Jhumpa Lahiri is in the news again, and this time it is because her work has been adapted by none other than Mira Nair. In December 2026, Lahiri’s stories will be tested on screen again, as Unaccustomed Earth will be released as an eight-episode long series on Netflix. This will feature a very interesting ensemble cast consisting of Freida Pinto, Siddharth, and Indraneil Sengupta. Perhaps through this, we will be again reminded of the fact that migration is not an event that occurs just once in a lifetime, but refers to a lifelong condition wherein one lives in translation.
Lahiri’s writing delves into the immigrant experience while also shining a light on Kolkata’s past and present. For example, Gogol in The Namesake decides to go running around the city’s crowded streets, while his grandmother is anxious about this adventure. The Victoria Memorial is also an important site.
” “I don’t know,” she shrugged, munching on some puffed rice and licking the mustard oil from the corners of her mouth.” This is a quote from Interpreter of Maladies, the short story from the collection of short stories bearing the same name. When it was published in 1999, the collection won major accolades in the literary sphere, and Jhumpa Lahiri, its author, made a name for herself amongst the pantheon of South Asian American women who wrote about diasporic identity. The puffed rice, consumed by the character named Mrs. Das is certainly a recurring trope not only in the story, but also in the writings that came before and after in Lahiri’s writing career. If one closely inspects Mira Nair’s work, The Namesake, an adaptation of Lahiri’s writing, one finds a scene where Ashima Ganguly (played by Tabu) puts together a snack with the cereal Rice Krispies as the chief ingredient. It was perhaps the closest thing Ashima would have come to in her quest for jhal muri, a snack made up of puffed rice. She whips it up when she feels hungry and needs to head out to run some errands. Ashima, being a first-generation immigrant also doesn’t bother to change her sartorial style as she continues to wear her cotton sarees at home and outside it too.
It is only a handful of prominent literary voices that have managed to explicate the meaning of what migration means for the South Asian diaspora — and Jhumpa Lahiri is one of them. She has been put into the category as other writers from the region, the likes of which include Meena Alexander, Talat Abbasi, Bapsi Sidhwa, Bharati Mukherjee and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. Divakaruni is perhaps the second most prominent voice to include the experiences of the Indian Bengali community in her writing. As Christiane Schlote notes, Lahiri and Divakaruni’s short stories and novels feature a series of Indian and Bengali women characters, embarking on their first flight to join their engineer husbands, who are most likely heading to Silicon Valley, or the New England Area as they attend schools such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Now would there be a need to specify that one is an Indian Bengali? Why can’t someone simply be Bengali? The answer is perhaps yes and for the latter, no, since the Bengali community was divided into two factions following the Partition of 1947, which is often referred to as the event that forged the creation of India and Pakistan. In the process, the creation of another Bengal is overlooked. Lahiri’s work touches upon the history of partition too as she writes about refugees residing in the areas near Tollygunge’s Golf Club, being ignored by the state apparatus, and in stories such as The Real Durwan, she embodies the trauma of loss through an old lady who had to leave her home in East Bengal.
The Bengali identity does extend to the other side of Bengal, the country of Bangladesh, colloquially known as Opaar Bangla (the Bengal on the other side). Despite the similarities between the cultures of West Bengal and Bangladesh, there are some pronounced differences. One of them lies in the fact that the Bangladeshi diaspora has found different ways of setting themselves up post-migration to the United States. In the city of New York alone, one finds a sizeable Bangladeshi community, often referred to simply as the Bengali identity, as ethnic identities could perhaps override one’s national identity, but in that process, it is important to recognize that a subset of Indian Bengalis seek to be represented in different ways. However, to label Lahiri solely as a chronicler of the Indian diaspora risks flattening a complex literary identity. Regional identity, national identity and the notion of transnational displacement intersect all at once, and go on to transcend geographical borders.
In a bid to understand Lahiri’s place in the diaspora, one must look into her Bengali heritage — and why the broader umbrella of the ‘Indian diaspora’ cannot be understood as a monolith. The Indian diaspora encompasses a wide variety of languages, ethnicities and histories, and Lahiri’s narratives often find home in the cultural sensibilities of the Indian Bengali middle class, as her stories revolve around West Bengal. There is a deep-seated allegiance to literature, poetry, classical music, and a nostalgia for the home country. Born in London to parents of Indian Bengali origin, and raised in Rhode Island, Lahiri experienced a childhood that oscillated between two different worlds. In many ways, the essence of her parents’ city, Calcutta was turned into a portable commodity through its debates and distinct ways of cooking and consuming food. In stories such as This Blessed House or When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine, Lahiri captures the nuances of what it is like to live in a Bengali household in suburban America. These are the spaces within which the adults find themselves attempting to recreate the charms of alleyways and coffee houses to be found back in the home that they have left behind, while the generation that comes after them are finding their way through the hostile corridors of public schools in America. Perhaps now, for this generation, Lahiri’s work matters more than ever because they find themselves and their crises being written about.
As the list of her works grew, to include novels such as The Namesake and The Lowland, Lahiri’s ideas branched out to include more experiences specific to the Indian Bengali community. In The Namesake, she delivers a masterclass in the friction and unease between two generations, and the duality of culture. Through the journey of Gogol Ganguli, who was named after a Russian author responsible for saving his father’s life in a deadly train accident, Lahiri explores the absurdity and beauty of ‘hyphenated’ identities. She refused to exoticize the Indian diaspora, something her predecessor in the literary field, Bharati Mukherjee was accused of doing—writing from a Euro-American perspective, for an audience that was primarily European and American. Lahiri’s characters experienced what other humans faced, including loneliness, ambition, and strains in one’s marital life, while migration remained in the backdrop.
Lahiri later on began to focus on a literary career where she would establish herself as an author who writes in Italian, and also published a book in Italian titled In Altre Parole. This was a departure from the foundational themes on which her career stood and was possibly seen as an act of betrayal by her readers in South Asia. However, it is important to remember that the way works of fiction become relevant or irrelevant is not operating on fixed timelines. One never knows when they are going to encounter Lahiri on the bookshelf, or on the screen. The upcoming Netflix series based on Unaccustomed Earth ensures that her previous work will be up for analysis and debate when December arrives. The Namesake might be screened in colleges, and The Real Durwan prescribed to students in their school syllabus. The stories themselves go beyond the persona of the author at times, and tend to find its own roots.
In another work of Lahiri’s — The Lowland — which courted controversy, she dwells upon the Naxalite movement that took shape in Bengal in the 1960s. The novel is written in a manner that engages deeply with the nooks and crannies of Kolkata, and paints a vivid picture of what happened in those decades in the educational institutes of Jadavpur University and Presidency. She describes the ostentatious colonial-era activities performed behind the high walls of Tolly Club—where the poor aren’t allowed, and the fences are raised higher when they start peeping. Lahiri’s works have not proffered convenient answers for the immigrant puzzle, or for what goes on in the Indian subcontinent. They simply shine a light on what is happening.
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