Healing Attachments in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland and Anuradha Roy’s <i>All The Lives We Never Lived</i>

The paper provides a comparative analysis of imaginative literature by Jhumpa Lahiri and Anuradha Roy, contemporary authors connected to Bengal, India, by virtue of cultural inheritance (Lahiri) and birth (Roy). Born in the same year, Lahiri and Roy enjoy global recognition, and the novels selected for analysis, The Lowland (2013) and All the Lives We Never Lived (2018), display thematic commonalities that support a comparative discussion. More specifically, both novels tackle the issue of children’s abandonment and their manners of coping with trauma by developing special connections to nature. Therefore, the analysis starts from the novels’ environmental focus, which seems to correlate the characters’ interest in their physical worlds with possibilities of healing. By discussing the contexts of their traumas and the subsequent bonds they establish with nature, the article examines the type of message constructed by Lahiri and Roy regarding a possible dissolution of the boundaries that configure the relation between humans and their environment. The analysis relies on a close reading of the texts that blends cultural studies, trauma theories, and environmental criticism, establishing whether the relation between the human and the non-human transcends a dual configuration, thus hinting at possibilities of planetary thinking and transcultural ecopoetics.