Prosthetic Memory and The Fabric of Multicultural Identity in The Works of Salman Rushdie and Jhumpa Lahiri
Dr Neha Anand
Assistant Director-Academics, Teerthanker Mahaveer University, Moradabad-244001, India.
10.46679/9789349926639ch16
This chapter is a part of: Cultural Memory in Translation: Revisiting Cultural Memory Through Interpretative Lens from India
ISBN (Ebook):978-93-49926-63-9
ISBN (Hardcover Print):978-93-49926-41-7
ISBN (Softcover Print):978-93-49926-75-2
© CSMFL Publications & its authors.
Published: November 10, 2025
Abstract
In the era of unmatched global migration and cultural blending, the way people as well as groups reminiscent and narrate their histories has become fundamental to identity formation. It has been, over the period of time, becoming more widely recognised that memory, which has archaeologically been observed as an individual and experiential marvel, can be passed down, arbitrated, and even shaped through a wide array of cultural relics and chronicles. In a multicultural society, this above-mentioned phenomenon—known as prosthetic memory—empowers the people to adopt and ardently attach with histories and experiences they have not personally witnessed, persuading how they observe not only themselves but other people also. The present paper is an attempt to investigate the vital role played by prosthetic memory in Indo-Anglian literature, wherein the authors deal with the remnants of colonialism, migration, along with cultural hybridity. Through a close exploration of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, it delineates clearly the way the duo puts in use prosthetic memory to direct and articulate complex postcolonial and diasporic subjectivities. On one hand where Lahiri’s personal, nuanced storytelling inspects the subtle transmission of familial and cultural memory transversely generations, on the other hand, Rushdie’s magical pragmatist narrative reminds the collective trauma and fractured identity of a recently independent nation. The paper determines the fact that prosthetic memory facilitates as both an ethical practice that advances compassionate engagement and a multi-ethnic vision of multiculturalism in the present global context, in conjunction to being a potent literary device.
Keywords: Prosthetic Memory, Indo-Anglian Literature, Multiculturalism, Postcolonialism, Diaspora, Identity.
References
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- Rushdie, S. (1981). Midnight’s children. Jonathan Cape.
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