Be Like Jhumpa Lahiri, Don’t Let Language Define You

Can you be as brave as Jhumpa Lahiri and renounce the language you grew up in?

Bravo Jhumpa Lahiri, you just showed us how to stop fearing language! (Photo: The Quint)

It’s Jhumpa Lahiri’s 50th birthday. Last year, we profiled the then 48-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner, who’s been learning a completely new language to write in. We are republishing that profile from The Quint’s archives to wish her a very happy birthday.

Jhumpa Lahiri, at 48, is attempting something so brave I’d give her an award for it. That is, if she’s got room for one on top of that rather prestigious National Humanities Medal US President Obama just bestowed on her.

Jhumpa Lahiri just showed us it’s time we stopped fearing language. (Photo Courtesy: Facebook/Jhumpa Lahiri)

She’s learning another language. And writing a whole book in it.

In a recent, rather fluid interview to Vogue – as fluid as the paradigms of language she smoothly transcends – Lahiri talks of a Bengali lunch she eats when she comes back to Kolkata, her parents’ hometown. The Bengali lunch – as I have told any poor, unsuspecting non-Bengali friend coming to visit – is a rather elaborate multi-course meal, which requires exhaustive navigation.

Kolkata is where Jhumpa Lahiri’s parents were born, and where she has never lived herself. (Photo: iStockphoto)

There is the rice, which MUST be divided into five equal portions (one portion’s usually greater and kept for the fish). The first portion’s had with sukto (bitter mash), the next with dal, the next with vegetables, and the last two usually with preparations of fish or chicken. The order
must always be followed, Lahiri laughs – as though to do otherwise, would be treason.

“If you put it all on your plate or do it backwards, people think there’s something wrong with you. We’re so used to obeying rules. So when you break the rules with language, some people get really uptight.”

Why Italian is Like the Scary New Lover

Let’s come to Lahiri herself for a second.

How’s this for linguistic fluidity? She’s 48, has lived in Rhode Island all her life, and only in the last 3 years has moved to Rome – which she now considers her ‘home’. So much so that she’s wanted to adopt the language of her chosen home, and write and revel in it – like an exciting new lover. She’s scared it’ll reject her – like all exciting new lovers – and yet pines for the insecurity its embrace offers.

Lahiri knows her Italian is “imperfect” – but that’s exactly what she thrives on. (Photo: iStockphoto)

Lahiri makes me wonder: what is language to each one of us, really? Do we have a different one for different facets of our personality? Do we curse in one language, talk to our parents in one, make love in another?

My Own Banana-Wrapped Memories of Language

I live, armed with three languages.

Bangla is what my parents taught me, what they fed posto and eilish maach to me in – wrapped in fragrant banana leaves on a Calcutta monsoo
n afternoon, what I resorted to when I had screaming matches with them, what I spoke in when I moved to another city and called to tell them I was homesick.

Bangla is what my parents taught me – what they fed posto and eilish maach to me in, wrapped in fragrant banana leaves. (Photo Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons)

Hindi was the language I appropriated, picked up through delicious snippets of Bollywood films (not allowed till the sixth grade), through a decade of living in another city that mostly speaks it, and is – to put it as banally as possible – the language of chosen migration.

I was taught English, of course, like we mostly are, through schools and colleges and sitcoms and Hollywood. It is also what I write in and find delight writing in.

I do not know, though, whether I can do what Lahiri did.

At 48, the Pulitzer-winner uprooted herself readily to another city to actively live amidst an alien language.

Lahiri’s book In Other Words (the English translation of In Altre Parole) is out end of February. 

In the introduction to In Other Words, Lahiri bares her soul, honestly declaring that she doesn’t want to translate her book herself – because then, she will be giving in to her “more dominant language”, English. In a particularly poignant chapter called “The Wall”, she says almost wistfully that she will always feel like a foreigner.

While in Italy, shopkeepers assume she’s a foreigner; in the US, people are amazed that she speaks English with an American accent – while in India, she shocks people with her fluent Bengali.

Does it Matter What Language We Speak?

Jhumpa Lahiri, at around the age of three, with her parents, Amar and Tapati, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, circa 1970. (Photo Courtesy: Facebook/Jhumpa Lahiri)

I wonder – can we ever really break out of the shackles of looking like the poster boys/girls of a particular language? If I was born in Calcutta, I must speak Bangla, my Hindi must be peppered with laughable eccentricities and my English must sound convent-educated.

I will look a foreigner in places, native in others.

Perhaps the best way out is to do what Lahiri does in her new book – swim a little way from the safe shore (“English” for her) and risk drowning in a new language. Because, as she puts it most beautifully:

“There is nothing so dangerous as security.”

She’s flagged off a possible beginning with the division of a Bengali lunch.

I’m going to try that the next time I’m home.