ABSTRACT
The chapter analyses house as a spatial construct that shares a symbiotic relationship with its inhabitants. The chapter also focuses on cultural, social and symbolic ideas that evolve out of this interdependent relationship. This system of interconnectedness between house, human beings and ideas is analysed in the chapter by using philosophic, anthropologic, architectural, economic and ethnographic theories and case studies that reveal some of the different ways in which house reflects the world around it, and, in turn, is also shaped and transformed by that world. The chapter, by taking into consideration theoretical meanings of house, eventually tries to deduce a chain of spatial meanings which interact with different social and cultural systems. It also posits house space as gendered wherein female agencies implicitly influence and get influenced by it. House space gets more nuanced when its female inhabitants grapple with shift(s) in territorial and cultural reference points. The chapter therefore by its end posits socio-cultural possibilities of reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s representations of diasporic house space and its relationship with a group of heterogeneous Indian American female characters.
