new world.

Leseprobe
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Chapter 3. Male Gaze:
Lahiri's fiction deals with the themes of displacement, immigrant lives and the quest of identities in a trans-cultural world. Being an Indian American novelist, Lahiri's works describe the lives of Indian Immigrants struggling in America. "Jhumpa Lahiri explained India to Americans and America to Indians, and showed, in her little family microcosms, what life might look like where the two worlds blend" (Giridharadas n.pag.). In The Lowland Lahiri has described the colonial experience of Indian subjects and ist impact upon their postmodern lives."Postmodern novels raise a number of specific issues regarding the interaction of historiography and fiction...issues surrounding the nature of identity and subjectivity; the question of reference and representation; the inter-textual nature of the past; the ideological implications of writing about history." (qtd. In Currie 71)
The Lowland exposes how the impact of history shatters the lives of individuals which affect not only their present relations, but the lives of upcoming generations as well. This historical disaster invokes a desire in them to break with the boundaries of traditional system, and willingly adopt displacement or dislocation as a source of freedom. In Indian postcolonial society the oppression of the subalterns (peasants) by the ruling class instigates them to raise their voice to get rid of the traditional system which has exploited them for a long time."For generations they'd lived under a feudal system that hadn't substantially changed. They were manipulated by wealthy landowners. They were pushed off fields they'd cultivated, denied revenue from crops they'd grown. They were preyed upon by moneylenders. Deprived of subsistence wages, some died from lack of food." (Lahiri 20)
As it is described in Post-Colonial Studies The Key Concepts by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, "class was an important factor in colonialism, firstly in constructing the attitudes of the colonizers towards different groups and categories of the colonized ('natives'), and increasingly amongst the colonized peoples themselves as they began to employ colonial cultural discourse to describe the changing nature of their own societies". The colonizers implement different strategies towards different groups and classes in a colonial society in order to fulfill their purpose of 'divide and rule'. In order to create anarchy in the society the colonizers give privilege to some local groups or classes, and subjugate the rest of people by granting them an inferior rank in their own society. These few privileged groups imitate the colonizers and use their hegemonic power to colonize their own people by denying their rights and freedom. So it is clear that the "kinds of inequity and injustice, exclusion and oppression found in post-colonial societies is simply explicable in terms of class" (33). It is due to this kind of treatment in the society that the subalterns raise their voices against social injustice and exploitation. They reject the ideologies that are dictated by the ruling class for their own profit, and start thinking about their basic rights which are denied by the elite factions of the society. In Reading Subaltern Studies Javed Alam has described the activities of peasants in colonial India and gives a presupposition;"Between the world of politics on the one hand and the economic processes of capitalist transformation on the other, there is a kind of mental space within which the social forms of existence and consciousness of the people are all their own---strong and enduring in their own right and therefore free from manipulations by the dominant groups. However much the ruling classes may control the themes and content of politics or the source of history, the subalterns, that is, the people, will always manage to make them heard." (qtd. In Ludden 43-44)
The Lowland is somewhat a kind of National Allegory which covers the hist