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Unit 24: Jhumpa Lahiri’s “This Blessed House”: Discussion on All Important Questions

pique readers’ interest. Lahiri often uses her characters’ material culture as emblems of the tensions Notes
and contradictions in their lives. Her short story “This Blessed House” is no exception. Through her
use of material culture in this story, Lahiri explores and critiques the possibility of camp—a style that
ironically exhibits poor taste—as a way to relieve some of those tensions created by divergent and
incoherent experiences of the material objects that surround us.
In the story, a young Indian couple, Sanjeev and Twinkle, have just married and have begun to settle
into their newly purchased Connecticut home. As they clean and unpack, they begin to find devotional
trinkets left by the Christians who sold the house. Little porcelain effigies, gospelthemed snow globes,
and posters and postcards of saints litter the house.
Twinkle decides to display the kitschy knickknacks around their home; Sanjeev, more traditional
and socially self-conscious about his Indian roots, protests. Gradually the story reveals that Twinkle
and Sanjeev’s differences run deeper than their preferences about what sits on the mantel.
Sanjeev grew up in India, attended MIT, and approaches his work with a seriousness that manifests an
anxiety for his peers’ opinions of him. Twinkle was raised in California and approaches life with an
uncalculated levity that makes her fun but also shallow, spontaneous, and insincere. They quarrel as
Twinkle’s boredom with her new life provokes Sanjeev to frustration. In the story’s final scene, Twinkle
gushes about her kitsch discoveries to some dinner guests. To Sanjeev’s discomfort, the story incites a
group treasure hunt around the house to look for more of the kitsch. As a dinner guest emerges from
the attic with a large silver bust of Jesus, Sanjeev’s discomfort dissolves into bland resignation.

24.2 Ideologies of Consumption

Lahiri’s story hinges on the question of what these material objects signify to her characters. More
than just catalyzing the narrative action of the story, material objects in “This Blessed House” reify a
host of attitudes and values that deeply divide the newlyweds. If Sanjeev’s and Twinkle’s experience
of these objects holds so much significance for them, it is important to ask how the couple came to
embed such meanings in physical objects.
After all, the material objects in the story are commodities—products of economic systems that are
subject to numerous social and economic factors. These objects also affect the ideologies by which
people make sense of the world; surely those social and economic factors play a role in the characters’
identities as well as the commodities’ production. Because of the centrality of material culture and
commodities to the story, the divide between Sanjeev and Twinkle may be interpreted in part as a
function of their differing ideologies of consumption. Doing so reveals how both modern and
postmodern economies constrain individuals’ search for happiness and meaning.
This story, like much of Lahiri’s work, lends itself to such a socioeconomic reading because of the
gulf Lahiri’s characters inhabit between two world economies. India is a nation in transition; half of
its people work in agriculture, yet most of its gross domestic product (GDP) comes from information
services and industry. Poverty remains high and most of the goods and services produced domestically
are consumed abroad.
In Consuming Life, he focuses on how consumption’s social meanings differ between modern and
postmodern economies. To be sure, human life has always required some consumption as each
person needs food, shelter, and other goods, but Bauman finds that consumption’s socially symbolic
function has emerged more recently.
The producer society needed to hypermobilize human labor. Convincing laborers to dramatically
increase their productive efforts required that society construct a social-material discourse that
assuaged doubts and reassured individuals of the meaning and worth of their unnaturally strenuous
workload. Such reassurances came in the form of apparent security, permanence, and reward. As the
producer society progressed during early modernity, consumption came to offer those reassurances
as it took on the new role of stating the durability of the entire social system, as well as one’s place
within that system. These are the types of “conspicuous consumers” that sociologist Thorsten Veblen
described at the turn of thetwentieth century. Bauman characterizes Veblen’s observations in this
way: “[It was] the public display of wealth with an emphasis on its solidity and durability” rather

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