Troubled Times: Family, History and Self: A Reappraisal of Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland

Troubled times refer to a state of sudden misfortune and loss in one's life. This sense of great loss jeopardizes the family relations, its historical context, and the individual self. The Naxalbari Uprising (1967) in West Bengal is one of such tragic events in the history of Postcolonial India which not only perturbed the entire Bengal socially, politically, and historically but also crashed the family relationships of the concerned people. In Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland (2013), her diasporic subjects encounter tension caused by the memories of the tragic Naxalite activities and the suffering of ordinary people during the movement. Hence, the present article attempts a contextual study of troubled times in its protagonists' family relationships, which changed the dynamics of their relationship. The present essay expands on the premise that traumatic events play a decisive role in shaping the lives of the characters in the novel and that of a community. It also posits, how the dominant political forces inflict trauma in the lives of the involved community through the notion of remembering and forgetting memories.