Diasporic Tension of Female Characters in Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth

Abstract: Jhumpa Lahiri (July11, 1967), is an English born American novelist and short story writer of the modern age. As a prominent and promising writer, she always prioritizes writing about the crisis of women of the contemporary era. Through her writing, she deals with the experience of a life in two separate cultures: one is the culture she belongs to, and the other is the one, she settles and harmonizes with. Having fallen in-between the dividing lines of two cultures, she faces a number of certain challenges in accommodating with, or imposing values of one culture over the other. The struggle is nicely presented in Jhumpa Lahiri’s recent fictional collection Unaccustomed Earth, where some of the female characters experience the same tension. These women characters fall between Indian and American experiences in order to find a final meeting point, from where they can distinguish things more clearly, and visualize a future for themselves. The experiences of these women characters also deal with the dynamics of two different generations – older and the recent. There are eight short stories in this novel Unaccustomed Earth. In my paper, I would like to explain the cross-cultural conflicts, troubles, disturbance, desires and predicaments of the women migrants in the first three stories of the novel Unaccustomed Earth.