Culture Clashes in Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies

Introduction: Redefining Culture Clash

The term "culture clash" seems to imply a conflict or misunderstanding between two polarized cultures — quite often Eastern versus Western. 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. In the story "Sexy," a Bengali calls his nation "nothing [you'll] ever need to worry about" when showing an American his country on a map (Lahiri 84).

However, with equal frequency a culture clash can occur between people of the same culture and background. Culture clashes occur between the genders in Interpreter of Maladies, and also between two people of the same ethnicity who have been exposed to Western standards to varying degrees. As one scholar observes, "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 that quest (Choubey 2001).

Misreading and Misinterpretation in 'The Interpreter of Maladies'

This dynamic is seen perhaps most potently in the title story, which begins the collection. In "The Interpreter of Maladies," Mr. Kapasi, an Indian, works part-time as a guide at the Sun Temple at Konarak. He meets a couple who might appear, at first glance, to share his Indian background. However, although the couple is of Indian descent, they are in fact completely Americanized, as are their three children. Mr. Kapasi is so formal that even the reader is never told his first name, yet the couple's dealings with one another are as casual and careless as those of any group of American tourists. They openly quarrel and air their private troubles in public. As their guide, Mr. Kapasi must show them the wonders of his native land just as he would for tourists of any other background. They speak more like the characters of American television programs he has watched than the way he expects them to speak, and they regard the Sun Temple and other sites with a tourist's appetite for the picturesque and the essentialized.

Despite these initial reservations, Mr. Kapasi develops a fascination with Mina Das, the wife. Tellingly, Lahiri does reveal Mina's first name, signaling the Americans' greater informality about relationships, in contrast to the guide's reserve. Almost as if she were a character from the television programs he has seen, Mr. Kapasi begins to construct a fantasy identity for Mina. He is flattered when she expresses admiration for his other job as an interpreter at a doctor's office.

Her approval seems to elevate her above the common order of American tourists in his eyes, and he persuades himself that she possesses a sensitivity far above the character of her rather crass husband and three noisy children. Mr. Kapasi's own marriage is faltering, which makes him psychologically susceptible to such a fantasy. His misinterpretation of Mina's American familiarity also illustrates how thoroughly two people can misread one another even when they share apparent cultural common ground and a common language — which is, of course, precisely what the collection's title suggests.

Vainly, he reads Mina's interest in him as far greater than it actually is. Mina is looking for a confessor, not a lover — a shoulder to cry on, not the prospect of an extramarital affair. The fact that the couple includes Mr. Kapasi in their family photographs as part of the scenery of picturesque "traditional" India, and regards him (especially in Mina's case) as an essentialized emblem of their ancestral homeland, goes unnoticed by him because of the power of his fantasy. While Mr. Kapasi looks upon Mina with desire, she merely views him through the American lens of her own culture, as a kind of mystical figure to whom she can unburden her heart.

In fact, Mina has already had an affair. While her marriage is indeed failing — as the couple's fighting makes clear — her interest in Mr. Kapasi is rooted in a desire to confess to someone "safe" that her youngest child is not her husband's. She asks this ordinary Gujarati interpreter for advice and absolution for the fact that one of her children was fathered by her husband's Punjabi friend. But Mr. Kapasi cannot offer her the solace she seeks, and he begins to feel that his entire imagined relationship with the couple has been tainted. Understanding that he has misread both Mina's maladies and his own — because of his inability to read American assumptions about love, romance, and gender — he discards her address and the photographs she later sends him, ending the story.

Navigating East and West in 'The Third and Final Continent'

Not all of Lahiri's stories are so cynical about romance, or suggest that fostering understanding between people of different cultural orientations is impossible. "The Third and Final Continent" is written in the first person from the perspective of an Indian immigrant during the first months of his marriage and his first year in America. The reader learns early on that the couple eventually has a son who "attends Harvard University" and inherits his parent's "habit of eating steamed rice with his hands" (Choubey 2001). His marriage is ultimately happy, but that happiness was hard-won because of the cultural obstacles the couple faced during their courtship.

The narrator arrives in Boston after a hastily arranged marriage to a woman he barely knows. While her visa is being processed, he travels to the United States and begins 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 far more familiar with Western ways, having previously studied in London. Although America — the third continent of the title — is his final destination, he begins his marriage culturally removed from both America and his wife. Each place he has lived has made him a stranger to the last.

The cultural clash depicted in this story operates on several levels. First, there is the clash between husband and wife: an Indian who has lived in the West and an Indian who has not. Second, there is the difference between men and women socialized differently within India itself — women in another story, "This Blessed House," are observed never to have grown "out of its girlhood" (Lahiri 142). Finally, there is the broader clash between Indian immigrants and American society. Even within America, generational divisions surface: the narrator's elderly landlady, Mrs. Croft, is scandalized by the sight of women in miniskirts on the streets of Cambridge. Yet a curious cultural bridge forms when Mrs. Croft warmly approves of the narrator's new bride from Calcutta, praising her modest dress and bearing as the mark of a true lady — a moment that momentarily links three very different cultural worlds.

Conclusion: Bridging Cultural Gaps

Some of the characters in Interpreter of Maladies learn to negotiate their new identities and cultural terrains and to bridge the gaps that exist between themselves and their fellow Indians, as well as between themselves and Americans. These stories counsel that one cannot assume a common culture simply because one's ancestors share a common point of origin. But with hard work and effort, the collection ultimately suggests, communication is possible — between cultures, between married couples, and between generations.