28 pages • 56 minutes read
Jhumpa LahiriA Real Durwan
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1999A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Jhumpa Lahiri
After her 1999 short-story collection Interpreter of Maladies won her the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award, Lahiri went on to write critically acclaimed novels: The Namesake (2003) and The Lowland (2013), which was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award for Fiction. Her second short-story collection, Unaccustomed Earth (2008), was also award-winning. As of 2023, Lahiri resides in Italy where she translates works from Italian to English, including her novel Whereabouts (2018) and a short-story collection from Italian writers.
Many of Lahiri’s stories detail the experience of Indian immigrants in the United States, while others, like “A Real Durwan,” are set in India. Boori Ma’s character, because she is a refugee and endures drastic displacement and alienation, likewise typifies Lahiri’s work. Akin to the author herself, Lahiri’s characters often feel torn between two places—or, their identities are tied to multiple places—and in “A Real Durwan,” the pattern plays into a theme of The Connections Between Place and Identity. Growing up in Rhode Island in the 1970s, Lahiri struggled to reconcile her Bengali heritage with her experience in the United States:
I also entered a world my parents had little knowledge or control of: school, books, music, television, things that seeped in and became a fundamental aspect of who I am. […] And yet there was evidence that I was not entirely American. […] In spite of the first lessons of arithmetic, one plus one did not equal two but zero, my conflicting selves always canceling each other out (Lahiri, Jhumpa. “My Two Lives.” Newsweek, 2006).
Stylistically, Lahiri’s writing resembles the above quote from an interview. Her prose is straightforward yet lyrical, with deep human messages conveyed in plain language. Her earliest works tell the stories of first-generation immigrants and detail what Lahiri, from her own experience, describes as “the frequently humiliating process of immigration” (“My Two Lives”). Beginning with Unaccustomed Earth, however, her characters are more frequently second- and third-generation immigrants trying to find their place in the world and bridging their parents’ cultures and their own experiences. Her later work journeys even further from these themes and includes two essay collections about storytelling, language, moving to a new country, and working in translation.
Historical Context: The Partition of India
The partition of India occurred on August 15, 1947, and brought about the end of the British Raj (British rule in India). Partition occurred in large part because Britain could no longer afford to rule its most treasured colony. With very little time for the residents of India to adapt or relocate, Britain declared one part of their former colony “India” and another “Pakistan.” Massive violence and wide-scale death followed, especially in the previously peaceful Punjab region, where Hindu, Muslim, and Christian peoples were suddenly pitted against one another. Though numbers differ depending on the source, Partition displaced 15 million people and killed over one million others (Dalrymple, William. “The Great Divide: The Violent Legacy of Indian Partition.” New Yorker, 2015). The new border separated Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan:
Immediately, there began one of the greatest migrations in human history, as millions of Muslims trekked to West and East Pakistan (the latter now known as Bangladesh) while millions of Hindus and Sikhs headed in the opposite direction (Dalrymple).
Despite a millennium of peaceful cohabitation, sectarian violence broke out in the wake of Partition, leading to genocide with Hindus and Sikhs on one side and Muslims on the other. According to some journalists and photographers who had recently witnessed the atrocities of the Second World War, the slaughter and horrors of the concentration camps did not compare to what they saw in the Punjab.
Many writers have traced the Indian subcontinent’s cultural polarization to British rule in India. Others believe the divide emerged between political leaders in India, namely “Muhammad Ali Jinnah, leader of the Muslim League, and Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, the two most prominent leaders of the Hindu-dominated Congress Party” (Dalrymple). Amid growing tensions on the Indian subcontinent, the final Viceroy of India, Lord Louis Mountbatten, moved up the date of Indian independence and the creation of the nation of Pakistan by 10 months. The night of August 14, the violence began.
After Mountbatten declared the Partition of India, people scrambled to situate themselves on “their” side of the line, with Muslims retreating to Pakistan and Hindus and Sikhs to India. Boori Ma’s accent gives her away as coming from Bengal. Because the narration is distanced, never fully entering the inner world of any character (including the protagonist), readers can only guess what happened to Boori Ma’s husband and daughter, who might have died trying to flee Bengal alongside many other Hindus. It is also unknown whether Boori Ma’s claims of her past as a wealthy landowner are true, but regardless, the story personalizes the Partition’s destructiveness to those who survived and were forced to relocate. Beyond Partition’s obvious literal-level role in the story, with Boori Ma’s past involving the historical exodus, the political event even makes its way into the story’s formal elements, as motifs of exile and displacement mark turning points both in the plot in the protagonist’s larger existence: Boori Ma survived exile and displacement in her flight from Bengal, but those experiences persist into her life in the building, where she is first displaced from her sleeping spot near the stairs and then thrown out of the building altogether. In both cases—her exile from Bengal, then from the building—she is innocent and at the mercy of irresistible forces.
Related Titles
By Jhumpa Lahiri
