TITLE: - Storytelling technique of Jhumpa Lahiri with special

Reference to When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine.

CONTENTS:-
1. Introduction

2. Objectives of the research project

3. Survey of Literature.

4. Method of Storytelling - narrative technique of some famous short

story writers.

5. Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies.

6. Jhumpa Lahiri’s storytelling techniques as employed in When Mr.

Pirzada Came to Dine.

7. Conclusion.
INTRODUCTION:-

Storytelling is the social and cultural activity of sharing stories as a means of entertainment,
education, cultural preservation and instilling moral values. Storytelling predates writing,
with the earliest forms of storytelling usually oral combined with gestures and expressions. In
addition to being part of religious rituals, some archaeologists believe rock art may have
served as a form of storytelling for many ancient cultures.

With the advent of writing and the use of stable, portable media, stories were recorded,
transcribed and shared over wide regions of the world. Stories have been carved, scratched,
painted, printed or inked onto wood or bamboo, ivory and other bones, pottery, clay tablets,
stone, palm-leaf books, bark cloth, paper, silk, canvas and other textiles, recorded on film and
stored electronically in digital form.

Modern storytelling has a broad purview. In addition to its traditional forms (fairytales,
folktales, mythology, legends, fables etc.), it has extended itself to representing history,
personal narrative, political commentary and evolving cultural norms. Contemporary
storytelling is also widely used to address educational objectives. The crucial elements of
stories and storytelling include plot, character and narrative point of view.

The art of telling story for writers is quite different from the oral storytelling. It is like the
flowing stream and readers either pleasantly swim or drink the sweet water to quench the
thirst of reading.

In modern day, short story is one of the famous genres of storytelling. A short story is a
piece of prose fiction that can be read in one sitting. Emerging from earlier oral storytelling
traditions in the 17th century, the short story has grown to encompass a body of work so
diverse as to defy easy characterization. At its most prototypical the short story features a
small cast of named characters, and focuses on a self-contained incident with the intent of
evoking a "single effect" or mood. In doing so, short stories make use of plot, resonance, and
other dynamic components to a far greater degree than is typical of an anecdote, yet to a far
lesser degree than a novel. While the short story is largely distinct from the novel, authors of
both generally draw from a common pool of literary techniques.

Objectives of the Research Project:-

The objectives lies behind this research project are –

a. The project is closely connected with the undergraduate foundation syllabus of 6th
semester.

b. To analyse the storytelling techniques of Jhumpa Lahiri in her short story when Mr.
Pirzada Came to Dine.

c. The short story When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine has been included in the syllabus of
Bachelor Degree in English Major. So it provides a revisiting of the honours syllabus.

Survey of Literature:-
Survey of Literature is a significant and essential part of a research project. It helps to have a
sufficient knowledge of the works done earlier by other researchers in this specific area. In
this context to gather all the information and knowledge a number texts, websites and articles
related to Jhumpa Lahiri and her Interpreter of Maladies and the story When Mr. Pirzada
Came to Dine have been studied for the practical implementation of that knowledge in this
research project .

Some of them are Indian Short Stories in English by Amar Nath Prasad and S.John Peter
Joseph. This book contains various articles by the scholars and critics on different subjects of
Indian English writings. In the book there are two articles on Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of
Maladies. These articles provide me a lot of knowledge regarding my research project.

The article Usage of Literary Technique (structure, symbol, style, language): A Metaphorical
Analysis of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies by Meenu Kumari.
“The Interpreter of Maladies, internal structure determines the significance of both its
technical and artistic elements, such as themes, symbols and images. The introduction must
immediately draw the reader in and pique their interest by establishing the emotional tone of
the narrative, setting the scene, creating the atmosphere and locating the characters in a
specific time and place. One of the most prominent features of Lahiri’s stories is her short,
tooth- point opening sentences, which immediately introduce information that is crucial to the
rest of the narrative. The gorgeousness of her writing style lies in the skill with which she
juxtaposes images and memories from life in Calcutta with life in Boston. Keywords:
Structure, Symbol, Images.”
Method of Storytelling: Narrative Techniques of Some Famous Short Story
Writers:-
A narrative technique, also known as a literary technique or literary device or fictional
device, is any of several specific methods, the creator of a narrative uses to convey what he
wants. It can be defined as ‘craftsmanship’. In other words, a strategy used in the making of a
narrative to relay information to the audience and particularly, to ‘develop’ the narrative,
usually in order to make it more complete, complicated or interesting. The most important
narrative techniques indentified are: arrangement of events to create a plot, point-of-view,
manipulation of time, dialogue, interior monologue, kind of narration etc.

There are some very famous names in literary world whose narrative techniques in the field
of short story writing are evoked and followed even in the present days. Some of them are
Guy de Maupassant, Edgar Allan Poe, Anton Chekhov, Oscar Wilde, O.Henry, James Joyce
etc.

Narrative Techniques of Guy de Maupassant:

Guy de Maupassant was a French naturalistic writer, considered by some to be one of

the best short story writers ever. He inspired 19th century society with over three
hundred short stories and six novels that deal with the mundane, the abstract, and the
psychological self and relevant issues in society. Some of his best short stories are The
Necklace, the Horla, Boule de Suif, Two Friends, and Pierrot etc. Through his narratives,
Maupassant fashions a picture of life without need for excessive background information or
the numerous component of a larger novel.

Maupassant is often referred to as a dark pessimist author. He operates under the umbrella of
naturalism using attributes of realism and pessimism. He was undoubtedly a naturalist writer.

Another characteristic of Maupassant’s writing style is his cruelty to his heroes: his
pessimism includes unfavourable human struggles such as disease, madness and death.
Maupassant’s writings possess a haunting thought of loss, death or some sort of unsatisfied
endings. Maupassant also writes narratives containing joyless humour. He was particularly
against romanticism. Maupassant was excelled at the objective writing technique, in which he
attempted to reveal the inner man by man’s outward acts.

As Maupassant narrative point of view is considered, Maupassant short stories are told from
the point of view of the traditional omniscient narrator who oversees the development of the
action and the interaction of the characters from a vontage point

One trick Maupassant uses is writing lots of really short paragraphs; this technique keeps the
story moving at a clip. Often paragraphs are little more than a single, simple sentence.

Narrative Techniques of O.Henry:

O.Henry, one of the three most famous short story writers in the world, enjoys equal status
with Chekhov and Maupassant. In the use of narrative technique he is unique in many
respects. O.Henry uses the first person narrative and third person narrative in many of his
stories. He uses ‘surprise ending’ or the ‘twist in the tail’. Virtually speaking, he wants his
stories to end in such a humorous or twisted manner. He is humane and he uses subtle irony
in the description and dialogues. Whatever he wants to say, he is very clear; as writer he uses
dialogues, incidents and characters for the development of the plot.

O.Henry also employs flash back techniques of narration. He commits himself to the use of
flash back profusely. He also employs nostalgic memory, suspense, thrill and realism. The
style of the writer is complex and inimitable. He is unique and possesses individual
idiosyncrasies. Though they appear very simple, the deep meanings hidden in the stories are
unfathomable.

With an ancient history of thousand years, India has been the cradle of ancient folklore, tales
and fables. Over the years this oral tradition has crystallized into formal short story writing.
And in recent years Indian writing in English has acquired a great significance; not only in
India but all over the world. Some of those famous Indian English short story writers, who
have made their own mark in India and abroad, are Rabindranath Tagore, Munshi
Premchand, R.K.Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, Ruskin Bond, Jhumpa Lahiri, Anita Desai etc.

Narrative Techniques of R.K.Narayan:-

R.K.Narayan, full name Rasipuram Krishna swami Iyer Narayan was an Indian writer
known for his works set in the fictional South-Indian town of Malgudi. Narayan has no
interest in complex socio-economic issues or questions of technique or form. For him
only the story matters. Most of his short stories are third person narratives were the
vision of the unobjective narrator is broadly limited to one character or incident only.

R.K. Narayan often gives the ‘inside views’ of the characters and speaks from a slightly
higher moral position. And another dominant feature of his short stories is the
reportorial quality that one finds in them.

Narrative Technique of Ruskin Bond:-

Ruskin Bond is considered to be an icon among Indian writers. Ruskin Bond’s works
are highly approved by society at large. His stories are very famous and he writes in an
extremely enjoyable language and style which holds a reader throughout the entire
narrative.

Ruskin Bond wrote in the light of his own experience of life and he found impressions
about things and people which had an ordinary effect on him and it was reflected in his
writings. His parents’ marital troubles and his father’s pain and loneliness had a lasting
effect on the shy and sensitive Ruskin Bond, an effect that has influenced his attitude
towards life and his writings. He takes up serious themes for his stories but they are not
dull, a he makes them interesting to attract the common reader.

Bond wrote about every part of life. From childhood to old-age, he wrote about his
experience and incidents that he was involved in various times. His stories are simple
ones about everyday life. They are light hearted and humorous. Most of his stories tell
how the narrator met a certain character, what they did and speak about and how they
parted.

In 1992 he received the Sahitya Academic Award for English writing, for his stories
collection, “Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra”.

Jhumpa lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies:-

With the publication of her Pulitzer Prize Winning book Interpreter of Maladies, an
exquisite collection of nine short stories whose central characters are Indian immigrants to
America, Jhumpa Lahiri became a star on the literary firmament. It was her debut short story
collection which was released in 1999 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2000.
Lahiri had also won many awards for this collection. These awards and honours included The
Transatlantic Review award from the Hensfield Foundation, the Louisiana Review Award for
short fiction, and The O.Henry Award for Best American Short Stories, The PEN
Hemingway Award, The New Yorker Debut of the Year Award and the American Academy
of Arts and Letters Award. Lahiri also received a nomination for the L.A.Times Book Prize.

As the daughter of Indian immigrants from the state of West Bengal, Lahiri visited Calcutta
often as a child, and recognizes the importance of both Indian and American culture in
shaping her perspective of life. At the same time, as her fiction shows, she is critical of the
superficial adoption of element of either culture and she readily admits that she feels neither
Indian nor American.

The stories of Interpreter of Maladies address sensitive difficulties and disconnection

between first and second generation United State’s immigrants. The themes of the stories
such as alienation and assimilation, love and marriage, home, exile and self-identity are quite
interesting and grasp the essence and experience of Lahiri. Lahiri’s realistic experiences take
the readers to journey the new world of foreign land. Her themes make the readers to be
aware of displacement by emphasizing the pain of exile.
“Jhumpa Lahiri’s elegant stories tell the lives of Indians in exile, of people navigating
between the strict traditions they’ve inherited and the baffling New World they must
encounter every day. An interpreter guides an American family through the India of their
ancestors and hears an astonishing revelation; a young Midwestern woman is drawn into a
tantalising affair with a married Bengali man; the eccentric, nervous Mrs. Sen. needs to learn
to drive if she is to keep her job minding eleven-year-old Eliot after school; a young couple
exchange confessions each night as they struggle to cope with the loss of their baby and their
falling marriage; and Mr. Pirzada, whose watch is always set to Dacca time, worries about his
family back in Pakistan.”

“Whether set in Boston or Bengal, these sublimely understated stories, spiced with humour
and subtle detail, speak with universal eloquence to anyone who has ever felt the yearnings of
exile or the emotional confusion of the outsider.”

Interpreter of Maladies, is a confessional piece, speaking of the pattern of hope and

disenchantment arising from the predicament of the writer placed between two traditions,
neither of which she can wholly accept or renounce. There is an aesthetic continuance in her
writing. The stories present the writer’s intercontinental journey during which she gets herself
accustomed to both the culture.

Lahiri’s stories seen to attempt to bring meaning to the present by reassessing the past and by
giving shape to the accumulated waste of experience of the character’s past prior to the
period of Westernization. Lahiri gives life in these stories to the feeling of alienation,
isolation, loneliness, longing, loss and hope which so often mark the immigrants’ experience.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s Storytelling Techniques as Employed in When Mr.

Pirzada Came to Dine:-
Jhumpa Lahiri’s excellent narrative techniques establish her as one of the towering figure in
World Literature. Her narratives tend to be spatial rather than sequential. Her detached,
impassionate style, structure and characters force the reader to see the verisimilitude of the
object. Lahiri’s works are necessarily the narratives of pain. She feels her sense of pain,
alienation and marginalization, to be a kind of inheritance from her parents. Home, homeland
and food are the most significant elements of nostalgia.

When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine’s internal structure determines the significance of both its
technical and artistic elements, such as narrative point of view, theme, symbol and images.
The story is narrated by Lilia, an Indian-American girl who is born and raised in the United
States. Though for most of her stories Lahiri has chosen a third–person omniscient narrative
structure where she can presents her character from an outsider’s point of view, for When Mr.
Pirzada Came to Dine the first person narrative voice lends immediacy to the poignancy of
the speaker’s experiences. In the story Jhumpa Lahiri illustrates an experience of the younger
Lilia who narrates the whole story in her perspective. Here the author uses first person
narrative voice through the character of Lilia. Lilia’s point of view prevails in the story. In the
story she is only a ten year old girl the objective narration tells her thought from the
perspective of an adult Lilia recalling childhood events.

The author Jhumpa Lahiri uses adult language to express thoughts and feelings of the ten
years old girl Lilia. In the story Lilia is portrayed as a child with a developing understanding
of the cultural and social events occurring around her. Lilia reflects as an adult on one
segment of her ten years old childhood. Since this is a child’s recollection, the tone and style
are simple and devoid of philosophical meaning and symbolism.

Thus more than a mere character Lilia functions as veritable narrative device in the story. The
child creates a perspective that is often thought of as innocent and naive and Lahiri employs
this to emphasize the motif of displacement. The story When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine, is
not only about a man, Mr. Pirzada residing in a foreign country, away from his family, living
in Pakistan, but also about the child, Lilia’s understanding of the world, and the impact upon
her. Lilia’s first person portrayal of a complex domestic situation highlights displacement in a
number of ways her parents and Pirzada represent the Indian world at home and her teacher
and Dora represent the American world at school symbolically.

The story When Mr.Pirzada Came to Dine took place in 1971 in New England where in the
mean time Pakistan was in the process of civil war. Mr.Pirzada was a Pakistani who came to
Boston on a grant from the government of Pakistan to study Foliage in New England. He
came from Dacca where he was a lecturer in Botany at the University. He had a wife of
twenty years and seven daughters between the ages of six and sixteen.

Mr.Pirzada was always worried about the incidents in Dacca. “In March, Dacca had been
invaded, torched and shelled by the Pakistani army. Teacher were dragged onto streets and
shot, women dragged into barracks and raped”.

Lilia, the narrator says “A glass for the Indian man”, she is immediately corrected by her
father. Mr.Pirzada is no longer considered Indian.

The partition is described thus: “like a pie we were sliced up. Hindus here and Muslims there.
“ Little Lilia did not understand anything as Mr.Pirzada and her parents spoke the same
language Lilia’s father told her that Mr.Pirzada was Bengali’ but he was a Muslim. That was
the reason why he lived in East Pakistan.. A map was shown to Lilia she was told by father
about the current situation in East Pakistan .Lilia nodded without understanding a word. Lilia
watched Mr.Pirzada very carefully when she learned that he was not an Indian. She carefully
looked at the pocket watch that night which was not to the local time in Dacca. Mr.Pirzada
finally reunited with the family in Dacca.

Like her other stories of Interpreter of Maladies, Lahiri builds her character around the
immigrant experience and cultural divide between India and America in the story When
Mr.Pirzada Came to Dine. At the same time she paints with sympathy and understanding
indelible characters that experience the pain and suffering.

Actually When Mr.Pirzada Came to Dine. Is a study of exile and sharpened sensibility, the
sense of brotherhood found in exiled Asian’s Indians, Pakistanis or Bangladeshis and their
united interests in the welfare of their united interests in the welfare of their near and dear
families in India and Bangladesh. The story is unique because the emphasis is not on
difference between the cultural but on tolerance and bond; “they were a single person,
sharing single silence and a single fear”. The admiration of the young girl, her silent prayer
for the welfare of Mr.Pirzada’s Family and his seven daughters, her sentiment of eating one
candy a day from the gift he had given her every night as a proper prayer are touching.

CONCLUSION:-

The nine short stories I the collection Interpreter of Maladies offer a wonderful variety of
experience gathered from the cultural clashes rippling outward in many directions. The
Trauma of dislocation an acute sense of loneliness and the pangs of estrangements
suffered by the millions of exiled Indians who try unsuccessfully to balance themselves
between “home” and “abroad “are the major maladies Lahiri attempts to interpret.
Most of her characters keep hanging in Limbo-between two identities-non Indian and
Indian. She is undoubtedly the first emigrant writer who is concerned with their
maladies and tries to be an interpreter. She probes deep into the maladies but
prescribes no cure. She is an artist and artists another name is interpreter. The story
When Mr.Pirzada Came to Dine reveals the storytelling skills of Jhumpa Lahiri. She was
first person objective narrative to narrate the story. Lilia, the year’s old young girl is
the first person narrative voice who tells the whole story in her perspectives. The
objective narration tells Lilia’s thoughts from the perspective of an adult Lilia recalling
her childhood events.

The character, Lilia’s family are Indian emigrants and Lahiri became their interpreter.
Her style is almost cinematic and with the help of montage one gets a glimpse into the
meaning of the story. Her keen awareness of the contours of her craft coupled with the
use of direct clear, elegant and sparkling prose makes the Interpreter of Maladies
priceless treaties.

There is no exaggeration in Amy Tan’s accolade treasured at the back of the cover of
the text-‘Jhumpa Lahiri’ is the kind of writer who makes you wants to garb the next
person you see and say “read this”! She’s a dazzling storyteller with a distinctive voice,
an eye, an ear for irony. She is one of the finest short story writers I have read’.