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POSTSCRIPT
DOCUMENTARY FILMS | READINGS
Some Lows, Many Highs
Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland is intellectually and
emotionally captivating, even though some
elements in the plot seem unconvincing.
Shoma Sen
A
novel set against the backdrop of the Naxalite movement
in Bengal in the late 1960s and the 1970s,
Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland centres around family
relationships. Udayan and Subhash, brothers in a lower
middle-class family of Tollygunge, Kolkata, grow up as intensely
close siblings, until Udayan is drawn into the Naxalite movement
and Subhash leaves for further studies in the US. The
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december 14, 2013 vol xlviII no 50 EPW Economic & Political Weekly

POSTSCRIPT
READINGS | LITERARY FESTIVALS
killing of his brother in a false encounter with the police
brings Subhash back to India where he marries Udayan’s wife,
Gauri, who is pregnant, and takes her off to Rhode Island to
escape the conservative atmosphere in their Kolkata home.
In the US Gauri gets drawn to academics and ultimately
deserts her family and their daughter Bela to
move away in pursuit of an independent career.
Perhaps the most feminist of Lahiri’s novels, The
Lowland portrays two types of feminism – an individualistic
kind of feminism in the character of
Gauri, the Naxalite sympathizer, who abandons
everything to pursue a career in philosophy, and
a kind of eco-feminism in her daughter, Bela.
Ironically, it is Bela who ends up practising the lifestyle of a
proletariat, taking up organic farming instead of higher
studies, living an anti-capitalist lifestyle, and becoming a
single, unwed mother.
But more than ideology, it is rudiments of psychology that
form the basis of Lahiri’s characterisation – the intense pain
of the rejected child and the husband who had wanted to do
a good turn; the “selfishness” of the mother who could not be
one; the ensuing guilt and trauma; and the ending of the
novel indicating the possibility of a future bond between
mother and daughter.
Somewhat unconvincing to me, however, was the element
of fate in the plot, where, like a 19th century novel,
the mother who abandons her child never once tries to
look her up, and the father and daughter leave her to her
new life without staking any claims. Except for some efforts
of Gauri at Googling into their past, this extremely cold
response to the only relatives and friends she had in the US
– for a woman who grew up in a traditionally Indian
atmosphere and spent some intense years with “comrades”
– is difficult to swallow.
I once heard of a Naxalite woman activist in Andhra
Pradesh who had gone underground, leaving her infant
daughter with her mother. Out of a deep emotional compulsion,
one day she secretly appeared at their house and rang
the doorbell. The girl opened the door and yelled out to her
grandmother that some stranger of a woman was standing
outside – the moment of reunion was rendered even more
pathetic for the activist mother.
But that the same situation should happen in “normal”
circumstances in the US makes one wonder whether the
social life and culture of this country led to the changes that
made Gauri feel that individual freedom and growth were a
priority to her at the cost of everything else. Or, like a character
from Hardy or Bronte, was it fate that moved mother and
daughter completely apart only to bring them together after
a gap of about 20 years?
Though Lahiri’s attempt at researching and recapturing
the traumatic lives of activists and their families living in
the Kolkata of that period is commendable for striking a
genuine chord, the sections of The Lowland that are based
... more than
ideology, it is
rudiments of
psychology
that form the
basis of Lahiri’s
characterisation
on life in Rhode Island are more the quintessential Lahiri.
The use of short sentences and hyperbole, in the parts
tracing the Naxalite movement, give way to longer, descriptive
sentences that detail life in the diasporic situation.
The characterisation of Udayan and Subhash’s parents,
and the narration of Udayan’s arrest and killing,
are movingly executed.
The description of the lower middle-class
Bengali life in the late 1960s and the 1970s, the
romancing of Gauri and Udayan, the patriarchal
practices and social movements in the society
of that era, the house in the lowlands, and
the aged mother paying tributes at her son’s
memorial service, are images that will remain permanently
imprinted in memory. The non-linear narrative and the intermingling
of the personal and the political in plot construction
bind the work securely, adding interest and suspense
to a novel that entraps the reader both intellectually
and emotionally.
Shoma Sen (shomasen@hotmail.com) teaches English literature at Nagpur University.
Economic & Political Weekly EPW december 14, 2013 vol xlviII no 50 141