Her “good” name, Nilanjana Sudeshna, was left behind when her kindergarten teacher decided to call her Jhumpa for short. This switch inspired one of her most popular books, The Namesake– a multigenerational story of the Ganguli couple and their son Gogol, living in the United States. Today, the book has become a staple in high schools all over the United States and Jhumpa Lahiri a common household name.
This was not always the case. Lahiri faced years of rejection by publishers, where her work was sent back to her from many publishers, sometimes with encouraging notes by editors. These kept her writing, and after years of perseverance and hard work, her first book was published in 1999. Interpreter of Maladies, a collection of short stories exploring themes of love, communication, family, and relationships, was received with great reviews, propelling her in mainstream media. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2000, making her a well-known author. This was followed by subsequent success of The Namesake, which was published in 2003.
Lahiri’s protagonists are often Indian immigrants in the United States. Lahiri attributes this to her two cultural identities of being Indian and American. She believes it was her desire to mix the two cultures in her writing that pushed her to write more stories about the immigrant experience. She draws from her parents’ experiences along with her own to make her characters come to life.
Lahiri is not new to the immigrant experience herself. She was born in the United Kingdom and moved to the United States when she was three years old. She grew up in Rhode Island where her father was the librarian at the University of Rhode Island. Growing up, she was embarrassed of her two identities. These personality traits are often seen in her characters.
Lahiri’s observant nature, a trait picked up at childhood, enables her to tell stories with intricate details of the lives of her characters. Her indirect characterization of her subjects sets her writing apart from many contemporary authors of this generation. Her characters, although Indian, deal with universal themes, relatable to everyone who reads it.
Always challenging her capabilities, Lahiri has moved to Italy with her family to fulfill her desire of learning Italian and writing in it. She describes her infatuation and love for Italian in her Italian debut In Other Words, which was published in 2015. Her latest book, Whereabouts, was recently published In English after translating from Italian. This time, she translated the text herself, unlike In Other Words, where Ann Goldstein translated the book to English. Whereabouts follows an unnamed, lonely woman, living in Italy in her journey.
Jhumpa Lahiri has received many accolades for her work, including the prestigious National Humanities Medal, awarded to her by Barack Obama in 2015. According to the white house citations “Jhumpa Lahiri, for enlarging the human story. In her works of fiction, Dr. Lahiri has illuminated the Indian-American experience in beautifully wrought narratives of estrangement and belonging.” Indeed, she has transformed our understanding of the Indian American immigrant experience.