Diaspora, National Identity, and Decolonization: A Nationalist Reading of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland and Manju Kapur’s The Immigrant

Abstract

Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland (2013) and Manju Kapur’s The Immigrant (2008) are diaspora narratives that simultaneously reflect India’s domestic challenges and its international reputation. Lahiri reimagines the Naxalite insurgency in Bengal and its diasporic reverberations, while Kapur traces the dislocation of an Indian woman migrating to Canada. Read together, the novels underscore how internal turbulence and external migration both shape the nation’s global image. This article offers a consciously nationalist and decolonising interpretation. It argues that postcolonial pedagogy—dominated for decades by colonialist habits of reading—has too often highlighted fragility and failure rather than resilience and responsibility. Read through the lens of the National Education Policy 2020, which urges a decolonised and value-based curriculum, these novels become teaching texts. They affirm constitutional democracy, civic duty, and cultural dignity while warning against imported ideologies and unanchored migration. In so doing, Lahiri and Kapur enhance India’s soft power abroad and remind citizens at home that genuine freedom rests on a balance of rights and duties. Their work becomes a pedagogical intervention, preparing students to act as responsible citizens and confident global representatives. In this sense, diaspora fiction is not a lament of loss but a civic resource for building India@100 – Vikshit Bharat.