Marking men, affect and care work: a study of middle-class Bengali masculinity in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines Pulitizer prize-winning Indian American writer Jhumpa Lahiri's engagement with masculinity and care-work in The Lowland (2013). Situated in a middle-class Bengali family, the novel revolves around the individualistic aspirations and intellectual motivations of the three main characters – the two brothers Subhash, Udayan and the woman they eventually marry, Gauri. This article first draws attention to the cultural archive of middle-class intellectual Bengali masculinity and then proceeds to delineate Lahiri's inscription of Bengali middle-class masculinity through her specific focus on Subhash's feeling masculinity. Affect theory is considered a necessary heuristic to situate this theoretical examination and further unpack Subhash's complication of reproductive heteronormativity. In doing so, this article also considers the gendered nature of care-work within the Bengali heteronormative family while at the same time positing Subhash's masculinity as a case in point, where naturalised gendered ideas are successfully blurred. By no means representative of all kinds of middle-class Bengali masculinities, this article's focus on Subhash's masculinity mainly situates a road map to theoretically mark heteronormative middle-class masculinity through the lens of affect theory.