In an interview with The Guardian, Pulitzer prize-winning writer author Jhumpa Lahiri has taken a stance on the obsession to identify oneself with a particular land or language. She finds this trend dangerous and blames the ill-conceived idea of nationalism for this. Jhumpa Lahiri mentions Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to say that she doesn’t believe in his “notion of what India is.”

She has not taken a discordant note though, as some writers would, take, for example, Arundhati Roy. Like her writings, Jhumpa Lahiri says she does it for herself, and not for the audience. This time, too, she seems to have spoken to and for herself and not to the world at large.

She is trying to protest the “increasingly nationalist sentiment” that has grown to a dangerous level across the world.

The interview starts with a question that she faces too often and she must find it both hard and irritating to answer: Where are you really from?

Jhumpa Lahiri born to Indian parents in London who moved to the US when she was 3, now lives in the US and Italy, and writes in English and Italian, thinks she has too many pieces to herself, making it difficult to say which one is she.

“I’ve never had that claim to any place and I think that we should try to think about the fact that we really are all passing through,” she said.

“I understand that we don’t want things to be false, we want things to be true, but then there’s the leap from authenticity to the idea of purity, and therefore, what is not authentic or pure is somehow corrupt, and that’s the danger zone,” she says.

“What does Make America Great Again mean? What is this ‘again’ that we’re talking about? What are we trying to get back to?” she asks, pointing to the Donald Trump phenomenon in the US politics.

An identity rooted in place or language is dangerous, she says, “because identity is not fixed, and rootedness should not be tied to things like language and place”.

In The Guardian report, Jhumpa Lahiri says Narendra Modi’s “notion of what India is” is an example of an “increasingly nationalist sentiment” that comes from “believing that you have, you know, some sort of non-negotiable right to belong to a place… I don’t believe that.”

Jhumpa Lahiri has three master’s degrees including in English literature and creative writing. She has a PhD, too. As eloquent speeches and powerful war pitches are making headlines, it’s worth taking note of what the writers have to say about the situation.

Kaja Kallas has studied law like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, the United States' Joe Biden, Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, France’s Emmanuel Macron and Poland’s Andrzej Duda.

According to him, the full picture is like this: you have a group of law professionals with tanks, missiles, nuclear hardware, and millions of armed soldiers at their disposal. They are trying to solve conflicts between them while the judges have gone on leave.

The Chinese President, Xi Jinping, who has been reportedly planning to invade Taiwan for years but could not find the right time yet, has studied chemical engineering.

Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu has studied architecture. His obsession with demolishing Gaza homes by incessant bombardment appears similar to Osama bin Laden’s grand vision of demolishing the American Twin Towers. Osama Bid Laden, too, studied architecture. Both Netanyahu and Bin Laden deserve PhDs for flattening concrete structures in record time.

Jhumpa Lahiri shot to fame with her story collection, The Interpreter of Maladies. Now that we know most burning problems in the world right now have been caused by lawyers and architects, should not we ban studying these subjects and allow more students to study other subjects? As an interpreter of malady, Jhumpa has once again shown her caliber at this critical juncture in contemporary world. (IPA Service)