Sins of the Brothers
Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘Lowland’
By SIDDHARTHA DEB
Published: September 27, 2013
The personal is political, the countercultural upheavals of the ’60s claimed, but in Jhumpa Lahiri’s new novel, “The Lowland,” which takes its inspiration from an Indian variant of that upheaval, it is the political that is always personal. Udayan, the younger of two brothers in the eastern Indian city of Calcutta (now Kolkata), gets drawn into a radical left movement called Naxalism, its name derived from Naxalbari, a tiny village to the north of Calcutta where impoverished peasants rose up against the police and landlords in 1967, sparking off dreams of a nationwide insurgency that would replicate Mao’s earlier revolution in China. But Udayan is killed by the police, and his older brother, Subhash, apolitical, passive, but responsible, returns home from graduate school in the United States to console his parents. Finding himself confronted with his brother’s pregnant widow, Gauri, and her ill treatment by his grieving parents, Subhash marries her and brings her to Rhode Island. Gauri gives birth to a girl, Bela, while also pursuing an academic career of her own in philosophy. By the end of the novel, when Bela is almost 40, the reader will have encountered four generations of this particular family.
THE LOWLAND
By Jhumpa Lahiri
340 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95.
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