Jhumpa Lahiran Culture

1242 Words3 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Review of related literature about cultural diversity

Each year there are many people from around the world that want to migrate into the United States making it their permanent home. Culture shapes and designs the world we live in and our place in it. Individuals and societies examine their surroundings through constant interpretations of what they do on a daily basis. Everyone who lives in any part of what we call “society,” are constantly trying to belong to that are they live in. The term “culture” is depicted in a new context, and includes everything from activities and buildings to language and practices of human beings. People from different cultures have characteristically different practices and a practice that is normal and acceptable in one culture may be abnormal and unacceptable in another.
Jhumpa Lahiri, the author of the story, “The Third and Final Continent,” grew up being aware of conflicting expectations from two different countries. As Jhumpa mentioned, “I was expected to be Indian by Indians and Americans by Americans (Lahiri, pg 50).” The Third and Final Continent leaves the reader with a positive notion of the immigrant experience in America. The narrator recalls his school days in London, rooming with other foreign Bengalis, and trying to settle in this new world. He talks about how when he was 36 years old when his own marriage was arranged and he first flew to Calcutta, to attend his wedding. This statement is unique because it depicts the differences between an American culture and an Indian culture. At the time of marriage he is 36 years old and he didn’t pick who he wanted to get married to. Marriage in India is something that most parents set compared to other countries where they can marry someone of choice. Indians settle down by an arranged marriage ma...

... middle of paper ...

...e end of The Third and Final Continent reveals the narrator is now an older man choosing to spend time with Mala in this new world instead of returning back to live in India. “When Mala misses their son who attends Harvard, they go visit him and bring him home for a weekend, so that he can eat rice with them with his hands, and speak Bengali, things we sometimes worry he will no longer do after we die (Lahiri, pg. 59).” According to the narrator, he wants to make sure that his son lives the same way that Mala and himself have been living in America. The traditions that they carried all these years should be carried when their son grows up and goes through that journey on his own.
Each family has their own unique background that helps make the next generation different from that of another and that’s what makes a country more diverse and has a cultural atmosphere.

Show More
Related

  • Red Skelton Research Paper

    352 Words  | 1 Pages

    Although each family has their differences, they came together and formed the families that are living today. Where our ancestors came from and what they came to be are key components to what makes up family history. The dirt from several countries traveled across the ocean to reach the soil of America stayed planted for generations to

    Read More

  • Sociology: Dramatic Changes To the American Family

    1018 Words  | 3 Pages

    Families have changed greatly over the past 60 years, and they continue to become more diverse.

    Read More

  • Second-Generation Immigration: Finding a Balance between Two Cultures

    671 Words  | 2 Pages

    ...d and left with little cultural influence of their ancestors (Hirschman 613). When the children inadvertently but naturally adapting to the world around them, such as Lahiri in Rhode Island, the two-part identity begins to raise an issue when she increasingly fits in more both the Indian and American culture. She explains she “felt an intense pressure to be two things, loyal to the old world and fluent in the new”, in which she evidently doing well at both tasks (Lahiri 612). The expectations for her to maintain her Indian customs while also succeeding in learning in the American culture put her in a position in which she is “sandwiched between the country of [her] parents and the country of [her] birth”, stuck in limbo, unable to pick one identity over the other.

    Read More

  • My Two Lives Jhumpa Lahiri Analysis

    826 Words  | 2 Pages

    With Indian parents and being raised in America from the age of two, Lahiri states in her essay that in her earlier years “Indian-American” was how she was described as, however, she hardly felt as if she could identify with “either side of the hyphen” (97,98). In other words, having these two cultures present in her life that supposedly made up who she was ended up making her feel that because she fell into both categories she could not fully relate to either culture, causing her to feel alienated. She goes on to say, “As a child I sought perfection and so denied myself the claim to any identity” (98). This thinking is a prime supporter of the correlation between culture and identity because it was culture that affected Lahiri’s claim of identity, even if that claiming was no identity at all. Through the examination of Lahiri’s early life, it is evident that there is a correspondence between identity and

    Read More

  • The Namesake By Jhumpa Lahiri

    824 Words  | 2 Pages

    Her story gave me a greater insight into the process by which many Indian women migrated to the United States. When reading The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, I did not think about Ashima’s story as being representative of the larger female Indian American immigrant experience, but in talking to Alka, I learned that their shared experience was common. Alka explained that many of the couples that she and her husband are friends with, had similar journeys to the United States. Through Alka’s narrative of her arrival, I also gained insight into arranged marriages which are heavily stigmatized in the Western world. She explained that her marriage was arranged by her and her husband’s parents who acquaintances and that largely left out of the decision making process. I was surprised that her family justified her engagement based on the fact that her field of studies would be most easily adapted in the United States, as well as financially stable. However, what surprised me most about her migration to the United States was, for the most part, out of her control. She chose to marry her husband because the match made both families so happy, and with that one decision she was whisked away to a foreign

    Read More

  • From The School Days Of An Indian Girl By Zitkala-Sa

    255 Words  | 1 Pages

    The author and her friends, Judewin and Thowin, alone with other children got excited about an adventure in to a new land. Their excitement was short because of their painful experiences from the white’s ignorance of the Indian culture. When a white women saw her arrived the school, she tossed her up in the air several times. It was insulting for her because of against the Indian culture. Her stay at the school was other painful experience.

    Read More

  • Jhumpa Lahiri: Writing About The Struggles Immigrants Face

    2017 Words  | 5 Pages

    Reisman, Rosemary M. Canfield. “The Third and Final Continent.” Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. N.p.: Salem Press, Inc, 2004. N. pag. Literary Reference Center. Web. 22 Feb. 2010. .

    Read More

  • Jhumpa

    779 Words  | 2 Pages

    The short story “Mrs. Sen” resolves around a recent and dependant immigrant Mrs. Sen, the wife of a university professor, who is cultural, physically and psychologically displaced, because she has left behind her home and family in Indian to migrate to America because of her husband’s job “Here in this place where Mr. Sen has brought me, I cannot sometimes sleep,” (115) In an interview with Frankfort, Lahiri states that women only migrated to America because of their husbands and thus did not have an identity or purpose of their own when they reach (Awadalla & Russell, np). The story portrays the life of Mrs. Sen who is caught between the culture she is born and socialized into and the new American culture she experiences when she migrates. Physically, Mrs. Sen resides in America, but psychologically her mind remains at home in India. Mrs. Sen, who is a first generation migrant, chooses not to assimilate into American as she states on page 113, “Everything is there,” referring to India. For Mrs.Sen, Calcutta remains in her memory as being her true home, “By then Eliot understood that when Mr...

    Read More

  • How Does Jhumpa Lahiri Use Literary Techniques

    431 Words  | 1 Pages

    “The family looked Indian but dressed as foreigners did, the children in stiff, brightly colored clothing and caps with translucent visors.” (Lahiri 147) In the beginning of the story we can see in this quote that Lahiri shows a theme, the difficulty of communication, where it shows a contrast between Indians and Indian Americans. Mr. Kapasi, after checking out Mrs. Das hopes that they will find something in common and will pursue his romance; yet, later on he does find that American gap that leads to disappointment.

    Read More

  • Summary Of Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth

    1637 Words  | 4 Pages

    The predicament of Ruma’s father is a universal predicament to all those immigrant parents caught up in a never ending dichotomy of acculturation. The more they assimilate themselves with the outside world, the more they can relate with their children. Usha, the adolescent protagonist of “Hell-Heaven” in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth, was born in Berlin, but later moved to Central Square, with her parents and settled there permanently. She is more an American with her behaviour and mannerism than an Indian.

    Read More

  • Somalian American Culture

    448 Words  | 1 Pages

    “The strength of a family, like the strength of an army, is in its loyalty to each other.” Mario Puzo, American author. Every culture has its own set of beliefs, traditions and religions. Your culture defines who you are as a person and how you go about your life. For example most Americans living in the Mid-west, speak English and grew up on or around the country lifestyle. Somalian people are united by one language, Somali, which is influenced by their native culture (Adair, 2013, p.1). Likewise with the Mid-western United states, they grew up on farmland but with a tropical climate still able to produce crops. Being part of a family is different from how it was a decade ago, at that time the mother stayed home with the children while the

    Read More

  • Bharati Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters

    1358 Words  | 3 Pages

    Generally, in the depiction of the immigrant woman’s negotiations with the New World, Bharati Mukherjee’s treatment of the past spacetime becomes crucial. Usually, her novels portray the past spacetime as a circumscribing space that must be escaped in order to (re)construct identity. For instance, in Wife, Mukherjee depicts Dimple’s inability to escape from the past as an inability to transform into an American individual who has the agency to define her self. On the other hand, in Jasmine, the protagonist almost completely rejects her past and her Indianness to facilitate her transformation and assimilation in America. Both novels depict the past as a constricting spacetime. However, in Desirable Daughters, instead of depicting the past as an essentialist, fixed entity that thwarts the transformation of identity, Mukherjee highlights the active participation of the past spacetime in (re)defining identity. Mukheree’s new artistic vision parallels Homi Bhabha’s theory of the performative space, whose dynamicity challenges pedagogical fixity and contributes to the continual (re)structuring of both individual identities and nation-spaces. Meanwhile, Mukherjee’s new treatment of the past spacetime resolves some of the dialectical strands of her artistic vision. To delineate the dissolution of these dialectics, this article traces Mukherjee’s portrayal of the past spacetime, first as an essentialist entity, then as a fluid metaphor, and lastly as an ambivalent entity that helps the protagonist redefine her identity. In the process, critics who brush off Mukherjee’s novels as having an Orientalist vision may be made to reconsider her aesthetics as well as her novels.

    Read More

  • Understanding Cultural Influence in Shaping Identity

    616 Words  | 2 Pages

    We reside in a country where the population is so diverse that we have many contrasting cultures that are extraordinary in its own esteem. Culture includes beliefs, language, traditions, arts and craft, dancing, fashion, cuisine, religion, politics, and the economy. These are just a few parts of culture and some cultures tend to have more and some have less. Not many people realize how a culture’s implication is so philosophical that it makes us human beings who we are. Culture is the lens we see the world through where we grasp and appraise our surroundings.

    Read More

  • Definition Of American Culture

    551 Words  | 2 Pages

    Culture is defined as the ways of thinking, acting, and material objects that together form a people's way of life. With our melting pot status, American culture is constantly changing as new people, new ideas, and new technology make their way into our society and change the way we think and feel. The ebb and flow of our culture can be easily seen by walking our streets and seeing how different age groups and races act similarly and differently to stimulus. This essay will discuss how even though our

    Read More

  • Culture Is Ordinary, by Raymond Williams

    1076 Words  | 3 Pages

    In the end, what we learn from this article is very realistic and logical. Furthermore, it is supported with real-life examples. Culture is ordinary, each individual has it, and it is both individual and common. It’s a result of both traditional values and an individual effort. Therefore, trying to fit it into certain sharp-edged models would be wrong.

    Read More

More about Jhumpa Lahiran Culture

Open Document