Jhumpa Lahiri, the Interpreter of the New Indian Diaspora

Published in 1999, at the turn of a new century and on the threshold of the third millennium, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies (winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, among many other awards) is a collection of stories charting the new Indian diaspora, in the aftermath of the 1965 reformation of the American immigration policy. This paper proposes a textual analysis of Lahiri’s debut work through the lens of diasporic discourse, in order to show how the poised and elegant voice of the Indian-American writer significantly sheds new light on diasporic literature, mediating between ethnic and global issues.