Theme Of Colonialism In Jhumpa Lahiri

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In her unornamented style, Lahiri portrays the tension between the family tradition and individual freedom. The central characters of the novel are woven to highlight the social and cultural polarities. While Ashima and Ashok Ganguli are conscious and nostalgic about their ‘home’, this feeling, on the other hand, is simultaneously contested in the characters of the siblings, Gogol and Sonia, who try to ‘root’ themselves in America. The travails of Ganguli seniors is explicative of the two most important phases of the immigrant settlement, viz., nostalgia for the homeland, laced with anxiety and dilemma in a strange land; and secondly, tentative and calibrated attempts at embracing foreign culture while keeping one’s native customs and tradition in perspective. Thus, while they have tried to assimilate the Americanism to the nitty-gritty’s of their everyday life.
The fictional gets into the skin of personal and real in Jhumpa Lahiri. Her voice is not intensely autobiographical as in D. H. Lawrence or Dickens but keeps on tapping the deeply realized elements in the growth of relations...

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