International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences Vol-6, Issue-1; Jan-Feb, 2021 Journal Home Page Available: https://ijeab.com/ Journal DOI: 10.22161/ijels ISSN: 2456-7620 https://dx.doi.org/10.22161/ijels.61.60 452 Cultural Negotiation of Immigrants in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Narratives Nagendra Bahadur Bhandari Department of English, Prithvi Narayan Campus, Tribhuvan University, Nepal Received: 11 Nov 2020; Received in revised form: 21 Jan 2021; Accepted: 01 Feb 2021; Available online: 10 Feb 2021 ©2021 The Author(s). Published by Infogain Publication. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Abstract— This article analyzes the cultural negotiation and identity formation of immigrant characters in Jhumpa Lahiri’s narratives. In the transcultural space of diaspora, the immigrant characters often vacillate between cultural practices of their home and host country problematizing their cultural identity. They can neither forsake their past: cultural origin nor fully emerge into the cultural practices of their host country. They tend to adopt the new cultural identity without leaving the old one. In a sense, they occupy a shared cultural space of their host and home country rendering cultural ambivalence. Such cultural negotiations lead them to the third space: hybrid cultural space which renders new form of fluid and dynamic cultural identity that transcends the binary of the past and present, and home country and host country. Formation of such unstable cultural identity of immigrants is examined in the critical frame of Stuart Hall’s cultural identity and Homi K Bhabha’s third space in this article. Keywords— Being, Becoming, Diaspora, Identity, Third Space. I. INTRODUCTION Diasporic literature deals with the problematic cultural identity of immigrants resulting from shifting of cultural and geographical space. Such writings try to explore the problems of transformation of the native into something other than themselves or at least one who is in a crisis regarding his \her own cultural identity. The immigrant characters find themselves in a struggle to establish an identity: feeling conflicted between two cultures; one their own native culture and the other an alien culture. There is always a tension between desires to belong to the new society and an urge to retain the culture of the old one. The tension renders identity crisis. The Indian American writer Jhumpa lahiri explores the problematic cultural identity of Indian immigrants living in the American diaspora in her narratives. She was a daughter of Bengali parents and was brought up in the west. She herself was influenced by both Indian and American culture and heritage. This multi cultural experience plays vital role in many of her stories and novels which depict the alienation and loneliness of immigrants caught up between two drastically different worlds. In 1999, Lahiri published her first short story collection Interpreter of Maladies. The nine stories of this collection share common themes such as the sense of loss, marital problems, and the importance of communication in Indian immigrant families. The subtitle of the collection is “Stories of Bengal, Boston and Beyond”, which points to the multicultural context of its characters, most of whom are from India (Bengal), immigrate to the United States and settle in the Boston area. However, the use of ‘beyond’ indicates that their diasporic journey beyond geographical space. Instead, it can be viewed as a rich, universal experience that connects people across globe. In 2003, she published her first novel, The Namesake, originally a novella in The New Yorker. It recounts the story of the Ganguli family, an Indian family with first-generation immigrant parents with their two children raised in the US.