Illness and Diaspora: Medical Humanities Perspectives in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction (Published)
This paper offers a medical humanities reading of Jhumpa Lahiri’s fiction, showing how illness is embedded in the everyday lives of South Asian diasporic subjects rather than reducible to biomedical events. Focusing on selected stories from Interpreter of Maladies and Unaccustomed Earth, and key episodes in The Namesake, it draws on illness narrative, narrative medicine, and critical medical humanities to analyse stillbirth, grief, seizures, depression, and diffuse distress. Migration, racialisation, gendered care work and intergenerational obligation emerge as determinants of suffering and its (in)visibility, especially in clinical scenes such as Mr Kapasi as “interpreter of maladies” and the hospital episodes in The Namesake. Gendered caregiving and the transmission of unspoken wounds are traced through Ashima, Mrs Sen and Ruma. The paper argues that Lahiri’s work critiques biomedical reductionism and offers a vital pedagogical resource for teaching migrant and minority health in postcolonial medical humanities
Keywords: Diaspora, Jhumpa Lahiri, South Asian literature, illness narrative, medical humanities, narrative medicine