Nation and Narration in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland

The present study attempts to scrutinize Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland in terms of postcolonial concepts of cultural identity and mimicry, as well as the relationship between nationality and the narration of the novel. The extended descriptions of the key characters in The Lowland pave the way to observe the link between their nationality and the way the novel is narrated. As Homi Bhabha and the other major postcolonial critics maintain, nation and narration cannot be separated. Therefore, the link between nation and the narration of the novel will be examined in this novel based on Bhabha’s theory. Besides, cultural identity defines people as one people of a shared nation and represents how they have been a member of that culture. The other postcolonial concept, mimicry, sheds light on the interaction of the colonized and the colonizer, which according to Bhabha leads to some alteration in both the colonizer and the colonized.