A Postcolonial Marxist Feminist Reading of Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland Md. Ul Alam Maruf*, Chowdhury Mainul Hasan** *Lecturer, Institute of Modern Languages, University of Chittagong, Chittagong, Bangladesh **Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Chittagong, Chittagong, Bangladesh Online published on 7 May, 2014. Abstract The Lowland is the second novel by Indian-American author Jhumpa Lahiri. The narrative of the novel starts against the backdrop of Naxalite ‘insurgencies’ in post-Independence India. It mainly tells the story of a mother in Diaspora, Gauri, and her American born girl, Bela. Love, marriage, sex and economic lives of Gauri and Bela and their influences on the development and transformation of their psyches have been taken into consideration for the current critique. Often human character and attitude to life are defined and determined by surroundings and circumstances in which they live rather than their birth or place of birth. Gauri goes through a development process which is metamorphic in nature while Bela substantially westernizes her existence. Cultural hegemony, social oppression of women, diasporic crisis, cross-cultural alienation, economic emancipation of women, lesbian divergence, social castration, nihilism and traumatic memories lend much to the complex narrative of the novel. This paper seeks to study the complex narrative of the novel and examine the characters of Gauri and Bela from the critical perspectives of postcolonialism, Marxism and feminism- more specifically, postcolonial feminism which differs from mainstream western feminism and does so being critical of the holistic hegemony of western feminism. Top Keywords Postcolonialism, Marxism, feminism, double colonization, patriarchy, lesbian divergence, womb and social castration. Top |