ABSTRACT
Jhumpa Lahiri is an important American novelist of Indian origin whose writing has been hugely influential in India. In this novel, she locates her woman protagonist in India at the height of the Maoist/Naxalite uprising in Calcutta in the 1970s. The chapter looks at how local political experience in the corners of the globe is used by an ethnic writer in the West and the politics of this strategy. The chapter also makes a comparison between Lahiri and an earlier American writer also of Bengali origin – Bharati Mukherjee – to understand Lahiri’s position as an ethnic Bengali producing literature in a multicultural milieu and how it reflects the way educated Indians view their own past, since Western literature is avidly consumed by them in India.
