Unhomeliness in Jhumpa Lahiriʼs "Hema and Kaushik"

Abstract

Frank writes that the characters of migration literature invariably deal with migration in different ways, from "the experience of migration and the uncertainty of displaced identities as destructive, agonizing, and painful to the experience of migration and displacement as productive, fascinating, and appealing, but in general, as he argues, the migration literature concerns redefining immigrants" identities to show their heterogeneous or hybrid feature. Jhumpa Lahiri has treated the same themes of migration and postcoloniality in most of her works. Being an American of Indian, or more accurately Bengali, descent, her works all have echoes of her life. This essay focuses on the various ways in which Jhumpa Lahiri employs hybridity in the second part of Unaccustomed Earth, entitled "Hema and Kaushik", to convey the unhomeliness of her postcolonial subject. Briefly, it is an account of an ethnic-American man, Kaushik, who is unable to root himself, either emotionally or physically. In this sense, his story becomes an excellent example of a hybrid text since the author addresses the protagonist's unhomeliness by constructing a text that defies fixedness and shows the impossibility of clinging to a center. This study intends to argue that "Hema and Kaushik" is a narrative permeated by unhomeliness, both in the tales it tells and in the form that the narrative takes. By drawing on Bhabhaʼs unhomeliness as a theoretical basis, this study intends to show that Jhumpa Lahiri breaks down the stabilized notions of home, homeland and national belonging thus depicting a more cosmopolitan picture of contemporary Indian diasporic community.