They desperately try to hold on to their previous identity but are in a constant dilemma as their husbands, representation of the patriarchy, try to mould them into someone new. In this essay, I argue that the first-generation women immigrants feel completely lost in the new land, confined to their homes and patriarchal rules. In this essay, I will discuss the female voice of this hybrid identity created by Lahiri in two of the stories that have central female characters – “Mrs.
This constant state of flux creates fluidity in the identity of these people who feel uprooted.įurther, the female characters in Lahiri’s stories assume a subaltern voice, often been dismissed by the patriarchal postcolonial literature (Möller 2008). Though the other three stories are set in India, they also deal with Indian Americans returning to India and facing a problem to adjust to the Indian conditions. In Maladies, six out of nine stories are about Indians based in the USA and the crisis that their identity is due to their sense of belonging to their native land even though they reside in America.
The craving for an imaginative homeland that one has left and on returning, their inexorable inability to adjust to their native land creates a vacuum in these characters leading to an identity crisis.
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