“I pretended I didn’t know Bangla”: Jhumpa Lahiri reflects on language and identity

Pulitzer Prize winning author Jhumpa Lahiri returned to a public stage in India after 12 years, speaking in Kolkata about language, migration and the shame that shaped her early life. In conversation with Malavika Banerjee at a city literary festival, Lahiri reflected on growing up between cultures, why she stepped away from English, and how Kolkata remains both central and unresolved in her sense of belonging.

“I was embarrassed to admit I knew Bangla”

Lahiri spoke openly about the discomfort she carried around her first language while growing up in the United States. “With my American friends, I pretended I didn’t really know Bangla,” she said, explaining how language became something to hide rather than inhabit. The embarrassment, she added, was not about Bangla itself but about wanting to belong elsewhere, even as that belonging remained fragile. Over time, she said, that shame revealed itself as a loss, a distancing from something intimate, one she now understands rather than denies.

“Kolkata was both the centre and the glaring absence”

Despite living much of her life abroad, Lahiri said Kolkata has always occupied an unresolved emotional space for her. “Kolkata was the centre of our family life, and yet it was also its absence,” she said, describing how the city shaped her parents’ world even when they lived elsewhere. Visits to Kolkata came with their own rules, including being told not to speak English, reinforcing the feeling of living between identities. Yet the city’s contradictions, multilingualism and cultural density continue to anchor her imagination. “All of India is kind of always in Kolkata anyway,” she said, calling it a place she has never truly left.

“English is the ultimate coloniser”

Explaining her decision to write in Italian, Lahiri framed it as a conscious step away from English, a language she described as carrying historical and colonial weight. “English is the ultimate coloniser,” she said, adding that while governments change, language retains power far longer. Writing in Italian, she explained, freed her from inherited expectations and forced a new discipline, one where every word had to be earned. The shift, she said, was not rejection but recalibration, allowing her to relate to language without hierarchy.

“Everyone is an outsider”

Discussing Roman Stories, her latest book, Lahiri challenged the idea that alienation belongs only to migrants. “People think there are insiders and outsiders. That’s a superficial reading,” she said. “Everyone is an outsider, wherever they are.” Set around a public staircase in Rome, the book uses shared spaces to explore private loneliness, suggesting that displacement is not geographical but existential. Belonging, Lahiri concluded, is no longer something she associates with a single place or language, but with the ongoing act of negotiating the self.

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