Spatial Metaphors and the Politics of Belonging in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake and The Lowland

Abstract

Jhumpa Lahiri's novels, The Namesake (2003) and The Lowland (2013), employ spatial metaphors to critique the institutional forms of displacement experienced by diasporic communities, while illustrating how these same communities create alternative geographies of belonging. Through textual analysis informed by transnational feminist geography, this paper argues that Lahiri's spatial imagination extends beyond typical narratives of cultural loss to demonstrate how marginalized communities construct counter-cartographies of memory, kinship, and political resistance. The analysis examines three connected themes: the bureaucratic violence in immigration systems, the gendered spatial practices women use to negotiate belonging, and how political trauma from Bengal's Naxalite movement gets transmitted across generations. Comparing how these themes appear in both novels, this research demonstrates how spatial metaphors serve as a political critique that challenges state-imposed citizenship categories and essentialist notions of cultural identity.