The present study attempts to critically scrutinize Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland in terms of postcolonial concepts of cultural identity and mimicry, as well as the relationship between nationality and the narration of the novel. The deep descriptions of the key characters in The Lowland pave the way to observe the link between their nationality and the way the novel is narrated. As Homi Bhabha and the other major postcolonial critics have argued, nation and narration are interwoven in a way that they cannot be separated. Therefore, the link between nation and the narration of the novel will be examined in this novel based on Bhabha’s theoretical standpoint. Cultural identity defines people as one people of a shared nation and represents how they have been a member of that culture. In The Lowland the key characters are Indian and they have some shared cultural identities including touching the feet of the elders as a sign of politeness. This is something that Subhash does when he is leaving India. The other postcolonial concept, mimicry, sheds light on the interaction of the colonized and the colonizer, which according to Bhabha leads to some alteration in both the colonizer and the colonized. Bela, one of the characters of The Lowland, gets some tattoos and this could be considered as mimicry. There are a number of other instances in the novel which could provide the reader with a postcolonial perspective.
