‘There was a woman, a translator, who wanted to be another person’

Jhumpa Lahiri, the Pulitzer-prize winning Indo-American writer, has waged a life-long battle with language; between Bengali, her mother-tongue, and English, the ‘hairy, smelly teenager’ of expression in the country she grew up in. What Lahiri gains through ‘a change of skies’, she exchanges for a politics of exile from the one language that would prove her the successful subject of American salad bowl multiculturalism. Lahiri writes almost exclusively about the experiences of the highly accomplished and culturally proud immigrant community, tracing its trajectory of arrival from the 1960s onwards in the corridors of American academic and professional careers. In laying out for scrutiny her experiments with language, inherited, adopted, and inhabited, Lahiri might well be offering a meditation on the ways in which language shapes ‘identity, alienation, belonging’; how language ‘recounts an uprooting, a state of disorientation, and a discovery’.