“Intersectional perspectives and youthful trauma”: (Re)considering Gauri in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland

ABSTRACT

This article offers a new reading of Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Lowland (2013), focused on the protagonist Gauri, by challenging earlier critical accounts of her character. Using an intersectional analysis supported by insights from trauma studies, it scrutinizes the elements that shape Gauri as a woman, revolutionary, wife, mother, and migrant. It argues that her persona is best understood as a product of her multiple interactions with the world and their related discourses within The Lowland’s exploration of the impact of the Naxalite Movement (1967–72) on a conservative middle-class Bengali family and especially on Gauri’s development. Contending that existing readings of Lahiri’s narrative are constrained by gaps in intersectional understandings or misunderstandings of the impact of trauma caused by her engagement with the Movement, the article offers a reading of how Lahiri’s protagonist subverts heteronormative discourses in multiple contexts, voicing her trauma culturally through actions rather than words.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• naxalite movement
• Jhumpa Lahiri
• intersectional feminism
• trauma
• West Bengal

And yet she could not forgive herself. Even as an adult, she wished only that she could go back and change things: the ungainly things she’d worn, the insecurity she’d felt, all the innocent mistakes she made. (Lahiri 2008, 137)

Introduction: Representing the Bengali migrant woman

The Bengali migrant woman consistently features in the works of North American authors of Indian origin including Bharati Mukherjee, Chitra Divakaruni, and Jhumpa Lahiri. The writers craft diverse journeys for these diasporic women protagonists who are impacted by social, cultural, and political causes and events. An intersectional analysis of the forces driving such journeys offers a more nuanced understanding of these literary texts, constructing a triangulated understanding based on the writer’s, protagonists’, and readers’ own responses. Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland (2013) has been criticized for the “authenticity” – or lack thereof – of its portrayal of West Bengal’s Naxalite Movement, the unsympathetic nature of the protagonist, Gauri, and her decisions (Asl 2018; Pius 2014; Samanta 2014; Purkayastha and Sengupta 2023; Walonen 2019). By contrast, I argue that the novel is remarkable for its understanding of the complex and multifarious forces working upon Gauri, who is traumatized by her experiences with the Movement. Furthermore, its treatment of the Naxalites is in line with much contemporary scholarship (Ray 2012; Sarkar 2021, 2022). For instance, Rabindra Ray (2012), an ex-Naxalite, insists that “the roots of the Naxalite phenomenon do not lie in the poverty of India’s laboring rural population, but in the psychological traumas of its urban educated young” (60). The youthful protagonists of Lahiri’s novel embody this trauma. Similarly, Binod Paudyal (2015) observes that “the student activists in Calcutta, as The Lowland demonstrates, come from middle- and upper-class families” (22). Pritha Sarkar (2021), too, comments on the hijacking of a local grassroots peasant movement by urbanized intellectuals and political parties, leading to the incursion of middle-class ideologies into the Naxal Movement as “the patriarchal characteristics of the 20th century urban Bengal middle-class society seeped into the movement as well” (3).

Defining the Naxalite Movement as “the first peasant insurgency post-Indian independence that developed into a movement”, Sarkar (2023, 30) claims that “violence became one of the chief tools in the movement dedicated to creating an egalitarian society and the state’s response to it in order to maintain the political status quo” (26). Originating in the small village of Naxalbari in North Bengal, the Maoist-Leninist Naxalite movement (1967–72) impacted the lives of countless young people in Bengal (Ray 2012). Capturing grain and food hoardings of elite rural landowners, destroying property and land deeds compounded by attempts to reassign agricultural land among landless peasants, “the Naxalite movement was a short-lived armed struggle against entrenched class interests of the rural elite and the collusive and coercive state machinery” (Purkayastha and Sengupta 2023, 4). However, only in recent years have gender issues and the reinterpretation of women’s roles within the Movement been subjects of scholarly discussion (Kamra 2013). This article examines this complexity with reference to Gauri, the protagonist of Lahiri’s novel The Lowland, through an intersectional analysis (Crenshaw 1991; Brah 2018; Collins 2015) in tandem with insights drawn from literary trauma theory (Balaev 2014, 2018; Visser 2015). It offers a more nuanced understanding of Gauri at the intersection of gender, race, nationality, social class, and sexuality, including ideology and corporeality, although these are not traditionally considered as vectors within intersectionality (Brah 2018; Carbin and Edenheim 2013). My intersectional analysis of Gauri’s reasoning for decisions taken as a lover, wife, mother, and migrant academic aims to unpack the ripple effect of her involvement with Naxalism on her life journey as a woman, her refuting of gendered cultural expectations, and her disengagement from motherhood.

Gauri’s life as impacted by the Naxalite movement, the novel’s core focus, compounds other factors besides gender, which at different points marginalize, challenge, and ultimately shape her. As a young philosophy student, she intersects with the lives of Udayan and Subhash Mitra, brothers living in a middle-class south Kolkata neighbourhood, both of whom she marries in turn. Gauri loves her first husband, the charismatic Naxalite revolutionary Udayan, later executed by law enforcement authorities for his revolutionary activities. Widowed and pregnant with Udayan’s child, she then accepts Subhash’s offer of marriage and starts afresh in the USA. Her daughter Bela, born there, is adopted by Subhash, and Gauri, now immersed in academic life, gradually dissociates herself from marriage and motherhood. Some years later, without notice, Gauri moves to California, taking up an academic position and severing ties with Bela and Subhash. Through Gauri’s silent refusal to enact traditional gender roles based on marriage and family, including entering alternative relationships with both men and women, the novel subverts normative cultural and gendered discourses.

Lahiri’s use of Naxalism as an instrument for change within the text has encountered criticism. Sharmila Purkayastha and Saswati Sengupta (2023) arraign Lahiri’s writing, stating that “Naxalism, an exotic unknown for the western reader perhaps, serves in this anglophone novel only to propel the plot, without any engagement or exploration” (10). Michael Walonen (2019), too, designates Lahiri’s crafting of The Lowland as a “bourgeois humanist appraisal” (282) which diminishes issues related to economic, social, and political injustices in India, focusing instead on “the ripple effects of familial trauma inaugurated by the Naxalites’ tactics of political violence” (282). However, Lahiri clearly stresses that the factual element within The Lowland is based on a tragic incident recounted to her during one of her Calcutta visits (Neary 2013). It involved the execution of two young Naxalites by security forces, near Lahiri’s grandparents’ residence, with the boys’ parents forced to watch the execution. She says: “That was the scene that [ … ] was so troubling and so haunted me – and ultimately inspired me to write the book” (Neary 2013, n.p.). The scene traumatically plays out in the novel when Gauri, Udayan’s wife, and his parents are forced to watch his execution (Lahiri 2013, 413–415). The excruciating pain of this event echoes through the silence embedded in Gauri’s journey through the text. It is intertwined with the pain she experiences upon realizing that her surveillance tasks for the Naxalites have made her an accessory to the murder of the policeman Nirmal Dey. Purkayastha and Sengupta (2023, 10), however, are dismissive of the impact of the policeman’s murder in Lahiri’s novel, writing that the entire movement is reduced to “they wanted a policeman out of the way” (Lahiri 2013, 392). This article contends that the effects of this trauma and its associated guilt, aligned with the pain of watching Udayan’s execution, strongly impact Gauri’s development. Lahiri’s research on the impact of the Naxalite Movement on Bengali society, and its consequences, draws on eyewitness accounts of people, especially from Calcutta, who had lived through those times. She affirms that her creation of Gauri was key to her exploration of how such events leave permanent scars on individuals:

I mean, she’s a 23-year-old woman. She’s in love with her revolutionary husband. She watches him shot in cold blood. She discovers after the fact that she is carrying his child. How does one move on from that? (Neary 2013, n. p.)

The Lowland and its critics

Geetha Ganapathy-Doré (2011, 74) says that “the typical immigrant woman is a mother figure in Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel[s]”. But through Gauri, who rejects this role in diaspora, and abandons both husband and child to seek an individualistic career path, Lahiri subverts her earlier fictional patterns. Combining an intersectional analysis with literary trauma theory, I argue that her involvement in Naxalism ultimately drove Gauri to more experimental relationships. Drawing on these sociocultural frameworks, I suggest a more empathic lens than earlier negative critiques of The Lowland – critiques of both Lahiri as creator and Gauri as wife, mother, and ex-revolutionary.

T.K. Pius (2014), for instance, is scathing in his assessment of Gauri’s “lonely” intellectual progress, alleging that although Lahiri accords her “a martyred dignity”, her presence in the book emanates a “pious sadism” (112). Moussa Pourya Asl (2018) further condemns Lahiri for purportedly upholding neo-liberal American patriarchy in The Lowland by presenting Gauri as a communist threat symbolizing female independence and bisexuality. These and other critiques (Purkayastha and Sengupta 2023; Samanta 2014; Walonen 2019) seek to elicit a social didacticism from the novel in an instrumentalist manner rather than unpacking its exploration of the power of complex, thwarted family relations and politically inflicted trauma.

By contrast, this article argues that the novel’s strength lies in its ability to encapsulate the consanguinity between the global, the political, and the personal, exemplifying how events that occurred in distant nations continue to impact the lives of diverse family members globally. Despite Purkayastha and Sengupta’s assertion that “Naxalism is made to serve as a rupture in the lives of Subhash, Gauri and Bela” (2023, 10), I contend that The Lowland showcases how Udayan’s participation in Bengal’s Naxalite Movement in the 1960s has a permanent impact upon the lives of his parents in India; his brother Subhash; Gauri, whose suppressed traumatized response transforms her character; and on his posthumously born daughter Bela in the USA. I concur with Paudyal that Lahiri’s use of “fragmented historical references”, which he terms a “narrative of connectivity” in which fragments of historical anecdotes and references are interjected into the main narrative, strengthens the novel “by demanding a meticulous and active participation on the part of the reader” (2015, 20).

Intersectional feminism and trauma approaches to The Lowland

The intersections between diverse vectors and Naxalite beliefs which shape Gauri and her relationships are a central concern of The Lowland. Intersectionality (Collins 2015; Crenshaw 1991) as an approach furthers understanding of the characterization of Gauri in relation to the influence of Naxalism, and by implication the novel’s global dimensions. I read Gauri’s middle-class social status (Ray 2012; Sarkar 2021) as an important vector in her inability to fully identify with the Naxalite cause and ideology. It also offers a window of cognizance onto her later dissonance with the Movement. A more complex analysis of the Movement’s inherent patriarchy, the manipulation of Gauri by the Party to fulfil the violent aim of murdering a policeman, is required to offset the conventional male-oriented approaches in stringent criticisms of Gauri, as located by Lahiri, within the Naxalite Movement (Asl 2018; Pius 2014; Samanta 2014; Walonen 2019). Even those who express approval of Lahiri’s writing appear disapproving of Gauri. Paudyal, for example, states that, “She remains Indian in many ways, yet she cannot become a good Indian mother who would never abandon her daughter” (2015, 28).

Although Purkayastha and Sengupta (2023) have criticized Lahiri’s detached portrayal of Naxalism, they are tolerant of her creation of Gauri in arguing that Udayan’s death sets her free, enabling her to move to the USA. Social class combined with educational access is imbricated in Lahiri’s fiction, as the educated oceanographer Subhash marries the philosophy student Gauri, and, in the USA, pathways to academia open up for her. This article’s intersectional feminist reading of the text interrogates the core male-dominated elitism of the Naxalite Movement to counter more patriarchal criticism. It considers the sociopolitical contexts which impact Gauri, rather than focusing on her actual experience of trauma, and it draws on Pluralistic Trauma Theory, which, according to Michelle Balaev (2008, 149–150), emphasizes the crucial role played by context, place, and physical environs; that is, it focuses on the cultural dimensions of trauma and the diverse ways in which it is perceived, remembered, and narrated by individuals and groups (Balaev 2018). In this sense, Pluralistic Trauma Theory builds on the work of Kai Erikson (1991), who delineates trauma “as resulting from a constellation of life experiences as well as from a discrete happening, from a persisting condition as well as from an acute event” (185; original emphasis). It resonates with intersectionality in its emphasis on the complex interrelationship of influences on subjectivity and behaviour.

This model is relevant as an analytical framework, as access to Gauri’s innermost thoughts is limited in the novel, and it offers a template for understanding her unconventional decisions. Readers must infer her subjectivity through her behaviour and the responses of others when their expectations are not met, often with traumatic consequences, as appears in the case of Subhash and Bela. As Balaev says: “In this model, trauma is conceptualized as an event that alters perception and identity yet in the wake of such disturbance new knowledge is formed about the self and external world” (2018, 366). We glimpse these changes through Gauri’s character transformation, as well as in the diverse and multifaceted remembrances and perceptions of trauma, evident in the stances adopted by the other characters in the novel.

A strength of The Lowland in its representation of trauma is that in creating Gauri as a Bengali woman impacted by fallout from the Naxalite Movement, and its associated trauma, Lahiri interrogates the intersections of race, ethnicity, and gender through tracing the development of a difficult, problematic character. The intersectional gendered complexities of the 1960s and 1970s in India are depicted through Gauri’s reactions, as Lahiri highlights other aspects of sociocultural and political structures such as the contradictory expectations concerning Gauri’s widowhood. While Udayan’s mother Bijoya has no compassion to spare for her beloved son’s widow, the Naxalite Party, despite its ostensibly egalitarian ethos, also expects Gauri to embrace eternal widowhood in memory of Udayan. Lahiri’s ironic portrayal of the enforcement of traditionally inhumane political, social, and cultural practices illustrates the implicit hypocrisy of individuals and ideologues. In The Lowland, “the personal and political paradigms overlap” (Balaev 2018, 156) and the existing cultural practice of determining what is allowed to be spoken – or not – after a traumatic experience is vital in establishing the social norm of that era in a particular context. Hence, through Gauri, the question of the “speakability of traumatic experience” (157) is shown to be influenced by entrenched cultural practices. As a widow, she is not given space by her in-laws to grieve, remember, or talk about what happened to Udayan. “She is unable to cry” (Lahiri 2013, 129), and, garbed in traditional white, she is forbidden to eat non-vegetarian food.

Here, at the intersections of culture, gender, and trauma, the novel invites the understanding that what remains unspoken in a narrative about trauma “can be a result of cultural values” (Balaev 2018, 367). Hence, Irene Visser (2015) argues for “openness to non-Western belief systems and their rituals and ceremonies in the engagement with trauma” (250) to fulfil the decolonization process of literary trauma theory. Critiquing classical trauma theory for its incapacity to “address atrocity, genocide and war” (Luckhurst 2008, 213, cited in Visser 2015, 251). Visser stresses instead the cultural and contextual impact of such traumatizing events on human lives. Such an approach is particularly relevant to this reading of The Lowland as a novel that emphasizes the anti-colonial ideology of Naxalism, yet its patriarchal discrimination against women. The following section examines the nature of the Movement to gauge its impact on Gauri’s psychological dilemmas.

The Naxalite Movement in The Lowland

The term “Naxalite” (derived from Naxalbari, a small town in Northern West Bengal) was first applied to numerous Indian militant insurgent groups operating on Maoist principles. In The Lowland, Udayan, Gauri’s first husband, embodies the group’s radical belief systems which sought to support oppressed peasants within West Bengal by conducting guerrilla warfare against the state. Through Gauri’s student Dipankar, a political researcher, Lahiri speaks of its “self-defeating tactics, [ … ] its unrealistic ideology” (2013, 341). Lahiri’s portrayal of Gauri as a Naxalite has been criticized (Asl 2018; Samanta 2014; Walonen 2019) as lacking an understanding of the Movement’s emancipatory potential for women participants. Asl (2018) contrasts Gauri’s apparent disillusionment with Naxalism with ethnographic data from female Naxalites, who describe their participation as “magic moments of struggle” (Asl 2018; 32 cited in Mallarika Sinha Roy 2009). However, Asl’s approach involves a preferential reading of Sinha Roy’s (2009, 2011) research, which emphasizes the roles of contextualization and individualization linked to such heightened emotions and ignores the force of the personal behind the political. Sinha Roy (2009) and Sarkar (2021) observe that the Naxalite leadership had always deemed female participation in the Movement as assistive rather than as vanguard militancy.

Indeed, the gender discrimination that permeated the Movement has been discussed by several critics (Kamra 2013; Ray 2012, 2006, 2007; Sinha Roy 2009, 2011), some of whom draw on the first-person narratives of ex-Naxalite women to critique an inherent bias of ascribing secondary status to women and allocating them “tek kaaj, mostly courier work, including the transportation of papers, arms and information” (Roy 2007, 191). Lahiri skilfully deploys this allocation of roles as Gauri is deputed to obtain information on the movements of Nirmal Dey, the policeman later murdered by Udayan (Lahiri 2013), as part of the guerrilla warfare against the state. For Asl, Lahiri’s devaluation of female participation is evident when Gauri joins the movement, being inspired by her brother’s and Udayan’s prior involvement. He argues that Lahiri marginalizes the female members’ engagement with Naxalism and “in the novel’s elaborations of Naxalism as a social movement, the women’s significant contribution is overlooked” (2018, 389). Asl’s claim that the first uprising at Naxalbari involved several women is correct, but power within the movement was soon usurped by upper-middle-class urban ideologues (Ray 2012; Singh 2015; Sarkar 2021), leading to changes in discourse. Lahiri’s perspective is possibly based on her reading of the narrative of the ex-Naxalite Krishna Bandopadhyay (2008), who observes that many women chose to enter the Movement idealistically, inspired by romantic love for male partners, and some ended up sadly disillusioned with both the violence and the patriarchal discrimination. I argue that Lahiri’s rendering of the causes driving female participation in Naxalism displays gender empathy rather than devaluation of commitment to the cause. The gendered trauma of atrocities based in such political conflict (Visser 2015) concerning women within that temporal space – particularly already marginalized women like Gauri – is ignored in these critiques.

Interestingly, Lahiri has no hesitation about incorporating her class perspective into the novel’s intersectional synthesis. Drawing on my sociocultural understanding as an upper-middle-class Bengali, and upon conversations with extended family and social networks, I concur with Lahiri (quoted in Neary 2013), that the Movement sparked tremendous emotion in some, while leaving others untouched. Udayan’s and Subhash’s father considers the Naxalites ideological rhetoric as meaningless and empty, thereby echoing the sentiments of large sections of West Bengal’s upper and middle classes. Class intersecting with gender also explains Gauri’s lack of genuine integration into the Naxalite group, as her tempered engagement with the Movement testifies. The “magic moments of struggle” (Asl 2018, 389; cited in Sinha Roy 2009, 32) mostly reflected the experiences of rural and working-class women rather than educated, middle-class, urban Bengali women such as Gauri. Furthermore, I maintain that Lahiri never designates The Lowland as a political novel; rather, it is a tragic family story, based on accounts of the Naxalite era during her Calcutta visits (Neary 2013). Lahiri’s literary imagination works with available archival raw material and personal recollections of locals, using the political movement as scaffolding to enable the novel’s development.

As readers, we do not see overt displays of sorrow or humour in Gauri. Pius’s (2014) criticism that there was authorial scope to infuse the narrative with instances of humour, eccentricity, and perhaps quirkiness is valid. Gauri’s characterization is overwhelmingly gloomy, and Lahiri outlines a straight narrative of sombre family issues and relationships unrelieved by instances of joy and humour. This forlornness partly derives from the authorial strategy not to present the narrative in Gauri’s own words, but to represent her traumatized subjectivity through the eyes of others – Udayan and the third-person narrator, for instance. Allowing Gauri to articulate the story of her trauma might have raised questions about healing (Balaev 2018; Visser 2015), but Gauri refuses to share her story – not even with her student Dipankar for his book on Naxalism – saying: “I’m sorry, I don’t want to be interviewed” (Lahiri 2013, 340). Nonetheless, news of Kanu Sanyal’s (the erstwhile Naxal leader) suicide affects her – “She could not rid herself of the emotion it churned up” (345) – distracting her, so that she falls and is badly injured, hence reinforcing the sense of untreated trauma as disabling.

Lahiri’s refusal to let Gauri directly narrate her trauma prevents her from accessing a feminist standpoint (Brah 2018) and offering her own understanding of her situation, although the fall she suffers signals her suppressed trauma. As Gauri manifests multiple subordinate identities – woman of colour, bisexual, widow, bad mother, bad wife, and so on – readers may underestimate the impact of trauma on her. However, Devon Carbado (2013) warns against “mapping fixed hierarchies” onto such identities because this obscures the fact that “both power and social categories are contextually constituted” (814). Lahiri uses Gauri’s Naxalism to illuminate hegemonic societal pressures which, through designated codes of conduct, lead to a stifling of the inner self. The reader is afforded brief but poignant glimpses into her youth and childhood as with Udayan’s observation of her as “a bookish girl, heedless of her own beauty” (Lahiri 2013, 506). In the earlier stages of her life, Gauri’s suppressed feelings and desires result in her later ongoing quest for individuation; but these emotional constraints inhibit her from coalescing her identities to resolve emotional and mental stress, whether through involvement in Naxalism or immersion in academia.

In fact, Gauri displays none of the sociocultural conflicts experienced by Lahiri’s earlier female protagonists such as Ashima in The Namesake (Lahiri 2003). Instead, migration to the USA creates a space for her to come into her own through the combined intersectional axes of education, gender, and class, and these enable her to find liberation from the traumas of the past by “jumping boundaries” (Martyris 2014). In traditional Bengali sociocultural discourse, the term Bhadramahila (mother and wife) denotes a dignified woman whose social status is defined by her respectability. As a single woman academic, Gauri moves away from this traditional role, slowly discarding her celibate lifestyle: “When desire eventually began to push its way through, its pattern was arbitrary, casual. [ … ] Sometimes she juggled lovers, and at other times, for extended periods there was no one” (Lahiri 2013, 287). Her relationship with Lorna, a student, is the biggest boundary Gauri scales, though “[she] had no recollection of crossing a line that drove her to desire a woman’s body” (289).

The intersectional forces acting upon Gauri

Lahiri locates Gauri between the late 1960s and early 1970s, an era when Bengali social norms prioritized marriage and motherhood, yet her heroine is left strangely bereft of the support of family networks. Philosophy, Gauri’s first love, is superseded by the presence of Udayan in her life and despite feeling that “she cast no shadow of her own” (Lahiri 2013, 91), Gauri develops a sense of self through Udayan’s love. Witnessing his brutal assassination, followed by harsh treatment from her in-laws, and stifling cultural constraints of an era which forbade discussion of post-traumatic disorder, offers multiple possible interpretations of Gauri’s future actions as wife and mother. Despite Subhash’s kindness and moving to the USA, Gauri’s early sense from her childhood, that she remains at the “end of a queue” (Lahiri 2013, 91), contributes to the later inability to articulate her trauma as Udayan’s widow; she is suffocated further by the expectations placed on her by her in-laws and the Naxalites.

Balaev contends that trauma is not so much unspeakable as culturally silenced and linked to various psychological, social, and neuro-historical models of memory and dissociation (2008). Gauri never speaks of watching Udayan die:

In all her life, apart from when Subhash asked, and the day she told Otto Weiss, she has not spoken to a single person about what happened to him. [ … ] What she’d seen from the terrace in Tollygunge. (Lahiri 2013, 279)

Repressing her need for connections, Gauri lives out these internalizations in her life and marriages, and associates such needs with pain, abandonment, and death – as reinforced by her loving and losing Udayan. After his death, “missing but resenting him (279)”, Gauri attempts to make sense of who Udayan was, her biggest fear being that without this haunting and her grief, she would be left with nothing. Although offering her an alternative universe, he had been unable to share it with her, yet despite this limitation she is unable to stop loving him.

Gauri ironically finds that each of her gendered positions, as Udayan’s wife and then his widow, leave her vulnerable to normative performativity. In seeking to construct an egalitarian Utopia consistent with Naxalite beliefs, she and Udayan had undergone a “revolutionary marriage” (Roy 2006, 100), which nonetheless was “governed by normative gender identities and hegemonic cultural codes” (104). Though the Naxalites advocated sociopolitical and cultural egalitarianism, and marriage between party members (comrades) was celebrated as a joining of revolutionaries, the Party discourse ensured that such marriages would run along traditional gendered lines (Sarkar 2021). Inserting Gauri within these intersectional matrices, Lahiri skilfully crafts her disillusionment with the gendered structures of the Party, whose members “like her in laws had expected her to honor Udayan’s memory, his martyrdom” (Lahiri 2013, 152) and deemed her marriage to Subhash as “unchaste” (Roy 2006, 104). Gauri’s self-imposition of silence as an ex-Naxalite, her characteristic detachment, is rooted in such disillusionment. The young, idealistic Gauri confronts the disparity between the ideal and the real within the contested site of her “revolutionary marriage.” This disillusionment is discerned by Udayan in his last moments as he looks into her eyes, seeing “a revision of everything they had once shared” (Lahiri 2013, 505). Like his death, the trauma of this disillusionment shadows Gauri forever, reminding the reader that “social, semantic, political, and economic factors are present in the experience and recollection of trauma” (Balaev 2014, 7).

An audacious literary puppeteer, Lahiri leaves the reader suspended in a world of shifting heteronormative discourses. An alternative explanation to Asl’s (2018) assertion that Lahiri aligns with US patriarchy is that she moulds Gauri as a challenge to patriarchal heteronormativity through experimentation with her sexuality, her wilful subjectivity, and refusal to submit to gendered modes of motherhood. Though berating herself for “failing at something every other woman on earth [does] without trying” (Lahiri 2013, 197), Gauri acknowledges that she finds motherhood both exhausting and intellectually unfulfilling. As Kalyan Nadiminti (2018) observes: “A reluctant participant in the Naxalite movement, Gauri finds a way out of both a national and domestic predicament by taking recourse to American university life” (247). Nadiminti further reads into Gauri’s character a resistance to “the sovereign will of family” (247), while Paudyal (2015) designates her “a new cosmopolitan subject” whose intersectional identity concomitantly occupies “a range of fluid subject positions, which can be trans-class, trans-local with competing value systems” (4). Unlike Ashima in The Namesake (Lahiri 2003), Gauri, an immigrant woman, defies the entrenched norms of the Bengali Bhadramahila (lady):

Drawing an arc between an insurgent Naxalism in Bengal with a personal rebellion of the protagonists affected by it, Lahiri presents us with Gauri who goes against every received piety of how an Indian woman arriving in Boston in those early days might live her life. (Chakraborty 2021, 95)

Shedding the trappings of her Bengali feminine identity, especially her long black hair – a symbol of an intimate past with Udayan who “drapes her hair around her shoulders” (Lahiri 2013, 278) – Gauri embraces an academic identity, discarding the roles of wife and mother along the way. Silently, Gauri’s actions culturally voice her sense of loss and trauma. The gesture of cropping her long hair, a source of pride and beauty for a traditional Indian woman, represents a decolonizing move by Lahiri, the cultural sensitivity of which is recognized by postcolonial trauma critics (Visser 2015; Craps 2014).

Representing Gauri as a mother

Within the narrative’s contested core lies Gauri’s indifference as a mother. Superficially, this attitude may suggest Gauri’s self-centredness, her prioritizing of intellectual attainments above other responsibilities. But Lahiri’s consummate portrayal invites the question of whether Gauri’s selfishness and inability to mother emanate from never having experienced a proper mother–child relationship: “In childhood Gauri had not known who she was, where or to whom she’d belonged” (Lahiri 2013, 91). Handed over by elderly parents to old grandparents, and upon the latter’s death living unobtrusively in her maternal uncle’s home, Gauri “had no memory of spending a moment ever, alone with her mother or father” (91).

As a young woman, Gauri emotionally isolated herself through academic pursuits, and she struggles with her role as Bela’s primary caregiver. She retires into her study whenever possible: “Isolation offered its own form of companionship: the reliable silence of her rooms, the steadfast tranquillity of the evenings” (Lahiri 2013, 165). Desiring solitude, Gauri is reluctant to share her space with Bela and Subhash. Aligning with what Sara Ahmed characterizes as a “wilful subject” (2014) by challenging “the sovereign will of family” (Nadiminti 2018, 247), Gauri betrays Bela as Udayan betrayed her. I assert that Gauri’s abandonment of Bela stems from the trauma of Bela’s creation. Impregnated by a fugitive revolutionary husband and haunted by her involvement in the killing of the policeman, Gauri’s unspoken trauma during her Naxalite phase is further compounded by her widowhood and later her parenting role as Bela’s mother. Ashamed of her perceived inability to mother, and unwilling to acknowledge the trauma inflicted by Naxalism, Gauri abandons her family, informing Subhash that “in time my absence will make things easier, not harder, for you and Bela” (Lahiri 2013, 252). Gauri’s refusal to recognize that Bela will perceive this move as maternal abandonment again alerts the reader to her inability to coalesce her myriad identities.

Gauri’s so-called “emancipation” when away from her child has led critics to conclude that Lahiri has sketched a “folktale parody of a cold, selfish witch” (Kakutani 2013, n.p.). However, by referring to “the times when Subhash took over Bela’s care, the relief she felt at being allowed, however briefly, to step aside”, Lahiri (2013, 116) portrays a traumatized young woman, possibly suffering post-partum disorder. Such lack of empathy on part of some critics reinforces a gendered reading of the novel. A more probing reading which sees beyond the immediate consequences teases out Gauri’s immense pain intermingled with anger at Udayan “for bringing her happiness and then taking it away. For trusting her, only to betray her” (Lahiri 2013, 197). Within the Naxalite party’s gendered spaces, “the consequences of conjugality such as the begetting of children were largely ignored” (Roy 2007, 197). Disregarding Gauri’s desires, Udayan emphasizes his refusal to have a child until “the war is won” (Lahiri 2013, 394), yet as an injured fugitive he seeks solace in lovemaking, leaving Gauri widowed and pregnant.

Readers might struggle to grasp Gauri’s abandonment of Subhash and Bela to pursue her academic career, perhaps struck by the unilateral abruptness of her severing of ties and alienation from her family. There is no negotiation or choice offered to Bela. Akin to the Party’s gendered parenting of its female followers, Gauri deprives her daughter of a voice. But Gauri is left mostly bereft of choice throughout the text, leading the reader to ask whether she has become incapable of decision-making, and hence chooses blindly (or wilfully), disregarding the consequences. Marrying Udayan is her first independent move and leaving Bela and Subhash the next. As Gauri hurtles from one decision to the next, choice itself appears alien to her, her agency always having been “non-sovereign” (Krause 2011, n.p., cited in Kamra 2013, 3). Leaving Bela and Subhash is an agential act, transforming Gauri’s earlier non-sovereign agency into wilful subjecthood; she now “disagrees with what has been willed by the other” (Ahmed 2014, 16), be it her family or the Party. This wilfulness can be considered Gauri’s response to the conflict and trauma she has experienced. It is further visible when as an academic “her ideology is isolated from her practice” (Lahiri 2013, 284). Gauri uses all she has learnt from Udayan, “shrewdly cultivated for her own intellectual gain” (284), aware that she is betraying his political ideals. Udayan believed that education was for the welfare of the masses, empowering those most marginalized, but Gauri sidesteps this shared ideology in her focus on individual career advancement. On the surface, this rejection may stem from Gauri’s inability to deal with his death. However, it is also possible that the trauma caused by Udayan’s idealism can only be mitigated through negating this in practice. As Balaev (2018) reminds us, “the reorientation of consciousness caused by traumatic events may include an ambiguous referentiality as well as determinate meaning” (366).

Gauri the immigrant: An ongoing silence

In the USA, Gauri gains status as a respected migrant academic. But by remaining a green card holder, she occupies “a nebulous space of permanent residency, neither returning to India nor becoming an American citizen” (Nadiminti 2018, 252). With her foreignness accentuated through colour, accent, and apparel, Gauri chooses to belong nowhere, as belonging has spelt trauma for her. The trauma of her precarious belonging as a Naxalite manifests in her decision to silently maintain exit routes for herself rather than fostering national and familial allegiances. When Gauri finally does come into her own intellectually, it is through the very abstract and disembodied discipline of philosophy, which predates her relationship with Udayan. In their very first conversation, she informs him that studying philosophy helps her understand things and “its purpose is to teach us how to die” (Lahiri 2013, 66). Philosophy later becomes the centre of her life, reinforcing her essentially solitary disposition and contemplative melancholy.

Naxalist philosophies impose on Gauri a continuation of her ongoing traumatic silence. As both wife and widow, she is silent about Udayan’s political activities. The final silence is maintained with her daughter. She has no words to offer Bela, because stories of her daughter’s inception and her subsequent abandonment entail confronting risky memories. “Forgetting of a certain past” (Lahiri 2013, 106) allows Gauri to survive, and severing connections with her husband and child aids this silencing process. Remembering is risky for her. Nonetheless, “the traumatic experience disrupts, yet does not foreclose memory’s function or deny the epistemological possibilities of the experience” (Balaev 2018, 367).

Gauri’s silence is both political and cultural, because as a US academic her past political affiliations with a radical leftist movement could prove dangerous on many fronts. She actively expels the past from her life, just as history expels Udayan and others like him who were “foot soldiers” (Ray 2012, 338) of the Naxalite movement. Roy (2006) contends that “even the language of feminism entails, it seems, certain silences, expulsions, and ‘forgettings’ that mark the boundaries of what can be recollected, and what can be told” (110). This echoes the Movement’s legacy of violence which even in its dissolution holds for some “risky memories that are not easily avowed or testified to” (188). This silence constantly reverberates in Gauri’s refusal to reconcile her past and present, and her steadfast adherence to the cultural mores of silent trauma despite her years as a migrant.

Conclusion: Gauri as a dispenser of justice

This article advocates a layered understanding of Gauri’s abandonment of both family and the Naxalite cause, asserting that being a philosopher, she dispenses retributive justice to herself, voicing her trauma through actions rather than words. Gauri repudiates all intimate relationships and as a gendered subject remains unforgiven by all: her daughter, her husband, her in-laws, as well as certain literary critics. When she attempts to reconnect with the adult Bela, now a mother herself, the latter takes a non-negotiable stance, informing her that “You are nothing” (Lahiri 2013, 470).

Gauri’s efforts appear half-hearted, and her post-traumatic condition culminates in her inability to deal with emotional intimacy and relationships. The narrator has not been forgiving of this inadequacy. Reading against the grain of what the narrator enunciates, an intersectional, trauma-based reading framework is more compassionate. Bela’s rejection of Gauri and refusal to obtain further knowledge about Udayan are Gauri’s final punishment. When Gauri reappears in Bela’s life after nearly three decades, Bela feels that she would like to “kill her all over again” (Lahiri 2013, 472) as while still young, shamed by her mother’s abandonment, she had informed people that Gauri had died. Bela symbolically commits matricide again, responding to her own daughter Meghna’s query about Gauri’s identity with the words “this lady was a friend of your grandmother’s” (466). Thus, Gauri remains an unwilling witness to murders: the policeman’s, Udayan’s, and now (metaphorically) her own.

Gauri belongs nowhere, appears to have no close friends, and her sexual intimacies – whether with random acquaintances, a hired tradesman, or her female student – are fleeting (Lahiri 2013). Yet she belongs in several intersectional spaces, as a Bengali, an ex-Naxalite, a mother, and a diasporic academic. The subsequent impacts of her Naxalite past have left her permanently dislocated yet paradoxically multiply located. Gauri’s youthful engagement with politics ends in personal tragedy because when both her husband and the policeman die, she has no ideological weapon with which to console herself or rationalize her pain by means of revolutionary political discourse.

Gauri deprives herself of the right to marital happiness and parenthood because, along with Udayan and the Party, she considers herself responsible for the murder of Nirmal Dey: a policeman, a husband, and the father of a little boy. Her actions had deprived a child of his father and transformed a young wife into a widow. Before departing for the USA, Gauri cannot resist visiting the policeman’s fatherless son: “For the first time she saw his face [ … ] the loss that would never be replaced, a loss that the child forming inside her shared” (Lahiri 2013, 444).

This child’s loss creates a permanent barrier to her building a life with Subhash and Bela. Gauri, unlike other Naxalites who were mobilized, could not view herself as a soldier “fighting a just war” (Dasgupta 2003, 1923). This is the connection cleverly etched by Lahiri: creating a pathway of trauma, Gauri speaks for the author in viewing the Naxalite struggle as a series of random acts of violence which often ended in the demise of their youthful “foot soldiers” (Ray 2012, 338). Her trauma remains ongoing, her sense of justice affronted. Lahiri portrays Gauri as “the sole accuser, the sole guardian of her own guilt” (2013, 481). Forever imprisoned by “her own act of killing” (364), yet “protected by Udayan, overlooked by the investigator, taken away by Subhash” (481), Gauri takes the final decision, becoming both judge and executioner in meting out the utmost penalty and denying herself access to her own family in a foreign land. A mature Bela pronounces the final sentence on Gauri, stating: “You’re dead to me as he is. The only difference is that you left me by choice” (471). Lahiri leaves readers to draw their own conclusion as to whether at this juncture Gauri’s acknowledgement and acceptance of her past traumas become visible, or whether, in accepting the matricide imposed by Bela, true to form, she again avoids confrontation with the past.

Despite her academic training, Gauri refuses to analyse and come to terms with her past. Her pain has become numbness, and her traumas deeply etched, including her emotionally indifferent upbringing, her involvement in a patriarchal political movement uncaring of women of her social background, the death of Udayan, and, most potent and painful, the death of the policeman, which she internalizes and carries as her personal guilt have remained suppressed. Self-analysis would have helped her trace the origins of her pain, sifting through her “coalition of identities” (Carastathis 2014), and realize her need for emotional connections.

An engagement with more stringent and at times unforgiving critiques of Gauri’s character highlights how an awareness of the intersecting axes of gender, education, context, and social class is necessary for suspending judgement while ensuring that “responsiveness to the tension of multiple perspectives is not foreclosed” (Pardy 2012, 154), and nuances of the character’s evolution are made accessible. Without examining how the knowledge and power dynamics of the Movement work out in the narrative, it is simplistic to pin labels on Gauri. In considering the sociocultural positionality of the author in The Lowland by using intersectional feminist frameworks and literary trauma theory, we move away from criticism influenced by ideological biases towards a more equitable critique.

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Reshmi Lahiri-Roy

Reshmi Lahiri-Roy is a Scholarly Teaching Fellow in the Institute of Education, Arts and Community at Federation University and is currently working on a second PhD (by publication) in Deakin University’s Faculty of Arts and Education. Her research areas include race in education, intersectionality, and inclusion within higher education experiences, autoethnography, and emotion writing as method. She has published in International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education; Emotion, Space and Society; Pedagogy, Society & Culture; and Globalisation, Societies and Education, among others. She is also co-editor of Asian Women, Identity and Migration: Experiences of Transnational Women of Indian Origin/Heritage (2021).