Jhumpa Lahiri questions the mother tongue — and the need to belong | India News
In a literary world fixated on roots, writer and translator Jhumpa Lahiri has a confession to make: she does not believe she has a mother tongue.“I have no mother tongue…I don’t call anything my language. I never have. I’ve always felt outside of all language,” the Pulitzer Prize–winning author said Friday, during a press interaction before her session ‘After the Mother Tongue’ at the Instituto Italiano di Cultura in New Delhi. The event capped her India visit, which marked her return to a public stage in the country after 12 years at the Kolkata Literary Meet earlier in the month. Speaking at a panel, the writer indulged in a wide-ranging conversation about learning and writing in Italian, her life in Rome and the challenges of studying literature across linguistic and cultural boundaries.Lahiri, born in London to Bengali parents and raised in the US, dismantled the idea that identity must be anchored to a single native language, calling instead for linguistic fluidity, migration and creative trespass.‘The Namesake’ author, once known as the voice of the Bengali diaspora for her portraits of first- and second-generation immigrant lives, described a lifelong estrangement from the very languages that shaped her. Bengali, spoken at home by her immigrant parents, was emotionally intimate but structurally incomplete. English, meanwhile, arrived through school and the outside world and maintained its own distance as “the language those American people spoke, not us.”That double remove became, for Lahiri, not a loss but an unexpected creative condition. “This lack of a principal dominant language has opened up a different kind of space inside me to inhabit other languages,” Lahiri said. If she rejects the idea of a mother tongue, Lahiri is equally resistant to the idea that languages belong to particular people. “The most amazing thing about language is… anyone who wishes to can learn another language,” she said. “It’s an incredibly radical way to cross a boundary. I’d encourage young writers to learn other languages and resist a monolingual centre of gravity.”But she tempered that optimism with two warnings: against linguistic domination and against linguistic nationalism. She described English as a global force that can overwhelm smaller languages, while cautioning that the intertwining of language and the nation-state in projects of national identity is “very dangerous.” Writing in Italian, she said, is an act of engagement, not ownership. “I always maintain the outsider’s perspective.”Lahiri’s transition from English to Italian began around 2012. She relocated her family to Rome at that time. There, she temporarily renounced reading and writing in English to immerse herself fully in Italian. She first fell in love with the language during a 1994 trip to Florence, and later sought freedom from the “overbearing” perfection of her Pulitzer-winning English works. ‘The Lowland’ (2013) marked her last major work of fiction in English. Since then, she has penned several original works in Italian, including the essay collection ‘In altre parole’ (’In Other Words’, 2015), the novel ‘Dove mi trovo’ (’Whereabouts’, 2018), and the short story collection ‘Racconti romani’ (’Roman Stories’, 2022). Some are self-translated into English.Perhaps the most striking idea Lahiri offered was about “belonging”. When asked where she finds a sense of home, she pushed back on the premise. “Why is this question of belonging so important? Why can we not approach life as a positive drift, a journey, a shifting, as an evolution, as a largely nomadic experience with certain points of orientation?”Her years living and writing in Italian, she said, have been key in liberating her from the notion that “we must belong somewhere.” Home, for her, is not tied to a nation or a tongue. “I find home in libraries. I find home by the sea. I find home with my friends, at my desk, with the people I love. I carry certain elements of home with me, like a tortoise. And sometimes home comes to me.”
