SOCIAL DIVISION AND ALIENATION: A MARXIST ANALYSIS OF JHUMPA LAHIRI’S A REAL DURWAN

Alienation is referred to a person's state of condition where he isolates himself from the people in his surroundings. Sometimes, according to Karl Marx, it leads to the isolation or alienation of an individual from other people. And sometimes it becomes more complex when a person isolates himself from the self and the work he requires to do. Marx identifies these four types of alienation in his book The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. The researcher of this paper intends to find the concept of Alienation in the story “A Real Durwan” by Jhumpa Lahiri, taken from the collection Interpreter of Maladies (199). “A Real Durwan” is a short story about the dislocated old woman of 64 years old who finds herself as a worker in her masters' house. She is supposed to clean the whole house and maintain the security of the whole society. At the end of the story, she loses her previous status of real durwan when they throw her out of society.