The first generation Indian-Americans are caught in the cultural limbo, whereas the next generation Indian-immigrants are the victims of emotional vacuum and hyphenated existence. As a separate racial and cultural identity, they feel a magnetic field of their 'home culture' operative on their minds. Lahiri Projects these Indian-Americans as 'self-chosen exiles' and 'transnational hybrids'.
The stories in the collection deal with the large section of second generation Indian-Americans, their cultural traditions, value system, their feeling for home and of homelessness.
Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth provides the readers with different paradigms of the life of the characters with Indian roots and American life. They help in deciding a separate national identity for the nationals of a country. Race, culture and ethnicity are the very significant identities that distinguish one society from another. Jhumpa Lahiri, a very powerful name in the field of diasporic literature, very skillfully portrays the racial and cultural conflicts in her short story collection Unaccustomed Earth. In the absence of the same, we, even, cannot imagine the harmonious relationships among its various constituents. Racial and cultural harmony is very much essential for peaceful existence of a society or a country. The focus is primarily on three stories: 'Unaccustomed Earth', 'Hell-Heaven' and 'Only Goodness'. This article is an attempt to explore and examine the anxiety of dislocation and the sense of cultural alienation prevailing among the characters mainly through textual analysis. Jhumpa Lahiri's third work Unaccustomed Earth (2008) with its eight stories continues to trail its predecessors, Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake, in portraying the anxieties and plights of the Bengali immigrants caught in the crisis of identity in an alien culture. Their feelings of displacement from their homeland often lead them to an anxious state while they strive to recreate a sense of home in an unfamiliar place. Frequently, Lahiri's characters are haunted by a sense of cultural alienation, the feeling of 'not belonging' or experiencing 'foreignness' and they constantly struggle to construct an identity of their own. It is now almost an acknowledged norm that any discussion on Jhumpa Lahiri's work will begin with a mention on her delineation of the first and second generation immigrant experiences of her characters.
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