Translational Politics and the Representation of Marginality: A Comparative Analysis of Translations of Mahasweta Devi's and Jhumpa Lahiri's Works

Abstract

Mahasweta Devi's imaginative works effectively portray the marginalised and third world. She writes extensively on behalf of indigenous communities that are nomads. Her publications mostly focus on the oppression of marginalised groups in Eastern India, including female subalterns, landless workers, dispossessed tribes, and others. The experiences of women and their quest for self-discovery in a "foreign" place have been the primary foci of diasporic fiction analysis. However, this essay takes a postcolonial stance in its examination of Jhumpa Lahiri's 2003 novel The Namesake in an effort to learn more about the gender politics and subtle semantic inflections that shape the portrayal of males from the Indian diaspora. Mr. Ashoke Ganguli is a first-generation American immigrant, and his son Gogol was born and raised in the United States; the story aims to illustrate the differences in their experiences. Cultural identity, I argue, is more about the second generation's identification of their "being" than it is for the first, whose struggle is to reconcile "being" with "becoming."