Jhumpa Lahiri's Radical Stance on Language and Identity
In a literary landscape often preoccupied with origins and roots, acclaimed writer and translator Jhumpa Lahiri has made a startling confession that challenges conventional wisdom about linguistic identity. During a press interaction in New Delhi, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author declared that she does not believe she possesses a mother tongue, fundamentally questioning the very concept of linguistic belonging.
A Lifelong Linguistic Outsider
"I have no mother tongue... I don't call anything my language. I never have. I've always felt outside of all language," Lahiri revealed during her session titled 'After the Mother Tongue' at the Instituto Italiano di Cultura. This event marked the culmination of her India visit, representing her return to the country's public stage after twelve years, following her earlier appearance at the Kolkata Literary Meet.
Born in London to Bengali parents and raised in the United States, Lahiri dismantled the pervasive notion that identity must be anchored to a single native language. Instead, she championed the ideas of linguistic fluidity, migration, and what she termed "creative trespass"—the freedom to cross linguistic boundaries without permission or apology.
The Double Remove That Became Creative Fuel
Once celebrated as the voice of the Bengali diaspora for her poignant portraits of immigrant lives, Lahiri described a lifelong estrangement from the very languages that shaped her upbringing. Bengali, spoken intimately at home by her immigrant parents, felt emotionally close yet structurally incomplete in her experience. English, acquired through school and the external world, maintained its own distance as "the language those American people spoke, not us."
Rather than viewing this linguistic displacement as a deficit, Lahiri transformed it into an unexpected creative advantage. "This lack of a principal dominant language has opened up a different kind of space inside me to inhabit other languages," she explained, suggesting that her multilingual liminality has become a source of artistic strength rather than a limitation.
Rejecting Linguistic Ownership and Nationalism
Lahiri extended her critique beyond personal experience to challenge broader assumptions about language ownership. "The most amazing thing about language is... anyone who wishes to can learn another language," she asserted. "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."
However, she tempered this optimism with crucial warnings about linguistic domination and nationalism. She described English as a powerful global force capable of overwhelming smaller languages, while cautioning against the dangerous intertwining of language and nation-state in projects of national identity. For Lahiri, writing in Italian represents an act of engagement rather than ownership, maintaining what she calls "the outsider's perspective."
The Italian Transformation
Lahiri's deliberate transition from English to Italian began around 2012 when she relocated her family to Rome. During this period, she temporarily renounced reading and writing in English to immerse herself completely in Italian—a language she first fell in love with during a 1994 trip to Florence. This linguistic shift offered her freedom from what she perceived as the "overbearing" perfection of her Pulitzer-winning English prose.
Her 2013 novel 'The Lowland' marked her last major work of fiction in English. Since then, she has produced several original works in Italian, including:
- The essay collection 'In altre parole' ('In Other Words', 2015)
- The novel 'Dove mi trovo' ('Whereabouts', 2018)
- The short story collection 'Racconti romani' ('Roman Stories', 2022)
Many of these works have been self-translated into English, creating a unique bilingual literary corpus that embodies her philosophy of linguistic fluidity.
Redefining Belonging and Home
Perhaps the most profound insight Lahiri offered concerned the very concept of belonging. When asked where she finds a sense of home, she questioned the premise itself: "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 have been instrumental in liberating her from the societal expectation that "we must belong somewhere." For Lahiri, home transcends geographical or linguistic boundaries: "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."
This perspective offers a radical alternative to conventional notions of identity, suggesting that belonging can be portable, multiple, and self-defined rather than fixed to specific languages or nations.
