Critical Analysis Of The Lowland By Gauri

Education plays an important role in the development of human life especially women’s. When a woman is suffering in the hands of fate and in her mental agony, education provides the confidence of leading a life of her own choice. Jhumpa Lahiri in her Man Booker Prize short listed (2013) and DSC Prize for South Asian Literature (2015) won novel “The Lowland” portrays the character Gauri with the notion of showing the plight of a Diaspora Indian woman. Gauri by attraction became the wife of Udayan, a radical communist in Calcutta and by his untimely death became the wife of his elder brother Subhash, a Ph.D Scholar in America. Her turmoil over the remembrance of her first husband and her inability of leading a smooth life with her second husband

“The only way to prevent it was to take Gauri away”(138). Even she refused to marry Subhash as it is disloyal to Udayan, she accepted his proposal on the assurance of her wishes of not yet born child and there were chances for pursuing her studies in a foreign land without any interruptions of anyone especially her in-laws. “She could go on with her studies. It would be an opportunity to begin again”(143). “He told her not to think about what people might say, how his parents would react”(143). Within twenty three years, she became the pawn in the hands of destiny. She had to depend more on others than herself. First, she was thrown to their grandparents by her own parents, then with Udayan for a short period of two years, after his death she had to accept the offer of Subhash. So in life, she was thrown to pillar to post in the hands of fate and the two brothers, both are her husbands, a woman never imagined in her life, “Always at the end of a queue, in the shadow of others, she believed she was not significant enough to cast a shadow of her own”