Cultural Conflict in the Diasporic Writings of Jhumpa Lahiri

Today the second generation of post-colonial writers dominate the Indian English fiction. The post-colonial writers started publishing their works in 1980s. The second generation of Indian English writers and specially the women writers like Nayantara Sahagal, Anita Desai, Shashi Deshpande and Jhumpa Lahiri have also produced the diasporic writings that are concerned with post-colonial issues of socio-political situation, gender discrimination, displacement, a sense of loss and nostalgia, cultural conflict, assimilation and identity crisis. The cultural conflict and its consequent assimilation is the main theme of the fictional world of Jhumpa Lahiri. This paper focuses on the central message – the cultural conflict emanating out of the disturbing life of the protagonists that makes the telling effect on their personal, family and social life, thereby, creating a series of conflicts which is finally resolved into a kind of cultural assimilation whose spectrum will be explored and explained in the context of the novels of Jhumpa Lahiri.