Jhumpa Lahiri makes an admirable navigation of her fictional creations with ineluctable gaps that speak of the divergent concerns of the postmodern and postcolonial times to evolve into meta-narratives. Indian writers in English have a distinguished work that speaks of their incredible eye for the social realities and rise to great heights in literary firmament. Writers such as R K Narayan, Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand, Nirad C Chaudhuri, Anita Desai, Toru Dutt, and other eminent literary luminaries achieved global critical acclaim for their writings. The shrunken globe has changed the interrogatives of approaching literature with several contemporaneous issues voicing the hitherto unvoiced. Maxine Hong Kinston’s The Woman Warrior (1976) which won The National Book Critics Award led the way in bringing out the transformation in the Asian-American literature. The newly emerging writers who settled in the adopted nations charged up myriad possibilities of centering the subaltern surpassing the fluid geography and stern cultures.

Among these writers is a new generation of women writers who are ceaselessly on a quest for the multiple consciousness and the process of diasporic identity formation. While interrogating these spaces they mediate with the historical discourses such as: tradition in exile and the cross-pollination of cultural symbolism and try to relocate the spaces they come to inhabit. This reminds us of the critical practice that John Maxwell Coetzee espouses in reading the absence and silence in the texts which exist as signs of ideological exclusion and oppression.

English Studies Journal, Interstices Outgrowing, The National Book Critics Award, Women Crossing Boundaries, ABIJAH CRAVEN, Narrative, Select Fiction, Jhumpa Lahiri, .