Culture Clashes With a Culture

Culture Clashes with a culture -- an analysis of Interpreter of Maladies and other stories by Jhumpa Lahiri The term 'culture clash' seems to imply a conflict or a misunderstanding between two polarized cultures, quite often Eastern vs. Western culture. For example, in the short story, "When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine," from Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies the young narrator is told by her teacher that history begins with the American Revolution, as if her own Indian heritage does not exist.

This sense of insignificance is even internalized by Indian natives. A Bengali calls his nation "nothing [you'll] ever need to worry about" in the story "Sexy," when showing an American his nation is on a map (Lahir 84). However, with equal frequency a culture clash can occur between people of the same culture and background.

Culture clashes can occur between the genders, as they do quite often in the Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri, or between two people of the same ethnicity who have been exposed to the standards of the West to varying degrees. "The stories collected in her debut anthology Interpreter of Maladies deal with the question of identity. The protagonists -- all Indians -- settled abroad are afflicted with a 'sense of exile.' Alienation has become their lot.

The absence of the sense of belonging that these creatures experience makes them resolved to achieve communication" but quite often they fail in their quest (Choubey 2001). This is seen perhaps most potently in the title story of "The Interpreter of Maladies" which begins the collection. In this tale, Mr. Kapasi, an Indian, acts as a part-time guide at the Sun Temple at Konarak. He meets a couple, whom to the eye might appear to be 'like' himself, for they share Indian background.

However, although the couple appears to be Indian, they are in fact completely Americanized, as are their three children. Mr. Kapasi is so formal that even the reader is not privileged to learn his first name, but the couple's dealings with one another are just as casual and careless as any group of American tourists. They openly quarrel and share their 'dirty laundry' in public. Mr.

Kapasi, as their guide, must show them wonders of his native land, just as if they were tourists of a European racial or ethnic group. They speak and sound more like the American television programs Mr. Kapasi has seen on television, not as he expects to hear them speak, and they have a tourist's eye for the most picturesque and essentialized elements of Indian culture, like the Sun Temple. Despite these initial reservations, Mr. Kapasi begins to develop a fascination with Mina Das, the wife of the couple.

The author, interestingly enough, does reveal Mina's first name, showing the American's greater informality and casualness about relationships, in contrast to her guide's reserve. Almost as if Mina is the subject of the television shows he has seen. Mr. Kapasi begins to construct a fantasy identity for Mina. He is flattered when she hears about his other job as an interpreter at a doctor's office.

Her approval of his skills seems to make her more dignified and superior to the common order of American men and women, and he believes that she has sensitivity above the character and bearing of her rather crass husband and three noisy children. Mr.

Kapasi's own marriage is faltering, so he is psychologically ripe for such a fantasy, but his misinterpretation of Mina's American familiarity also shows how it is possible even between people with some apparent cultural common ground and language to completely misinterpret one another's maladies, as the title suggests. Vainly, he reads Mina's interest in himself and his position as far greater than it is in actuality. Mina is actually looking for a confessor, not a lover, a shoulder to cry on rather than a potential extramarital affair.

The fact that the couple includes them in their family photographs as part of the scenery of picturesque 'traditional' India, and interprets him (particularly in the case of Mina) as an essentialized example of their ancestral home goes unnoticed by Mr. Kapasi, because of the power of his fantasy. While Mr. Kapasi looks upon Mina with desire, she merely sees him through the American lens of her own culture, as a kind of mystical being to which she can open up her heart.

In fact, Mina has already had an affair. While her marriage is indeed failing, as is exemplified by the way she fights with her husband, her interest in Mr. Kapasi is rooted in her desire to confess to someone 'safe' that her youngest child is not her own child. She asks this very ordinary Gujarati interpreter from doctor's office to give her some advice and absolution for the fact that one of her children was fathered by her husband's Punjabi friend, not her husband. But Mr.

Kapasi cannot offer her solace for her guilt, and he begins to feel that his entire relationship with the couple (or, his imagined relationship) has become sullied. Finally knowing that he has not interpreted either Mina's or his own maladies correctly because of his inability to read the Americans' culture, or understand their assumptions about love, romance, and gender, he throws her address away, as well as the photographs they send of him depicting the time they spent together, at the end of the story.

Not all of Lahiri's stories are so cynical about romance, or suggest that fostering understanding between peoples of different cultural orientations is impossible. "The Third and Final Continent" is written in the first-person from the point-of-view of an Indian immigrant during the first months of his marriage and year in America. The reader already learns that the couple has a son -- "who attends Harvard University" and inherits this parent's "habit of eating steamed rice with his hands" (Choubey 2001).

His marriage is now happy, but this happiness was hard-won because of the cultural obstacles they faced during their courtship. The narrator comes to Boston after having a quick arranged marriage with a woman he barely knows. While her visa is processed, he goes to the United States, and begins to learn how to fend for himself in a strange culture and climate.

He is already far more worldly than his young bride, who has never left Calcutta, and he is far more astute in the ways of the West, as he has already studied in London. Although America, the third continent of the title, is his final stopping place, he begins his marriage culturally removed from America and his wife, and England to some degree as well, as every place he has lived, makes him a stranger to the previous location. The cultural clash that is depicted exists on many levels.

First, there is the clash of cultures between man and wife, an Indian who has lived abroad in the West, and an Indian who has not. Second, there is the difference of culture between men and women, who are socialized differently in India. Women often do not grow "out of its girlhood," as observed in another story, "This Blessed House" (Lahir142). And finally, there is the cultural clash between Americans and Indians.

And even in America, there are generational cultural clashes, as the old generation, exemplified by the narrator's landlady, is outraged at the sight of women in miniskirts on the streets of Cambridge. A kind of odd community or cultural bridge between the different cultural existences of the narrator, his wife, and the landlady are created when Mrs. Croft approves of the new bride from Calcutta, noting that she is a true lady, given her modest dress and appearance. A different kind of generational culture clash occurs at "Mrs.

Sen's." In this short story, the first-person perspective of a young American boy, who knows nothing about Indian culture, is used to ironically and naively show the unhappiness of the title character. Mrs. Sen is living in America, lonely and unhappy in her isolation, except for the eleven-year-old child she is watching. But while Mrs. Sen's unhappiness springs from her forced immersion American culture, only Eliot, the boy, understands even a little bit how isolated she feels.

Her husband seems immune to her misery, and is absorbed in his teaching, while Mrs. Sen descends deeper and deeper.