Lahiri is amongst 10 distinguished recipients this year.
By Sujeet Rajan
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NEW YORK: Indian American fiction writer Jhumpa Lahiri is one of the 10 distinguished recipients of the 2014 National Humanities Medal, to be conferred by President Barack Obama at the White House, on September 10.
The National Humanities Medal honors an individual or organization whose work has deepened the nation’s understanding of the human experience, broadened citizens’ engagement with history and literature or helped preserve and expand Americans’ access to cultural resources.
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The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) manages the nominations process for the National Humanities Medal on behalf of the White House. Each year NEH invites nominations from individuals and organizations across the country. The National Council on the Humanities, NEH’s presidentially-appointed and Senate-confirmed advisory body, reviews the nominations and provides recommendations to the President, who selects the recipients.
Created as an independent federal agency in 1965, NEH awards grants that support research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities that have resulted in thousands of museums exhibits, scholarly books, films, and radio programs. NEH is celebrating its 50th anniversary beginning Sept 29.
“The National Endowment for the Humanities is proud to join President Obama in celebrating the achievements of these distinguished medalists,” said NEH Chairman William Adams, in a statement. “The recipients of this medal have sparked our imaginations, ignited our passions, and transformed our cultural understanding. They embody how the humanities can serve a common good.”
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The first National Humanities Medal was awarded in 1996. Since then, 175 have been bestowed — to 163 individuals and 12 organizations — inclusive of this year’s recipients.
The humanities medal, first awarded as the Charles Frankel Prize in 1989, will be presented along with the 2014 National Medal of Arts. First Lady Michelle Obama would be present too at the ceremony.
The White House citation for Lahiri read: “For enlarging the human story. In her works of fiction, Dr. Lahiri has illuminated the Indian-American experience in beautifully wrought narratives of estrangement and belonging.”
The citation is accompanied by an article on Lahiri written by Elizabeth Word Gutting, a writer based in Washington, D.C., and the program director of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation.
Related Story: Ghosts of the past stalk ‘The Lowland’
The article in full:
Jhumpa Lahiri was shy as a child. At a young age, she began reading and writing, and a new connection to the world opened up through the words she found and placed on the page. But it wasn’t always so easy, or straightforward. As she got older, she no longer wrote. Out of fear, or out of insecurity. When describing herself as a young adult, she says, “I felt so lost. I was just searching for that thing, that place, that kept me sane and kept me whole.”
How did she start writing again?
“I just had no choice. I was so afraid to open up that box again, and go inside there, and yet I knew that it was the one place where I had to be in order to survive, to live this life. We are animals, and we’re built to survive. And I knew that my survival as a person, as a human being, depended on writing.”
She attended Boston University for her MFA, and then received a seven-month fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown. Through “wonderful teachers” and the encouragement of peers, her confidence grew again.
She has published two novels and two collections of short stories in English, and her fifth and most recent book is a collection of essays she wrote in Italian while living in Rome, titled In Altre Parole (In Other Words). She received the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Hemingway Award for her first book, Interpreter of Maladies, at the age of 32. She has been a finalist for both the Booker Prize and the National Book Award. President Obama appointed her as a member of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities in 2010. Literary critics have characterized her as one of the foremost contemporary writers on the immigrant experience in America. This fall, she will join Princeton’s creative writing faculty. It is no stretch to say she is one of the most influential writers at work today.
Lahiri was born in London to Indian parents from West Bengal. When her father was studying at the London School of Economics, MIT offered him a job as a university librarian. Her parents came to the Unites States. “not from necessity, but from choice, from curiosity.” Lahiri was two years old. They planned to stay for a few years. They’ve lived in Rhode Island for over 40 years now.
Bengali was “the first language of [her] life,” the language she spoke at home with her parents. But English was what she spoke outside of home, in school, with friends, and the language in which she read and wrote. But she says that though she has a “technical full mastery of English, I never felt it was fully mine. It was the language in which I built a life away and apart from my mother and father, which was always emphasizing the distance between us.”
Her family traveled back to Calcutta often to visit relatives. Seeing her parents so emotionally connected to their point of origin raised many questions in her own mind. She wondered what her emotional point of origin was; she didn’t feel the same connection to India as her parents did, nor did she feel genuinely linked to America. “At many times in my life, I wished I could be like any other American . . . feel really a part of it, really woven into it. I couldn’t. I just couldn’t do it. And all of my writing has come out of that.”
However, Lahiri has recently found a place where she’s “never felt as at home.” She has been living for the past three years with her husband and two children in Rome. For years, she studied Italian. The impetus to do so came from instinct: Over twenty years ago, she traveled to Italy for a weeklong trip, and within a day or two of arriving, she had “a very intense reaction to the language,” which made her feel the need to begin learning Italian.
She’s now fluent. For several years, she has read only in Italian. And a week after moving to Rome, she began writing solely in Italian. In Altre Parole is a reflection on the experience of turning her life toward another language. Through discovering a third language, it seems she has found herself. She has built her life and career by following instincts. When describing what she continually strives for in her work, she says what interests her is “moving forward, and moving on to unexplored territory.”
Interestingly, president Barack Obama had recently included Lahiri’s exceptional novel ‘The Lowland’ as part of his reading material on a vacation. It’s not known whether, he, did indeed get the time to read the novel in part, or full, but it would be special for him as well to bestow Lahiri with the award.
Here’s a review of ‘The Lowland’ in The American Bazaar:
http://www.americanbazaaronline.com/2013/10/14/ghosts-past-stalkthe-lowland/
Apart from Lahiri, the other recipients of the 2014 National Humanities Medal are:
- The Clemente Course in the Humanities
- Annie Dillard, author
- Everett L. Fly, architect and preservationist
- Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, philosopher and novelist
- Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, historian
- Fedwa Malti-Douglas, scholar
- Larry McMurtry, novelist
- Vicki Lynn Ruiz, historian
- Alice Waters, author and food activist.