The novel Interpreter of Maladies is a collection of short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri published in 1999. The title Interpreter of Maladies is an expression suggesting clarifying or explaining ailments of the body, mind or moral. The story follows a visit of a Bengali American family, consisting of Mr. and Mrs. Das and their three children Tina, Robby, and Bobby as they take a vacation in India visiting tourist site with their Indian guide. The purpose of the story is meant to reflect the trauma and self-transformation through immigration, resulting in a series of broken identities. Lahiri’s stories show a struggle to keep hold of culture as characters create new lives in foreign cultures. In real world context, Interpreter of Maladies is meant to reflect the violent legacy of the Indian Partition.
The Indian Partition occurred in 1947 when fifteen million people were displaced and more than a million killed after the British finally left India after 300 years. As the British left due to not having the resources to control its greatest imperial asset after world war II, the subcontinent was partitioned into two independent nation states, Hindu majority India and Muslim majority Pakistan. As soon as India was partitioned, one of the greatest migrations in human history took place as millions of Muslims trekked to the West and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) while millions of Hindus and Sikhs headed in the opposite direction, with hundreds of thousands not surviving the journey. While these cultures coexisted for almost a millennium, they instantly began attacking each other causing an unprecedented mutual genocide. A few descriptions of the events that took place were gangs of killers setting whole villages aflame, hacking to death men and children while carrying off young women to be raped.
By 1948, the great migration drew to a close and more than 15 million people had been displaced from their homes, with between one and two million deaths. In relation to India’s modern identity, the Partition is central, similar to how the holocaust is to identity among Jews, representing painfully onto the religious consciousness by memories of unimaginable violence.
Dalrymple, W., Mishra, P., & Coll, S. (2015, June 22). The mutual genocide of Indian partition. The New Yorker. Retrieved November 5, 2021, from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/29/the-great-divide-books-dalrymple.
Lahiri, J. (1999). Interpreter of maladies: Stories.