Believe Me, Do Not Believe Me: Jhumpa Lahiri and the Royal Family of Oudh

Abstract

In Interpreter of Maladies (1999) Jhumpa Lahiri gives voice to Boori Ma, a durwan (doorkeeper) who chronicles about the easier times she enjoyed before deportation to Kolkata (previously known as Calcutta, India) after Partition of 1947. Lahiri plays with the word real implying that Boori Ma’s stories could be deciphered as real or not. Boori Ma’s fictitious life resembles the one of the Royal Family of Oudh, which Lahiri seems to be inspired by. Foreign correspondents (Kaufman, 1981; Miles, 1985; Barry, 2019) did not question the veracity of this family’s life story. In the present article, the two stories are compared: a literary and a real one. It is our intention to prove that traumatic experiences, such as Partition, cause subjects to imagine an alternative life; strategy which is unconsciously activated to heal trauma (LaCapra, 1999; Mookerjea-Leonard, 2017). The latter is what western journalists and readers failed to acknowledge.