Jhumpa is a Bengali pet-name (often distinct from the formal name) meaning "cluster" or "bouquet" — also a colloquial word for the dangling earrings worn at weddings. PEN/Hemingway Award (1999); National Humanities Medal (2014, Obama). Has since moved to Rome and writes in Italian — her In Other Words (2015) and Whereabouts (2018) are originally Italian works she later translated to English herself. Currently a creative-writing professor at Barnard.
Subject of countless American fiction studies.
Jhumpa does not currently appear in the US Social Security Administration's top 1,000 girls' names, so we don't publish a US rank or birth count for it. That says nothing about the name's standing elsewhere in the world — only that it sits outside the ranked US data we rely on.
In Pythagorean numerology the letters of Jhumpa reduce to 6, The Nurturer. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.