Interaction of Literature Between West and East in Context to Jumpa Lahiri and Anita Desai
Abstract:
Fiction literature- especially English fiction literature has no boundary or walls of country. Starting from Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, Henry Jams, Ivan Turgenev Anton Chekhov, Graham Green, and Joseph Conrad to Indian writers like R.K. Narayan, Mulkraj Anand, Raja Rao, Anita Desai, Jumpa Lahiri, Girish Karnad etc. have immensely contributed in Anglo-Indian fiction literature. Interaction among these world class writers has left a permanent impression on English fiction literature. We can see similarity in writing of Jane Austin and R.K. Narayan, writings of Hardy and R.K. Narayan, in their portrayal of characters.
India has inherited a great legacy of her culture from ancient time. Civilization has constantly been passing through its sophisticated form. India has also kept her age old prevailing tradition in the society with some modification. India is such a country where festivals, cultural events, protocols of civilization, Religious occasions, National Day Celebration Programme and Traditional Rituals always take place. They are the inseparable parts of our society. They basically aimed to unite people with the feeling of togetherness, to make people enjoy life very closely with harmonious mutual understanding and the same is also been seen in the writings of native Indian authors.
Key Words: Fiction literature, English Language, Culture, Tradition, Publication.
Introduction:
The struggle of Indian people for independence was a peerless struggle which covered span of almost half of the twentieth century. The unarmed struggle created by Gandhiji awakened the Indian people from the sound sleep of British fetters of one and half century which was a memorable period of Indian history. Thoughts of Gandhi were not only limited to political field but it were spread in the social, economic and moral fields as well. It is truly called the Gandhian Age, as the impact of Gandhi's personality and his social, political, economic programmes was immense including writings and fiction literature. His humanitarian work was not ended with advent of freedom but it was continuing till the last breath of his life.
The wind of change in Indian sub-continent can be considered from the Revolt of 1857. Two World Wars also proved the significant change in cultural, social and other aspects of Indian life. Advent of Gandhiji (1869-1948) from South Africa in 1915 was a powerful current in political and social fields like a fresh air that made the whole country to take deep breaths. Writers of every era are always mirror of contemporary age, which reflects image of political and social condition of that society. Social, political and moral thinking can be seen reflected in the fiction literature of the age.
It is of course true that, the independence struggle of people of India led by Gandhiji was not only a political struggle but it was spread as moral experience for all Indian people in the twentieth century. No Indian writer was there who could not impress with Gandhian thoughts. Writings of K.A. Abbas, Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand and R. K. Narayan are the few examples for the statement. All the characters of these writers were directly or indirectly seen affected by Gandhian thought. It was a national phenomenon that no boundaries of state or language or community could restrict it. Importance of peasant movement was also a significant in Indian struggle for independence. The condition of landless village folk was naturally worsened. They all supported in the ideology of Gandhiji.
The condition of Indian people from labours, landless peasants, marginal land holder, middle class men of rural and urban area, the servants, children, women and employees were almost the same. British exploited Indian people in such a badly way that, it cannot be described in words. British reign of one and half century in India made Indian people so miser that there was no meal for a family at night and they passed their nights with only drinking a glass of water. The researcher thinks that this description is enough to describe the age of British reign, Gandhian era and contemporary writers.
So many ups and downs happened in the Indian struggle movement for independence. So many leaders from different states came out to support. Way of thinking of all these leaders may be different but they were all believed in Gandhian ideology except Subhash Chandra Bose who told that "Tum muje Khoon do, main tumhe aazadi dunga." But his ideology was not supported by majority of people. Events of 1915 to 1942 and 1947 in the history of independence are a huge story which cannot be described in few pages. But the conclusion is that, the British had to leave before on 15th August 1947 and India became an independent nation.
So many novels, fiction literatures, short stories, drama and poetries are written regarding the events and episode of zamindars and landless farmers. So many movies are also released on the same content. Our writers Anita Desai (1937) and Jumpa Lahiri (1967) which are under study also were not free from Gandhian ideology and Gandhian thoughts. We shall discuss them, by their novels one by one.
Jhumpa Lahiri
Actual name of Jhumpa Lahiri is Nilanjana Sudeshna."Jhumpa" Lahiri is nickname (Bengali born on July 11, 1967) is the American author. Jhumpais selected as the winner of the 29th PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the short story. Jhumpa's short debut story collection “Interpreter of Maladies” (1999) won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction literature, as well asthe first novel, “The Namesake” (2003), was adapted at popular film with same name. Her birth name was Nilanjana Sudeshna but people know as Jhumpa. She was a member of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, appointed by U.S. President Barack Obama. (She resigned from the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, appointed by U.S. President where she resigned in August, 2017, co-signing a letter of resignation saying with reference to the President Trump, “Ignoring your hateful rhetoric would have made us complicit in your words and actions.” Her book “The Lowland”, published in 2013, was a nominee for the Booker Prize & the National Book Award for Fiction literature. Jhumpa is currently a professor of creative writing at Princeton University.
She was born in London, the daughter of Bengali Indian emigrants from the state of West Bengal. Her family moved to the United States when she was of2 years; Jhumpa considers herself an American, stating, “I wasn’t born here, but I might as well have been”. Jhumpa grew up in Kingston, Rhode Island, where her father Amar Lahiri works as a librarian at the University of Rhode Island. He is the basis for the protagonist in "The Third and final Continent," the closing story from Interpreter of Maladies. Jhumpa's mother wanted her children to grow up knowing their Bengali heritage, & her family often visited realties in Calcutta.
When she began kindergarten in Kingston, Rhode Island, Jhumpa's teacher decided to call her by her pet’s name, Jhumpa, because it was easier to pronounce than her "proper name." Jhumpa recalled, “I always felt so embarrassed by my name....You feel like you're causing someone pain just by being who you are.” Jhumpa's ambivalence over her identity was the inspiration for the ambivalence of Gogol, the protagonist of her noel “The Namesake”, over his unusual name. Jhumpa graduated from South Kingstown High School & received her B.A. in English fiction literature from Barnard College of Columbia University in 1989. Jhumpa then received multiple degrees from Boston University: an M.A. in English, an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, an M.A. in Comparative Fiction literature, & a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies. She took a fellowship at Provincetown's Fine Arts Work Center, which lasted for the next two years (1997-1998). Jhumpa has taught creative writing at Boston University & the Rhode Island School of Design.
In 2001, Jhumpa married Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, a journalist who was then deputy editor of Time Latin America, & who is now senior editor of Time Latin America. Jhumpa lives in Rome with her husband &2 children, Octavio (b.2002) and Noor (b.2005). Jhumpa joined the Princeton University faculty on July 1, 2015 as a professor of creative writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts. Jhumpa's early short stories faced rejection from publishers for years. Her debut short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, was finally released in 1999. Jhumpa's second collection of short stories, “Unaccustomed Earth”, was released on April 1, 2008. Since 2005, Jhumpa has been a vice president of the PEN American Center, an organization designed to promote friendship & intellectual cooperation among writers.
Anita Desai
She is novelist, short story writer as well as children's author. Anita Desai's father was Indian and mother was German. She born in 1937 in Mussoorie but spent much of her life in Delhi, where she studied her B.A. in English fiction literature& graduated with honours from University of Delhi. She made her debut as a novelist with “Cry, The Peacock”, which was followed by equally well crafted “Voices in The City”. She was specially noted for her sensitive portrayal of female characters & the alimentation of the middle-class women in India, and praised as one of the finest of her generation of Indian writers in English.
As a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she has taught at Girton College, Cambridge and has been Parrington Professor of English at Mount Holyoke Colleges, U.S.A. She is now Prof. Emeritus, Creative Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology U.S.A.
“Anita Desai creates a stained-glass landscape with details of images, colours and odours.... ‘Cry, The Peacock’ is the product of a mellowed craftswoman.”
Statesman
She was first published in 1960s and immediately praised as the finest of her generation of Indian writers in English. Her novels evoke characters, events and moods with recourse to a rich use of visual imagery and details. The origin of her stories, as she has admitted, is itself rooted in images; 'there are so many images that remains in the mind stay with you.....' She has received numerous awards, including the 1978 Sahitya Academy Award for “Fire On The Mountains”, the 1983 Guardian Prize for Children's Fiction for Village “By The Sea” and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1980 and again in 1984.
She has received numerous awards, including most recently in 2005 the Grinzane Cavour International Prize - Una Vita Per la literature (a life for Literature) - one of Europe's most prestigious literary awards and often said to anticipate the Nobel Prize.
“....The style (Anita Desai) has evolved is lucid, fight, and eremitic ... her imagistic prose acquires an ambiguous and terrible power-the words hold down the events forcibly.”
Arts Guardian London
Anita Desai is by now firmly established as the preeminent Indian novelist of the generation, and the writing mirrors the woman to a quite remarkable degree. When you first encounter it the prose seems to whisper, to speak so softly as to risk going unheard, but as you bend your ear to listen you hear many unexpected notes of wicked comedy, of sharp, even biting perceptions about her fellow men and women, and of a clear-sighted unsent mentality about human nature that is anything but frail. The voice takes hold of the reader, gently, irresistibly, and its strength and clarity soon come to seem like small miracles.
In an age when writers are often clumsily grouped together by ethnic origin, or language, or corralled into the ghettoes of ideology and gender, it is easy to forget the transnational, translingual, and indeed transsexual nature of all great literature, in whose frontier less landscape R.K.Narayan's Malgudi is in the same neighbourhood as William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Macon do, closer to those places, indeed, than to any place in India; and thanks to the translations commissioned by the Argentine publisher Victoria Ocampo, a generation of Latin American writers was reared on the works of Rabindranath Tagore. When I think of Anita Desai I see her most clearly as a figure standing, as an equal, beside Jane Austen, that other great Indian novelist, creator of brave, brilliant women trapped by conservative social mores into becoming mere husband-hunters, women who would be very recognizable to denizens of, for example, the Delhi of Clear Light of Day. And because while she is wholly Indian she is also half-European, I think of her in the company of other insider-outsiders such as the white Caribbean novelist Jean Rhys, author of Wide Sargasso Sea, or the half-Sikh, half-Hungarian painter Amrita Sher-Gil. Nor should Anita Desai be placed in exclusively female company. As In Custody makes plain, she has cared as much about, and been shaped as deeply by, the great (male) Urdu poets as by any woman's poems.
Until the publication of In Custody one might has said that the subject of Anita Desai's fiction was solitude. Her most memorable early creations - The Old Woman, Nanda Kaul, In Fire On The Mountain (a novel to which her daughter Kiran's the Inheritance of Loss owes an immense artistic debt), or Bim In Clear Light Of Day were isolated, singular figures. Those books themselves felt like private universes, illuminated by their author's perceptiveness, delicacy of language and sharp wit, but remaining, in a sense, as solitary, as separate, as their characters.
Conclusion
Change is integral in life because stagnancy is death. Thus, the rules obstructing human progress must be erased and revived to meet the present demand of sustained survival. Time immemorial patriarchy’s hegemony has dictated women to live by these rules of flexibility in order to respond towards adoption and adaptation as envisioned by their male counterparts. The new women perusing multiple challenges in the global scenario has succeeded in clearing the suffocation that chocked her psyche in the old arena. Whereas men who have been the oppressor, ruling suppressing women happen to depict a baffled and scattered self, caught into the terminal of old and new. The traditional patriarchal mindset becomes the strongest hurdle towards his existence in the new world as he is torn between the dilemmas of to be or not to be.
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