How Jhumpa Lahiri redefined identity in a language not her own

Jhumpa Lahiri, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, has turned down an award from the Noguchi Museum in Queens, rejecting their new policy banning political attire for staff—leading to the firing of three employees who wore kaffiyehs in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.

This week, we delve into Lahiri’s evocative memoir, In Other Words.

This striking book is not just about language—it’s about identity, displacement, and the constant search for belonging. In a voice that's both tender and piercing, Lahiri reflects on what it means to live between worlds, in cultures that are not quite hers yet impossible to shake.

The author of Interpreter of Maladies and The Lowland takes a bold step here—exploring not English, but Italian, a language she embraced later in life. It's as if she’s starting from scratch, trying to carve out a new identity through the very words she speaks.

Intimate and deeply moving

Lahiri’s journey into Italian is more than linguistic—it’s existential. Having learned English only when she entered nursery school, she’s always been caught in the web of a “third culture,” not quite at home in the world her parents came from, and not fully belonging to the one she grew up in.

In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri is an intimate and deeply moving reflection on what it means to belong—or not. Lahiri explores the pain and beauty of living between worlds, feeling displaced, and searching for a sense of home.

She writes from that liminal space—where language, not place, has always been her truest connection. Yet, despite her early fiction being steeped in Indian culture, there’s an unshakable sense that it was never quite her own.

As her passion for Italian deepens, she wonders: is she losing her tether to English, her literary lifeline? Or is this pursuit of Italian simply a “pleasant distraction,” as some might suggest?

Through her journey, she touches on the alienation that comes with a 'third culture' identity, and the longing for a connection to a language that feels truly like home.

Lahiri's personal history is threaded with the feeling of being an outsider—seen as ‘foreign’ both in the United States, where she spent most of her life, and in India, the land of her heritage. Too foreign for both.

It was only with In Other Worlds that she stumbled into an Italian world, where she's finally found something that feels like hers, a new home. A home in language.

Ahmad Nazir is a UAE based freelance writer, with a degree in education from the Université de Montpellier in Southern France