Cultural Alienation of Indian Diaspora in Lahiri’s “Unaccustomed Earth”

Abstract

This research, fashioned after Jhumpa Lahiri's “Unaccustomed Earth,” is an endeavor to expose mediocrities, generational gap, and the searching analysis of Indian traditions, marriage and social life of immigrant Bengali-Americans living as an inborded labores in foreign land. This work examines Lahiri's immigrant characters and their experiences as second generation of Bengali immigrants in America in the light of postcolonial critical insights. In other words, this work is an effort to clarify the research question if the life in exile is the unbearable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home. Each and every attempt in this paper resonates with Lahiri's discovery of alienated self in her characters in the title story “Unaccustomed Earth.”