Surname 2
people’s stories spurred her curiosity and made her want to write about their experiences in
foreign lands.
The author’s approach to writing was unconventional because she was not concerned with
upholding the typical image of Indians as a group. In that regard, she did not distinguish Indians
from the general population in the way that previous writers did. Before Lahiri, most Indian-
American literature focused on their strong family ties and their love for spicy foods; however,
the writer diverted from this notion and wrote about infidelities in Indian marriages, cultural
displacements among people in the group, and diversities among the Indian subcultures. In the
Interpreter of Maladies, she presented Asians as people with peculiar challenges, which
confronted the common perception of them as a homogenous group. For example, in “When Mr.
Pirzada Came to Dine,” Lahiri highlights how people from the same ethnic group, who speak the
same language and have similar mannerisms, can have challenges that are worlds apart. For her
real perspectives, she became the first person of South Asian origin to win the Pulitzer Prize for
Fiction, awarded in the year 2000.
Winning the Pulitzer Prize changed the author’s life in various ways. Before the
Interpreter of Maladies, Lahiri admitted that publishers frequently rejected her manuscripts. She
shared a small one-bedroom house with her husband, where she often wrote. In a past interview,
the author admitted that writing to her was a “private form of consolation” until the biggest prize
in American literature propelled her to the public limelight (Hadley). Besides, the award was for
her first book; hence, it put pressure on future works as an artist. Accordingly, she became
answerable to a broader host of readers, both in the US and overseas. Most importantly, her
Indian audiences sometimes challenged the truth in her fiction, guided by the conviction that her
stories influenced foreigners’ perspectives of the group. For example, some fans accused her
subsequent novel, The Namesake, of being inaccurate in its depiction of the lives of second-
