The Namesake

·    Author’s Study

·      Jhumpa Lahiri

Born	Nilanjana Sudeshna Lahiri 11 July 1967 (age 51) London, England, UK
Occupation	Author
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Barnard College Boston University
Genre	Novel, short story, postcolonial
Notable works	Interpreter of Maladies(1999) The Namesake (2003) Unaccustomed Earth (2008) The Lowland (2013)
Notable awards	1999 O. Henry Award 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

Nilanjana Sudeshna "Jhumpa" Lahiri (born July 11, 1967) is an American author of Indian origin, known for her short-stories, novels and essays in English, and more recently, in Italian.

In her body of works, Lahiri explores the Indian-immigrant experience in America. A clash of two cultures that defined who she was and in many ways still is. Her debut collection of short-stories Interpreter of Maladies (1999) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award, and her first novel, The Namesake (2003), was adapted into the popular film of the same name. Her second story collection Unaccustomed Earth (2008) won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. In 2011, Lahiri moved to Rome, Italy and has since then published two books of essays, and has a forthcoming novel written in Italian. She has also translated some of her own writings and those of other authors from Italian into English.

In 2014, Lahiri was awarded the National Humanities Medal. She is currently a professor of creative writing at Princeton University.

·      Biography

Lahiri was born in London, the daughter of Bengali Indian emigrants from the state of West Bengal. Her family moved to the United States when she was two; Lahiri considers herself an American, stating, "I wasn't born here, but I might as well have been." Lahiri grew up in Kingston, Rhode Island, where her father Amar Lahiri works as a librarian at the University of Rhode Island;^[1] he is the basis for the protagonist in "The Third and Final Continent," the closing story from Interpreter of Maladies. Lahiri's mother wanted her children to grow up knowing their Bengali heritage, and her family often visited relatives in Calcutta (now Kolkata).

When she began kindergarten in Kingston, Rhode Island, Lahiri's teacher decided to call her by her pet name, Jhumpa, because it was easier to pronounce than her "proper name". Lahiri recalled, "I always felt so embarrassed by my name.... You feel like you're causing someone pain just by being who you are." Lahiri's ambivalence over her identity was the inspiration for the ambivalence of Gogol, the protagonist of her novel The Namesake, over his unusual name. In an editorial in Newsweek, Lahiri claims that she has "felt intense pressure to be two things, loyal to the old world and fluent in the new." Much of her experiences growing up as a child were marked by these two sides tugging away at one other. When she became an adult, she found that she was was able to be part of these two dimensions without the embarrassment and struggle that she had when she was a child. Lahiri graduated from South Kingstown High School and received her B.A. in English literature from Barnard College of Columbia University in 1989.

Lahiri then received multiple degrees from Boston University: an M.A. in English, an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, an M.A. in Comparative Literature, and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies. Her dissertation, completed in 1997, was entitled Accursed Palace: The Italian palazzo on the Jacobean stage (1603–1625). Her principal advisers were William Carroll (English) and Hellmut Wohl (Art History). She took a fellowship at Provincetown's Fine Arts Work Center, which lasted for the next two years (1997–1998). Lahiri has taught creative writing at Boston University and the Rhode Island School of Design.

In 2001, Lahiri married Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, a journalist who was then deputy editor of TIME Latin America, and who is now senior editor of TIME Latin America. Lahiri lives in Rome with her husband and their two children, Octavio (b. 2002) and Noor (b. 2005). Lahiri joined the Princeton University faculty on July 1, 2015 as a professor of creative writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts.^[

·      Literary career

·         Lahiri's early short stories faced rejection from publishers "for years". Her debut short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, was finally released in 1999. The stories address sensitive dilemmas in the lives of Indians or Indian immigrants, with themes such as marital difficulties, the bereavement over a stillborn child, and the disconnection between first and second generation United States immigrants. Lahiri later wrote, "When I first started writing I was not conscious that my subject was the Indian-American experience. What drew me to my craft was the desire to force the two worlds I occupied to mingle on the page as I was not brave enough, or mature enough, to allow in life."^[13] The collection was praised by American critics, but received mixed reviews in India, where reviewers were alternately enthusiastic and upset Lahiri had "not paint[ed] Indians in a more positive light."^[14] Interpreter of Maladies sold 600,000 copies and received the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (only the seventh time a story collection had won the award).

·         In 2003, Lahiri published her first novel, The Namesake. The theme and plot of this story was influenced in part by a family story she heard growing up. Her father's cousin was involved in a train wreck and was only saved when the workers saw a beam of light reflected off of a watch he was wearing. Similarly, the protagonist's father in The Namesake was rescued due to his peers recognizing the books that he read by Russian author Nikolai Gogol. The father and his wife immigrated to the United States as young adults. After this life-changing experience, he named his son Gogol and his daughter Sonia. Together the two children grow up in a culture with different mannerisms and customs that clash with what their parents have taught them. A film adaptation of The Namesake was released in March 2007, directed by Mira Nair and starring Kal Penn as Gogol and Bollywood stars Tabu and Irrfan Khan as his parents. Lahiri herself made a cameo as "Aunt Jhumpa."

·         Lahiri's second collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, was released on April 1, 2008. Upon its publication, Unaccustomed Earth achieved the rare distinction of debuting at number 1 on The New York Times best seller list.^[17] New York Times Book Review editor, Dwight Garner, stated, "It's hard to remember the last genuinely serious, well-written work of fiction—particularly a book of stories—that leapt straight to No. 1; it's a powerful demonstration of Lahiri's newfound commercial clout."^[17]

·         Lahiri has also had a distinguished relationship with The New Yorker magazine in which she has published a number of her short stories, mostly fiction, and a few non-fiction including The Long Way Home; Cooking Lessons, a story about the importance of food in Lahiri's relationship with her mother.

·         Since 2005, Lahiri has been a vice president of the PEN American Center, an organization designed to promote friendship and intellectual cooperation among writers.

·         In February 2010, she was appointed a member of the Committee on the Arts and Humanities, along with five others.

·         In September 2013, her novel The Lowland was placed on the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize, which ultimately went to The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton. The following month it was also long-listed for the National Book Award for Fiction, and revealed to be a finalist on October 16, 2013. However, on November 20, 2013, it lost out for that award to James McBride and his novel The Good Lord Bird.

·         In December 2015, Lahiri published a non-fiction essay called "Teach Yourself Italian" in The New Yorker about her experience learning Italian. In the essay she declared that she is now only writing in Italian, and the essay itself was translated from Italian to English.

·         Jhumpa Lahiri was judged as the winner of the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2015 for her book The Lowland (Vintage Books/ Random House, India) at the Zee Jaipur Literature Festival for which she entered Limca Book of Records.

·         In 2017, Lahiri receives the Pen/Malamad award for excellence in the short story. The award was established by the family of Pulitzer Prize winning writer Bernard Malamud to honor excellence in the art of short fiction.

·         In 2018, Lahiri published a short story "The Boundary" in The New Yorker. The story explores the life of two families and the contrasting features between them. (Wikipedia )

·      What is Diaspora?

• 1. Diaspora Presentation By Ali Rahmat

• 2. Overview of the Presentation 1) Diaspora? 2) Diasporic Writing? 3) What is Temporal and Spatial Move in diasporic literature? 4) Diasporic authors and their books. 5) Features and themes of Diasporic Culture/Literature . 6) Them of Nostalgia, memory, Imaginary homelands with example, lost home has two main forms in diasporic literature. (i) ‘Home’ and the poetics of ‘return’ (ii) Dislocation, relocation, memo- realization

• 3. The word Diaspora derives from the Greek word meaning “to disperse”. Diaspora is simply the displacement of a community/culture into another geographical and cultural region. Robin Cohen defines: Diaspora as “communities living together in one country who acknowledge that the old country – a nation often buried deep in language, religion custom or folklore- always has some claim on their loyalty and emotion … a member’s adherence to a diasporic community is demonstrated by an acceptance of an inescapable link with their pass migration history and a sense of co-ethnicity with others of similar background” Diaspora?

• 4.  Two main moves in diasporic writing;Ø2. Spatial Move? The spatial move involves two things: de-territorialization (the loss of territory. It is both geographical and cultural) and a re-teritorialization (restructuring of a place or territory that has experienced de-territorialization 1. Temporal Move? The temporal move is looking back at the past (analepsis) and looking forward at the future (prolepsis). Meena Alexander defines as; “writing in search of a homeland” Diasporic writing

• 5.  The Calcutta Chromosome (Ghosh).Ø The House of a Thousand Doors (Alexander) Ø Brick Lane (Monica Ali) ØThe Nowhere Man (Markandaya) ØThe Famished Road (Ben Okri), Ø The Rainbow (Hanif Kurishi) ØAn Area of Darkness (Naipaul) ØDiasporic authors and their books

• 6. Ambivalence between seeking acceptance/assimilation in the new culturesØReclamation of history of the homeland and childhood spaces ØFeatures of homeland- language /rituals, forms of behavior ØThe sense of alienation in new society/culture/land ØThe memory - details of childhood landscapes, historical events, people ØThe shift, Contrast, and relation between centre and periphery ØFeatures of Diasporic Culture/Literature would Include:

• 7. The previous features and themes can be reorganized following three themes: 1) Nostalgia, memory, Imaginary homelands 2) Hybridities and new identities 3) Globalization and cosmopolitanism

• 8.  Exile and displacement narratives frequently combine a sense of disquiet with their nostalgia and longing. For example: Margaret Atwood writes. “Ii is my clothes, my way of walking, The things I carry in my hand ……………………………….. This space cannot hear”üNostalgia, memory, Imaginary homelands

• 9. (i)‘Home’ and the poetics of ‘return’ Meena Alexander writes in Manhattan Music (1997) ‘She [Sandhya] kept returning to her childhood home, a house with a red-tiled roof and a sandy courtyard where the mulberry bloomed’ “Did my uncles ride on camels?.. Did my cousins, so like me in other ways, squat down in the sand like little Mowglis, half-naked and eating with their fingers? .... Sories to help me see my place in world and give me a sense the past which could go into making a life in the present and the future. Hanif Kurishi mentions in his essay ‘The Ranbow’ as; Hanif KurishiMeena Alexander (Slideshare.in )

·      Key Facts

Full Title · The Namesake

Author ·  Jhumpa Lahiri

Type Of Work ·  Novel

Genre ·  Realism

Language ·  English

Time And Place Written ·  Rome, early 2000s

Date Of First Publication ·  2003

Publisher ·  Houghton Mifflin

Narrator ·  Unnamed

Point Of View ·  Third-person, subjective

Tone ·  Dispassionate (straightforward reporting of emotions and actions)

Setting (Time) ·  1968-2000

Setting (Place) ·  In and around New England and the Northeast: notably the Boston area, New Haven, and New York City

Protagonist ·  Gogol, with Ashima and Ashoke as secondary protagonists

Major Conflict ·  Gogol’smarriage to Moushumi begins to flounder

Rising Action ·  Moushumi begins an affair with Dimitri, her old friend

Climax ·  Moushumi reveals to Gogol, on the train, that she is having an affair

Falling Action ·  Gogol attends a final Christmas party at Pemberton Road

Themes ·  Change, and its Dependence on Stability; The Universality of “Foreignness”; the Formation of Identity

Motifs ·  Naming, Riding the Train, Reading

Symbols · The Stories of Nikolai Gogol, the house on Pemberton Road, the spit of land on Cape Cod

Foreshadowing ·  Moushumi encounters Dimitri’s name among a stack of letters at NYU; Gogol realizes that, on her trip to Palm Beach, Moushumi has not taken her bathing suit

·      Characters

Ashoke Ganguli

The reader learns less about Ashoke’s interior life than she does about Ashima’s and Gogol’s. But this does not mean that Ashoke is a “flat” or unrealistic character. Indeed, he is a quiet, sensitive, loving man, devoted to his wife and two children. He is a man of duty, understanding that he must work to support those he loves. But he is also a man willing to challenge the assumptions of what is “normal.” For, after all, Ashoke chose to study for his PhD in America, far from his family, even after they urged him to stay in India.

Ashoke’s life turns on the train accident that nearly kills him. After the accident, he resolves to travel, to see the world as Ghosh has urged him to do. The Gogol he is reading in the train leads to his son’s pet name. And the works of the Russians give to Ashoke a sense of the broadness, the complexity of the world—of life beyond the confines of Calcutta, or Massachusetts, or Ohio. Although Ashoke is a man of few words, he is a dreamer, a romantic. Ashima seems always to understand this about her husband, but Gogol learns it in earnest after his father’s death.

·      Ashima Ganguli

The novel begins from Ashima’s perspective, and it ends with hers, too. In between, thirty-two years elapse, during which time Ashima grows from a young, diffident mother to the grand dame of a large family and network of Bengali-American friends. Ashima feels, at first, that she has separated herself completely from her family in Calcutta. Her father’s death, early in her marriage to Ashoke, devastates her. There are times when she feels she cannot raise Gogol and Sonia with Ashoke away at work. Even the transition from Cambridge to the suburbs is a difficult one, as Ashima misses being able to walk everywhere with her son, and she does not know, for years, how to drive.

But Ashima’s story is one of increasing independence. This begins in earnest after Ashoke takes the visiting professorship in Ohio, which leaves the family spread over four states for the first time: Sonia in California, Gogol in New York, Ashoke in the Midwest, and Ashima in the house at Pemberton Road. Ashoke’s death is, of course, a shock, and Ashima mourns his loss deeply for the rest of his life. But as she acknowledges, to herself and others, Ashoke was also teaching her, however unintentionally, how to live alone, by going to Cleveland for those several months before his heart attack.

Ashima thus demonstrates, by the end of the novel, the cycles of change and return that characterize all human life. By Chapter 12, she is making food as she has been throughout the novel, as she was in Chapter 1, waiting for Gogol to be born. But now she is a resident both of the US, which she considers home, and of Calcutta, where she will be spending six months a year. Ashima realizes just how familiar, how important to her, her life in America has become.

·      Gogol (Nikhil) Ganguli

Gogol is the center of the novel, and it is his journey from childhood into young adulthood that the narrator tracks most closely. Gogol’s transformation is marked in at least three ways. First, his name. Gogol is Gogol, of course, because his father and mother needed a name for him before leaving the hospital. The name “Gogol” was an important one to Ashoke, who adored Nikolai Gogol’s work. Ashoke also has traumatic connection to the train-wreck during which he was reading Gogol. When Gogol asks his father, when he is college, whether the name Gogol reminds Ashoke of nearly dying, Ashoke counters that “Gogol” is for him a name of hope, of joy—of life. Gogol the child is the happy outcome of a terrible event in Ashoke’s younger days.

Gogol’s decision to become Nikhil occurs before he knows his father’s story in detail. But the change to Nikhil also represents a maturation, an attempt to find a new self in college. This leads to the second of Gogol’s transformations: into a student of architecture. Ashima’s father was a painter, and so visual art runs in the family. Gogol is also inspired by the design of the Taj Mahal when the family visits India together, when he is in high school. At Yale, Nikhil is able to pursue his love of architecture most directly, and this leads him to graduate study in New York, and a job at a firm there.

Gogol’slife in New York, in turn, leads to his third set of transformations—within romantic relationships. The novel spends relatively little time discussing Gogol’s friendships, although he is presumed to have some friends. Instead, Lahiri’s narrator focuses on Gogol’s life with three women: Ruth in college, Maxine in New York, and, finally, Moushumi, his wife. Each woman, in turn, marks a stage in Gogol’s development. And Lahiri is careful, too, to give these female characters emotional three-dimensionality of their own. In particular, Gogol seems not to recognize that Maxine truly loves him, and wishes to know his family’s practices in detail. By contrast, Moushumi, who is of Gogol’s world, wants constantly to leave that world, to make a new, more intellectually “rich” life for herself among her cosmopolitan New York friends. Through these romantic relationships, then, Gogol tests out different identities, different ways of relating to himself and his family, over time.

·      Sonia Ganguli

The fourth member of the Ganguli family in Boston. Although the reader very rarely has access to Sonia’s thoughts, she is a constant, calming presence for the family. She goes to school and lives for a time in California, but after Ashoke’s death, Sonia returns to the Boston area, where she practices law and becomes engaged to a man named Ben. Sonia is a steadying presence for Ashima after Ashoke’s passing.

·      Moushumi 

Gogol’s wife. Moushumi knew Gogol when he was a young boy, and the two are set up on a blind date, in New York, by their parents. Moushumi is a graduate student in French literature and adores Paris. She also adores, in part, the cosmopolitan life she lived there, with a banker named Graham, who left her and broke her heart. Moushumi marries Gogol but, after a time, becomes restless in the marriage, and enjoys more and more the company of her intellectual friends. Moushumi begins an affair with Dimitri, an old acquaintance, and later she and Gogol divorce. Moushumi’s point of view is included, though not frequently, in the novel. We learn, for example, of the dissolution of Moushumi’s first engagement, to the American banker, via access to her own thoughts, although the narrator retains the third person in these sections.

·      Maxine Ratliff - 

Gogol’s second serious girlfriend. Maxine and Gogol meet in New York, at a party. Maxine represents, for Gogol, a life very different from his own. She lives with her parents downtown, in a beautiful townhouse, and shares their intellectual, cosmopolitan life. Maxine does not always understand Gogol’s family’s traditions, but she tries to, and seems to care genuinely for him. After Ashoke’s death, Gogol pulls away from Maxine, leaving her out of the mourning ceremonies. They soon separate.

·      Ruth 

 Nikhil’s first serious girlfriend. Gogol and Ruth meet on the train, from New Haven to Boston, heading back to their respective homes for a Thanksgiving break in college. They both attend Yale. They fall in love and spend about a year together, but Ruth then goes away to Oxford to study for a semester. After this, their relationship becomes strained, and they part.

·      The Namesake Summary

The year is 1968, and Ashima Ganguli, a Bengali woman who has recently moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts with her new husband, is about to give birth. Her husband, Ashoke, accompanies her to the hospital in a taxi. In the waiting room of the hospital, Ashoke remembers how in 1961, as he was taking the train from Calcutta to Jamshedpur to visit his grandfather and collect the books he was to inherit from him, there was an accident and he had nearly died. On the train, he had been reading a collection of short stories by Nikolai Gogol, a Russian author, when the locomotive engine and seven bogies derailed, causing Ashoke's car to be flung into a nearby field. Rescue workers found Ashoke because of the book page he clutched in his hand.

Their baby boy is born in the morning. Ashima and Ashoke want to wait to name him until a letter arrives from Ashima's grandmother with two name options: one for a boy and one for a girl. It is the Bengali tradition to have a respected elder choose the name of a child. However, it is time to leave the hospital and the letter has not arrived, so they decide to make up a pet name that will be used until they can officially name their baby based on his grandmother's wishes. Ashoke chooses Gogol, the name of the author whose stories he was reading when the train crashed years before. Ashima and Ashoke hold a rice ceremony for Gogol when he is six months old. Six months later, the Gangulis are planning a visit to India. Ashima's brother Rana calls with the bad news that her father has suffered a heart attack and died. Ashima is extremely upset and they decide to go to Calcutta six weeks earlier than they had planned for the funeral.

By 1971, the Gangulis have moved from Harvard Square to a university town outside Boston. After two years in university-subsidized housing, Ashima and Ashoke decide to buy a home. The new house is on Pemberton Road, and there are no Bengali neighbors. On the first day of Gogol's kindergarten, his parents tell the principal, Mrs. Lapidus, that she should call Gogol by his formal name, "Nikhil." But she overhears them referring to him as "Gogol" and asks him what he would like to be called. When he answers "Gogol," it sticks. Ashima gives birth to Gogol's little sister, Sonia, in May. In the next years, Ashoke finds out about the deaths of both his parents and Ashima finds out about the death of her mother. They learn about these deaths by phone call.

On Gogol's fourteenth birthday, his father comes into his room and gives him his birthday present: The Short Stories of Nikolai Gogol. Gogol is more interested in listening to the Beatles than looking at the book, and he is unable to appreciate it. Ashoke begins to tell Gogol about the train accident that made him appreciate the author Gogol so much, but stops because he realizes Gogol cannot yet understand. Gogol stashes the book away when his father leaves. The next year, the Gangulis decide to go to Calcutta for eight months while Ashoke is up for sabbatical at the university. Gogol begins his junior year of high school in the fall, taking English with Mr. Lawson. Mr. Lawson knows about the Russian author Gogol and assigns the class to read one of his short stories, "The Overcoat."

The summer before he leaves for college at Yale, Gogol goes to probate court and legally changes his name to Nikhil. Gogol goes to Yale and introduces himself as Nikhil; however, it takes a while before he really feels like Nikhil. He begins to date a girl named Ruth, but they grow apart while she is studying abroad at Oxford. The next Thanksgiving, Ashoke tells Gogol about the origin of his name; about the train accident in which he was almost killed. Gogol asks him if he reminds him of that night that he almost died, and his father says no; he reminds him of "everything that followed."

By 1994, Gogol is living in a tiny apartment in New York working as an architect. He begins to date a woman named Maxine Ratliff. Her parents, Lydia and Gerald, are incredibly wealthy, and they interact in a casual but intelligent way that is totally opposite the behavior of Gogol's own parents. He begins spending most of his time at their home rather than at his own apartment, and he feels effortlessly incorporated into their lives. Eventually, he basically moves into their home with them. Ashima calls to ask him to visit them to see his father off before he leaves to spend nine months at a university outside Cleveland, but the most Gogol will do is stop in for lunch with Maxine on their way to her parents' lake house in New Hampshire.

While Ashima is addressing Christmas cards one quiet day, Ashoke calls at 3 pm and tells her he is at the hospital. His stomach has been bothering him all day, so he has driven himself to the hospital to get it checked out. After two hours, she has not heard from Ashoke and so she calls the hospital. An intern tells her that Ashoke has "expired." He has died from a massive heart attack. Gogol flies to Ohio to identify his father's body and clean out his apartment. The next morning, he flies home to Boston to be with his mother and Sonia. At the house on Pemberton Road, many people come by to sit with them in mourning. Sonia decides to live there with her mother for a while.

A year after Ashoke's death, Gogol has broken up with Maxine. Ashima encourages him to call Moushumi Mazoomdar, the daughter of family friends whom Gogol has grown up around at family parties. She tells him that she moved to Paris to study French literature, and then moved to New York to follow her ex-fiancé, an American named Graham. After the fight that ended their engagement, Moushumi had taken the rest of the semester off from NYU and mourned, finally returning to school in the fall. It was then that she had met Gogol. Gogol and she begin to date seriously.

Within a year of dating, Gogol and Moushumi get married in New Jersey in a ceremony that is almost entirely planned and managed by their parents. They move into an apartment together and get used to married life. They go to Paris in March together; Moushumi is presenting a paper at a conference, so Gogol accompanies her as a vacation. While there, he feels lonely because Moushumi is so obviously at home in the city. Two days after their first wedding anniversary, Moushumi comes across a resume at the university from a man named Dimitri Desjardins whom she knows from her teenage and college years. Moushumi begins having an affair with Dimitri on Mondays and Wednesdays, after she teaches her class. Gogol knows nothing of his wife's affair with Dimitri. He has the vague feeling that something is not right in his marriage with Moushumi, but he can't put his finger on what.

A year later, before Christmas of the year 2000, Ashima is preparing food for the party she will throw that evening. She has decided to move out of the house on Pemberton Road to spend six months at a time in Calcutta with her family and six months in the United States with her children and friends. The reader learns from Ashima's point of view that Sonia and Ben are going to be married in Calcutta in a little over a year, and that Gogol and Moushumi decided to get a divorce. Gogol arrives at the train station before Sonia and Ben are there to meet him. He remembers the year before, how on the train ride from New York to the house at Pemberton Road he had discovered Moushumi's affair with Dimitri. They had spent the holiday at the house on Pemberton Road as planned, but she had left the day after Christmas to go back to New York, and when Gogol returned to the apartment days later, she had packed up and left for good. Now, arriving at the train station a year later, he sees Sonia and Ben pulling up in his mother's car to take him to the house one last time.

Party guests arrive and Gogol goes back to his old bedroom and discovers the book his father had given him so many years ago on his birthday: the collection of short stories by Nikolai Gogol. At the time, he had had no appreciation for it and hadn't even read a single story. Now, he sees the inscription his father has written inside: "The man who gave you his name, from the man who gave you your name." He takes his time, not going downstairs with the camera just yet; he sits down and begins to read “The Overcoat.” (The Namesake)

·      The Namesake Themes

Relationships between Parents and Children

 

The theme of the relationship between parents and children becomes prominent, as Gogol grows old enough to interact with his parents as a child. While Ashima is pregnant with Sonia, Gogol and Ashoke eat dinner alone together and Ashoke scolds Gogol for playing with his food. He says, "At your age I ate tin," to draw attention to how grateful Gogol should be for having the food to eat. The relationship between Ashima and Ashoke and their own parents is also mentioned when they find out that their parents have died; Ashoke's parents both die of cancer, and Ashima's mother dies of kidney disease. They learn about these deaths by phone calls.

As Ashima addresses Christmas cards in Chapter 7, she is wistful that Sonia and Gogol did not come home to celebrate Thanksgiving with her. Their need for independence is contrary to the need she felt at their age to be near her family. Gogol begins to feel tender toward his father after his death, when his attitude toward him while he was alive was generally impatient. As Gogol drives Ashoke's rental car to the rental office of his apartment building, he wonders if a man outside the building mistakes him for his father. The thought is comforting to him. He now understands the guilt and uselessness his parents had felt when their own parents had passed away across the world, in Calcutta.

The relationships between parents and children are introduced in Chapter 8 with regard to 6Moushumi and her parents, who are Bengali like the Gangulis. Because she is a woman, they had been presenting her with Bengali suitors throughout her teenage years, none of whom she was interested in. This experience alienated her from her parents, since she did not want to take their advice about whom she should marry, and since she resented them for trying to control her destiny in that way.

The relationship between parents and children is prominent as a theme in Chapter 12. Gogol considers what it took for his parents to live in the United States, so far from their own parents, and how he has always remained close to home; they bore it "with a stamina he fears he does not possess himself." He does not think he can bear being so far away from his mother for so long.

Name and Identity

 

The important theme of name and identity is introduced at the very beginning of Chapter 1, when Ashima calls out for her husband from the bathroom. She doesn't use his name when she calls for him, since "it's not the type of thing Bengali wives do." Their husbands' names are considered too intimate to be used. In Chapter 2, the Bengali tradition of pet names, or daknam and "good" names, or bhalonam, is explained. Only close family uses the pet name in the privacy of the home, while the "good" name is used in formal situations like work. Ashima and Ashoke have to give their son a pet name as they wait for the "good" name suggestions to arrive from Ashima's grandmother, but the letter from Calcutta never comes.

The theme of name and identity is important in Chapter 3, when Gogol starts kindergarten. His parents intend for him to go by "Nikhil" at school and "Gogol" at home, but Gogol is confused and doesn't want a new name: "He is afraid to be Nikhil, someone he doesn't know. Who doesn't know him." As a child, he associates a new name with a new identity. Gogol is not bothered by the unusual nature of his name until he is eleven and realizes, on a class trip to a cemetery, that his name is unique. He makes rubbings of the other gravestones with names he has never heard before because he relates to them. By his fourteenth birthday, Gogol has come to hate his name and resents being asked about it. There are many different names for Gogol and Sonia to remember for their relatives in Calcutta, "to signify whether they are related on their mother's or their father's side, by marriage or by blood." At the college party, Gogol is reluctant to introduce himself to Kim as "Gogol," so he says his name is Nikhil. It gives him the confidence to kiss her: "It hadn't been Gogol who had kissed Kim... Gogol had nothing to do with it."

Ashima has never uttered Ashoke's name in his presence; the reader is reminded of this fact as she signs his name to their Christmas cards. It creates a rift between Ashoke's name and his identity, at least his identity to his wife. Even after Ashoke dies, as Ashima explains to their friends what happened to him, she refuses, "even in death, to utter her husband's name." She does not understand his identity as linked to his name.

Moushumi knows Gogol as "Gogol," and is surprised when he introduces himself as Nikhil at the bar. It is "the first time he's been out with a woman who'd once known him by that other name." He comes to like the sense of familiarity it creates between them. She still calls him Nikhil like everyone else in his life, but she knows the first name he ever had, and that seems like a secret bond between them.

Moushumi and Gogol bond over their Bengali identities and how they are a source of confusion for Americans. "They talk about how they are both routinely assumed to be Greek, Egyptian, Mexican - even in this misrendering they are joined." Neither of them thought they would date another Bengali seriously, since it was something both their parents wanted for them so badly. They know that their relationship will appeal to their Bengali parents, and they find this both comforting and surprising; they never thought they would please their parents in that way.

The theme of name and identity emerges in Chapter 9 while Astrid, Donald, and the guests at the dinner party discuss what to name Astrid's baby. Moushumi reveals to the guests nonchalantly that Nikhil was not always named Nikhil. This offends him because it feels like a betrayal of an intimate detail only she knew to people he doesn't like.

Language Barrier

 

The language barrier that is to be the source of much struggle for Ashima and Ashoke is evident when they arrive at the hospital for Gogol's birth. After she has been given a bed, Ashima looks for her husband, but he has stepped behind the curtain around her bed. He says, "I'll be back," in Bengali, a language neither the nurses nor the doctor speaks. The curtain is a physical barrier, but it represents the symbolic barrier created by speaking Bengali in the United States.

The words the American husbands at the hospital speak to their wives demonstrate the culture barrier between India and the United States. They say that they love their wives and comfort them with intimate words, while Ashima knows that she and Ashoke will not exchange those types of words since "this is not how they are."

The language barrier arises as an issue as Gogol and Sonia grow older. Ashima and Ashoke send them to Bengali language and culture classes every other Saturday, but "it never fails to unsettle them, that their children sound just like Americans, expertly conversing in a language that still at times confounds them, in accents they are accustomed not to trust."

In Chapter 8, after his date with Moushumi, Gogol makes the decision to speak to his taxi driver in Bengali. He feels the impulse to connect with another Indian after having embraced his childhood memories with Moushumi.

Alienation

 

The theme of alienation, of being a stranger in a foreign land, is prominent throughout the novel. Throughout her pregnancy, which was difficult, Ashima was afraid about raising a child in "a country where she is related to no one, where she knows so little, where life seems so tentative and spare." Her son, Gogol, will feel at home in the United States in a way that she never does. When Gogol is born, Ashima mourns the fact that her close family does not surround him. It means that his birth, "like most everything else in America, feels somehow haphazard, only half true." When she arrives home from the hospital, Ashima says to Ashoke in a moment of angst, "I don't want to raise Gogol alone in this country. It's not right. I want to go back."

Ashima feels alienated in the suburbs; this alienation of being a foreigner is compared to "a sort of lifelong pregnancy," because it is "a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts... something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect." Gogol also feels alienated, especially when he realizes that "no one he knows in the world, in Russia or India or America or anywhere, shares his name. Not even the source of his namesake."

The theme of alienation is tied to loneliness in Chapter 7, with regard to Ashima. She is living alone in the house on Pemberton Road and she does not like it at all. She "feels too old to learn such a skill. She hates returning in the evenings to a dark, empty house, going to sleep on one side of the bed and waking up on another." When Maxine comes to stay with the Gangulis at the end of the mourning period for Ashoke, Gogol can tell "she feels useless, a bit excluded in this house full of Bengalis." It's the way he is used to feeling around her extended family and friends in New Hampshire.

The theme of alienation appears in Moushumi's life, as she describes to Gogol how she rejected all the Indian suitors with whom her parents tried to match her up. She tells him, "She was convinced in her bones that there would be no one at all. Sometimes she wondered if it was her horror of being married to someone she didn't love that had caused her, subconsciously, to shut herself off." She went to Paris so she could reinvent herself without the confusion of where she fit in.

Gogol feels alienated sometimes in his marriage to Moushumi. When he finds remnants of her life with Graham around the apartment they now share together, he wonders if "he represents some sort of capitulation or defeat." When they go to Paris together, he wishes it were her first time there, too, so he didn't feel so out of place while she feels so obviously comfortable.

Ashima feels alienated and alone after showering before the party. She "feels lonely suddenly, horribly, permanently alone, and briefly, turned away from the mirror, she sobs for her husband." She feels "both impatience and indifference for all the days she still must live." She does not feel motivated to be in Calcutta with the family she left over thirty years before, nor does she feel excited about being in the United States with her children and potential grandchildren. She just feels exhausted and overwhelmed without her husband.

United States vs. India

 

The tension between the way things are in the United States and the way things are in India is apparent in the character of Mrs. Jones, the elderly secretary whom Ashoke shares with the other members of his department at the university. She lives alone and sees her children and grandchildren rarely; this is "a life that Ashoke's mother would find humiliating." As the Ganguli children grow up as Americans, their parents give in to certain American traditions. For his fourteenth birthday, Gogol has two celebrations: one that is typically American and one that is Bengali.

The theme of the United States vs. India is apparent during the wedding between Moushumi and Gogol. Their parents plan the entire thing, inviting people neither of them has met and engaging in rituals neither of them understands. They don't have the type of intimate, personal wedding their American friends would have planned.

The difference between Bengali and American approaches to marriage is clear in Ashima's evaluation of Gogol's divorce from Moushumi. She thinks, "Fortunately they have not considered it their duty to stay married, as the Bengalis of Ashoke and Ashima's generation do." In her view, the pressure to settle for less than "their ideal of happiness" has given way to "American common sense." Surprisingly, Ashima is pleased with this outcome, as opposed to an unhappy but dutiful marriage for her son.

Tension between Life and Death

 

Ashoke decides not to tell Gogol about his near-death experience because he realizes that Gogol is not able to understand it yet. This decision points to the tension between life and death: "Today, his son's birthday, is a day to honor life, not brushes with death. And so, for now, Ashoke decides to keep the explanation of his son's name to himself."

The tension between life and death is prominent in this chapter, especially as Gogol deals with the death of Ashoke, his father. He thinks about how "they were already drunk from the book party, lazily sipping their beers, their cold cups of jasmine tea. All that time, his father was in the hospital, already dead." As Gogol takes the train from Boston back to his life in New York, he thinks of the train accident his father had been a victim in so long ago.

The tension of life versus death is apparent to Gogol as he gets ready for his wedding. "Their shared giddiness, the excitement of the preparations, saddens him, all of it reminding him that his father is dead." His father's absence is apparent in contrast to the celebration of his new life with Moushumi.

Nostalgia

As the novel progresses, the characters begin to feel more and more nostalgic about earlier times in their lives. Gogol feels nostalgic when his mother and Sonia come to the train station to see him off. He remembers that the whole family would see him off every time he returned to Yale as a college student; "his father would always stand on the platform until the train was out of sight."

Gogol begins to feel more and more nostalgic as his marriage with Moushumi progresses. In Paris, he wishes he could stay in bed with Moushumi for hours, the way they used to, rather than having to sightsee by himself while she prepares for her presentation. During the dinner party at the home of Astrid and Donald, Gogol becomes nostalgic for when he and Moushumi were first dating, and they spent an entire afternoon designing their ideal house.

Nostalgia is prevalent in Chapter 12, as Ashima prepares for the last Christmas party she will ever host at the house on Pemberton Road. She remembers when Gogol and Sonia were little, helping her prepare the food for these parties: "Gogol's hand wrapped around the can of crumbs, Sonia always wanting to eat the croquettes before they'd been breaded and fried." As Sonia, Ben, Gogol, and Ashima assemble the fake Christmas tree together, Gogol remembers decorating the first plastic tree his parents had bought at his insistence.

·      Symbols

Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.

The Stories of Nikolai Gogol

Gogol’s stories are fraught with meaning. They are imbued with the trauma of Ashoke’s accident, which nearly took his life. They are strange and marvelous tales of adventures beyond Ashoke’s immediate experience, and they therefore are enticements for him to see other parts of the world. And they are the inspiration for his son’s name, a name that Gogol will carry with him for years, despite resisting it at various times in his life. By reconnecting with this volume of stories at the end of the novel, Gogol is attempting to bond with his father through time, despite his father’s loss. Gogol’s fictions present a means, then, for learning more about family, and for understanding what kind of person his father was. They are a powerful link to the past.

The house at Pemberton Road

Similarly, the house on Pemberton Road is a space in which the Ganguli family comes together. It was not, perhaps, the home Ashima envisioned when she was a girl in Calcutta. It is cut off from other homes by a patch of lawn, and it has a “cookie-cutter” quality to it. It is a simple, suburban dwelling. But Ashima and the Gangulis fill it with family, with large meals and overflowing parties. Pemberton Road becomes an indicator of the adaptive, ever-changing nature of family, of the tendency for memories to be created in the unlikeliest of places. Ashima finds herself deeply saddened by leaving Pemberton Road, even as she knows, by the novel’s end, that she is embarking on a new phase of her life.

The spit of land on Cape Cod

This spit of land, which Gogol recalls after his father’s death, exists for him only in memory. He and his father went out there together, during a family trip. They walked until they could walk no more. Ashoke turned to Gogol and told him to remember that moment, and to note that they traveled together to the end of the continent. Although Gogol made little of the memory then, he sees, as a grown man, how much this trip meant to his father. Now, with Ashoke gone, Gogol can remain close to him by calling this memory to mind—by journeying with his father into the past.

·      Analysis of the Novel

The Namesake portrays both the immigrant experience in America, and the complexity of family loyalties that underlies all human experience. Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli, after an arranged marriage in India, emigrate to America where Ashoke achieves his dream of an engineering degree and a tenured position in a New England college. Their son Gogol, named for the Russian writer, rejects both his unique name and his Bengali heritage.

In a scene central to the novel’s theme, Ashoke gives his son a volume of Nikolai Gogol’s short stories for his fourteenth birthday, hoping to explain the book’s significance in his own life. Gogol, a thoroughly Americanized teenager, is indifferent, preoccupied with his favorite Beatles recording. Such quietly revealing moments give the narrative its emotional power. The loneliness of lives lived in exile is most poignantly revealed in the late night family telephone calls from India, always an announcement of illness or death.

Gogol earns his degree in architecture, but happiness in love eludes him. An intense love affair with Maxine draws him into a wealthy American family, revealing the extreme contrasts between American and Indian family values. Gogol’s marriage to Moushumi, who shares his Indian heritage, ends in divorce.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s conclusion achieves a fine balance. Ashima, now a widow, sells the family home and will divide her time between America and Calcutta. Gogol, at thirty-two, discovers in his father’s gift of Gogol’s short stories a temporary reconciliation with his name and the heritage he has rejected.

Critics praise Lahiri’s luminous, graceful style and her keenly observed details of daily life, particularly the mythic significance of food and ethnic customs. The Namesake, her first novel, fulfills the promise of her collection of short stories, The Interpreter of Maladies (1999), that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000.

Gogol Ganguli, the protagonist of Jhumpa Lahiri’s first novel, is on a quest: He is compelled to reinvent himself, to achieve a sense of dignity that will overcome the embarrassment of his name. Born in the United States, he is the son of Ashima and Ashoke Ganguli, who were married in India in the traditional way, by parental arrangement. They strive to preserve their Bengali culture while freeing their children to become successful Americans. Unlike immigrants of earlier generations who turned their backs on the old country, knowing they could never return, the Ganguli family travels frequently and with fluid ease between the United States and India, fully at home in neither place.

Gogol’s name is a bizarre accident of fate. Ashoke, as a young man in India, survives a terrible train accident and is saved only because the rescuers notice the crumpled page of a book falling from his hand. This book is the collected short stories of Russian writer Nikolai Gogol. This accident marks Ashoke physically with a lifelong limp and emotionally with a sense of mystery about his survival when all others in the same railroad car perished.

When his son is born in Boston, Ashoke must name the child on the birth certificate before the infant is released from the hospital. Indian children are given a pet name for the family, with the formal or “good” name chosen later, when the child’s personality has been formed. The grandmother in India has been chosen to name the boy, but her letter has not yet arrived. Ashoke names his son for the author whose book saved his life.

This name is, for Gogol, a despised symbol of his cultural alienation, neither Indian nor American but Russian. Worse still, as he learns in high school, the author, although a genius, was mentally disturbed and suicidal. The narrative spans the first thirty-two years of Gogol’s life, following him as a young child, then a schoolboy, continuing through his college years and his early career as an architect. While Gogol is the focus of the story, the narrator, writing in the third person as a distant observer, departs from this position at times to explore the lives of other major characters who are on their own journeys, trying to make sense of their lives.

Ashoke earns his degree in engineering and becomes a tenured professor at a small-town New England college, and the family establishes a home on Pemberton Road. A man of the working world, Ashoke successfully adapts to American ways in his public life. However, he and Ashima socialize only with their Bengali friends, immigrants who share their traditions. Ashoke and Gogol are outwardly respectful to each other, but Ashoke is puzzled and saddened by his son’s emotional distance. Ashima, a homemaker in the old world tradition, is torn between the old ways and the new. She wears the sari throughout her life and cooks Indian food but adopts American customs for the sake of her children. Her Thanksgiving turkey is seasoned with garlic and cumin, and she decorates an artificial Christmas tree.

The scenes in the novel are fraught with the tension between the two cultures which causes conflict in the family life. Ashima often accedes to her son’s wishes but sometimes stands her ground with indignation. When Gogol returns from a grade-school field trip with a grave rubbing from a Puritan cemetery which he intends to display on the refrigerator, Ashima is horrified. In Hindu tradition, the body is burned; she finds it barbaric that Americans display artifacts of the dead in the place where food is cooked and consumed.

Ashoke, in a poignant scene, presents his son with a hardcover volume of Gogol’s short stories for his fourteenth birthday, a special edition ordered from England and intended to commemorate the significance of his name. Gogol, a thoroughly Americanized teenager preoccupied with his favorite Beatles recording, is indifferent to his father’s gift. Ashoke quietly leaves the room, where he is not welcome. Although Gogol will eventually learn this story, the author conveys a powerful sense of loss for a moment of love that might have united father and son.

The Gangulis maintain close ties with their families in India by telephone. The middle-of-the-night overseas calls invariably bring news of serious illness or a death in the family, revealing Ashimi’s sense of loss and separation from loved ones and her native traditions. Only on her return to India does she feel secure. However, Gogol and his younger sister, Sonia, are bored and annoyed by their noisy, intrusive Bengali relatives. They crave their hamburgers and pizza and hot showers. When they return to the United States, they purposely forget their Indian experience—it seems irrelevant to their lives.

Although Gogol is enrolled in school under his formal name, Nikhil, it seems strange to him, and he continues to call himself Gogol, much as he hates the name. His sister calls him by the unfortunate nickname of Goggles. When he is eighteen and a freshman at Yale University, he changes his name legally to Nikhil. His roommates, and later his adult friends, know him as Nikhil, but occasionally a family member calls him Gogol, and this requires an embarrassing explanation.

Gogol’s headlong affair with Maxine Ratliff in New York City, where he works as an architect, illuminates the clash between the two cultures that is at the heart of this story. Maxine is an editor of art books, and she and her parents are upscale Americans whose lifestyle would make a good feature story in a trendy magazine. Maxine’s mother is a textile curator at the Metropolitan Museum, and her father is a lawyer. The Ratliffs are as different from the Gangulis as it is possible to imagine. Where Gogol’s parents refuse to acknowledge that he might have a sex life, the Ratliffs are at ease with Maxine and Gogol’s affair, conducted casually in their home. The Ratliffs have frequent dinner parties, featuring small portions of elegantly prepared food. They are wine connoisseurs and often appear to be mildly intoxicated. The Gangulis are teetotalers, and Gogol has never seen them display physical affection. They entertain their Bengali friends in large, noisy gatherings with an overabundance of food, which they chew with their mouths open.

Seduced by their contrasting lifestyle and infatuated with Maxine, Gogol moves into the Ratliffs’ tastefully decorated Manhattan town house. In one scene, Gogol and Maxine stop briefly at the house on Pemberton Road on their way to a vacation in New Hampshire. Ashima is hurt that they will spend the holiday with Maxine’s family but responds with polite hospitality. Gogol sees that his mother is overdressed and has cooked too much food. Ashima is deeply offended when the young woman calls her by her first name but suffers the insult without comment.

The death of Ashoke is a wrenching experience for Gogol and a turning point in his life. During a visiting professorship at an Ohio university, Ashoke is felled by a fatal heart attack. Ashima, who has remained in the family home, is notified by telephone from the hospital; she finally reaches Gogol at the Ratliff home. Gogol must identify his father’s body in the morgue and clear out the apartment where his father had lived temporarily. The precisely detailed description of Ashoke’s body, the hospital rooms, and the bare furnishings of the apartment are a stark reminder to Gogol of his loss, his discovery that he has never truly known his father. These scenes recall an earlier event when young Gogol and his father had walked on the sands at Cape Cod to the lighthouse, as far as they could go. Ashoke said, “Remember that you and I made this journey, that we went together to a place where there was nowhere left to go.”

After Ashoke’s death, Maxine and Gogol gradually drift apart. Gogol’s reaction seems remote and puzzling: “His time with her seems like a permanent part of him that no longer has any relevance, or currency. As if that time were a name he’d ceased to use.” After the period of mourning for Ashoke, Gogol agrees, at his mother’s request, to meet Moushumi, the daughter of Bengali friends whom he has known since childhood. The two are attracted to each other, begin an affair, and marry in a traditional Indian ceremony. Moushumi, however, has had previous affairs and a troubled history of mental breakdowns. She inexplicably sabotages her marriage through an affair with an older, less attractive man.

The conclusion reaches for a symmetry that resolves the conflicts in the narrative. Ashima sells the family home and will spend half the year in Calcutta with her friends and relatives, the other half with her children in the United States. Sonia is engaged to Ben, a man of mixed Jewish and Chinese ancestry, and this promises to be a successful union. Gogol, as he helps to dismantle the home on Pemberton Road, rediscovers the volume of short stories, his father’s birthday gift, and begins to read.

Lahiri’s first book, The Interpreter of Maladies, is a collection of short stories which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000. The Namesake, her first novel, has raised high critical expectations. Her style, often described as luminous and graceful, is accomplished, especially in the precisely detailed word choices and descriptions of ordinary life that draw the reader into the narrative. Lahiri grounds the reader with a sense of time and place by frequent mentions of historical events, such as the assassinations of the 1960’s. She is a shrewd, often ironic, observer of the nuances of both Indian traditions and American pop culture. The Gangulis, for instance, are baffled by teenage Sonia’s disruption of the household when she dyes her entire wardrobe black, and they find it incredible that the president of the United States is addressed as Jimmy.

Critics have high praise for Lahiri’s richly sensuous, epicurean descriptions of the preparation and consumption of food. The author says that she is an enthusiastic cook. Like food, train travel, both in India and the United States, is a recurring motif. In an interview, Lahiri said that she sees her narrative as resembling the incomplete glimpses of the passing scene through the window of a train.

Several critics find that the gaps in the narrative give the impression of incompleteness. Others say that the third-person, distant narrative voice creates a flat, unemotional tone. However, The Namesake has received enthusiastic popular acclaim, and most critics agree that it fulfills the promise of her earlier, highly praised work.

As a portrait of immigration and a personal quest for identity, the novel raises interesting questions. Given the genuine pain that Ashima and Ashoke suffer in attempting to reconcile their cultural heritage with the American dream, it is worth considering whether Gogol’s angst over the oddity of his name should evoke the reader’s sympathy. Ashoke’s common-sense interpretation of Gogol’s complaints when he announces he will change his name is instructive: “The only person who didn’t take Gogol seriously, the only person who tormented him, the only person chronically aware of and afflicted by the embarrassment of this name . . . was Gogol.” As Gogol takes up his father’s gift and begins to read, there is hope that he has reached a mature resting place between the two cultures that are his heritage.

Important Quotations Explained

1.

“He remembers the page crumpled tightly in his fingers, the sudden shock of the lantern’s glare in his eyes. But for the first time he thinks of that moment not with terror, but with gratitude.”

In Chapter 2, when Ashoke names Gogol, the narrator describes his memory of the train accident that almost killed him. That moment resonates throughout the novel, and Lahiri’s narrator makes plain that the painful memory is present to him in the precise moment of naming his son. But the memory in this moment changes. It is still powerful, almost overwhelming. But it is a memory that becomes infused with his parental love for the young Gogol. Gogol becomes a link not only to the past, but to the Gangulis’ new life in America, in Cambridge, where they are making a home together. Gogol the boy does not know this yet, and it will take him years to grow into the knowledge of what this name means to his father.

It should be noted that, during the train-wreck, Ashoke was responsible for his own salvation. If he had not had the presence of mind to drop the page, he might never have been seen. He would then have perished like Ghosh, but without the change to travel beyond India, to see the world. Thus, Gogol’s works are not just an opportunity for intellectual “journeying.” They are, for Ashoke, a very real life-line, a way of communicating with the outside world. Without Gogol, Ashoke would not be alive. Thus the transmission of this name to Ashoke’s first son is an indicator of how Gogol the boy, too, represents a “new life” for his father. Ashoke’s willingness to change the horrible memory of the wreck into the positive memory of his son’s birth is laudable. Indeed, Ashoke does not dwell in the past, nor does he rue leaving Calcutta and his family behind. He is instead thrilled at the opportunities a life in America presents, despite the difficulties of making a new life so far away from home.

2.

“He is aware that his parents, and their friends, and the children of their friends, and all his own friends from high school, will never call him anything but Gogol.”

These lines occur in Chapter 5, after Gogol officially changes his name in court. Even as Gogol begins the process of changing his name to Gogol, he has no illusions about what this name-change will and will not accomplish. Gogol remains Gogol to those around him. Names, Gogol realizes, are much more than indicators of one’s self. They are, perhaps more than anything, indicators of how one is perceived by other people, in school or the home. For his parents and sister, Gogol is a name of family intimacy and love. For friends at school, Gogol is fun to say, an amusing change from some of the more “common” names people encounter in Boston-area high schools.

But, for Gogol, his own name is confusing. At the time of his name-change, Gogol does not understand the story of his name, nor its relation to his father’s life. He sees it only as an embarrassment. It is a tie, he thinks, not even to Indian culture, but to that of Russia, where his father has never even lived. “Gogol” makes Gogol feel like a child. Thus Gogol changes his name, officially, not to change how the world sees him, but to help change how he sees himself. He changes his name as part of a larger process of personal transformation and growth. This process will continue in college, as Gogol pursues his intellectual interests, meets new people, and begins dating Ruth. By the time Gogol is older, and living in New York, very few people will know him as Gogol. And those who do will seem to be relics of his past. Thus Moushumi is a “hinge” between Gogol’s past and present, for she befriends him as Gogol but falls in love with him as Nikhil.

3.

“And then the young woman tells her that the patient, Ashoke Ganguli, her husband, has expired. Expired. A word used for library cards, for magazine subscriptions.”

In Chapter 7, after Ashoke’s death in Ohio, Ashima thinks these thoughts, while alone in the house on Pemberton Road. For Ashima, Ashoke is everything: husband, father to her two children. He is the person who organized things around the home, performed the chores, earned the majority of the family’s income. Ashoke is the reason that Ashima has come to the United States in the first place, for she followed her husband out of a sense of a wife’s duty, even though she was terrified of leaving Calcutta. The notion that Ashoke could be simply “gone” is too terrible to contemplate.

This is not to say that Ashima’s entire life depends on Ashoke. She loves her husband, and has grown in his absence, learning to do some of the things that, for years, he took care of on his own. But it would be no exaggeration to say that Ashoke is the person closest to Ashima on earth. The two of them have shared years together. They have been inseparable since moving to Cambridge together, immediately after their wedding in India.

The idea, then, that Ashoke could be simply “expired” is too clinical, too horrible for Ashima to bear. The hospital administrator’s tone, while intended to be professional, seems to Ashima utterly devoid of humanity. This is in keeping with Ashima’s feelings about death and dying in the US more broadly. Ashima feels that, in America, death is an informal affair, something that is not respected and revered as it is in Calcutta. When, for example, Gogol goes on a school trip to a graveyard, and makes an etching of a gravestone, Ashima cannot believe that such “art-making” would occur among the dead. Here, then, is another example of what Ashima considers the foreignness, the strangeness of American attitudes toward dying.

4.

‘There’s no such thing as a perfect name. I think that human beings should be allowed to name themselves when they turn eighteen,’ he adds. ‘Until then, pronouns.’

In Chapter 9, Gogol, says this to Moushumi and her friends, after she reveals that he has changed his name from Gogol. Gogol is, first, embarrassed that his wife has done this without consulting with him. He feels that Moushumi is making fun of him in front of her friends, perhaps making it seem that she is more like “them” than like her own Bengali-American husband. Gogol is particularly sensitive of these feelings, since he already believes he is somewhat excluded from the intellectual life Moushumi shares with Donald, Astrid, and the others in the Brooklyn brownstone where this scene takes place.

But Gogol’s comments, though motivated by anger, nonetheless represent his attitudes truthfully. He does feel that his own name, Gogol, is not a reflection of his personality. He believes that he changed his name to Gogol in order to make it a better indicator of the way he views himself. He does not understand why Moushumi’s Brooklyn friends place so much emphasis on names in the first place, on strange or “uncommon” names. And Gogol doesn’t understand, too, why his own name was a matter of such concern for his parents. After all, Ashima and Ashoke waited for months for the letter to arrive from Calcutta, with the special name chosen by his great-grandmother inside.

Thus, this quotation encapsulates Gogol’s frustrations with the cultural norms of some of Moushumi’s friends. He realizes that there are parts of his personality that are, quite simply, from Moushumi’s. They do not necessarily view the world in the same way, despite the fact that Gogol and Moushumi are from very similar circumstances. They each wish to escape their Bengali-American identities. But Moushumi wants to exchange her for the identity of an urban sophisticate, which she would share with this group of artistically-inclined friends. Gogol, on the other hand, is not so sure of what identity best suits him—of the cultural mix where he most belongs.

5.

“In a few minutes he will go downstairs, join the party, his family. But for now his mother is distracted, laughing at a story a friend is telling her, unaware of her son’s absence. For now, he starts to read.”

Gogol, at the close of Chapter 12, picks up The Stories of Nikolai Gogol, and the narrator closes the book with these lines. They are a fitting end to a novel that is so much about family and individual growth, about one’s relation to the past and to the future. Gogol has, by this point in the novel, realized his obligations to his mother and his sister. He has always returned dutifully to the Boston area to see his family, but previously, he did so merely because he felt he had to. This trip, however, is different. Gogol seems genuinely excited about celebrating one final Christmas with his mother at Pemberton Road. And Ashima, for her part, is ready to move on to a new stage of her life, even as she realizes how much the Pemberton Road house has meant to her and to the family over the years.

Gogol recognizes that his mother is in need of this kind of “distraction,” of the company of friends and family. And Gogol finds a kind of distraction for himself, too. It has been a difficult past year, as he is still reeling from his divorce. He is trying, as he has throughout the novel, to understand who he is and what he wants. Although his professional life is largely secure, his relationship has dissolved. His father is no longer alive to communicate with him. Thus Gogol “talks” to his father the only way he can: by reading the book his father gave him, years ago, and which Gogol barely even glanced at, at the time. Gogol’s stories do not contain Ashoke’s words, but they meant an enormous amount to him in life. And by reading them, in solitude, after the party, Gogol can learn more about his father—about the love his father had for Gogol and for the rest of the Ganguli family.

• FURTHER STUDY

Born in 1967 in London, to parents of Bengali heritage, Jhumpa Lahiri, like Gogol and Sonia in The Namesake, was raised in New England (although in Rhode Island, rather than Massachusetts, like the Gangulis). She attended Barnard, majoring in English, and earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University, and then a PhD in Renaissance Studies, also from BU. Her first published book, containing short stories written over many years, is titled Interpreter of Maladies. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000. Lahiri earns a living both as a fiction writer and as a teacher of creative writing. She is currently on the faculty at Princeton University, where she leads workshops in fiction, and has taught at other colleges in the United States. Lahiri’s fans are many, including the President of the United States, Barack Obama, who in 2014 presented Lahiri with the National Humanities Medal. For several years, Lahiri, her husband Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush (a magazine editor), and their two children lived in Rome.

To the extent that The Namesake tracks the lives of Bengali-Americans living in the Northeastern United States, one might say that the novel is inspired by the facts of Lahiri’s life. But The Namesake is also a work of fiction. Thus, there are important differences between Lahiri’s biography and the stories of the characters she portrays. Foremost among these differences is the decision to base the novel not on one perspective, but on several. The unnamed narrator, who refers to characters in the third person, using he or she, relates the thoughts of Ashima, Ashoke, Moushumi, and Gogol. The characters’ perspectives change as the novel progresses, and sometimes Lahiri’s narrator will move from one character’s mind to another within a single chapter.

The Namesake and Interpreter of Maladies are perhaps Lahiri’s best-known works, although each of her publications, including the short-story collection Unaccustomed Earth (2008) and the novel The Lowland (2013), has led to significant sales and broad acclaim. Lahiri is known as a writer of immigrant life, especially relating to the experiences of Bengalis living in the United States. But it would be limiting to state that this is Lahiri’s sole preoccupation. Instead, The Namesake tracks a great many other issues: people’s romantic relationships and friendships; the nature of family and loss; and the impact of literature, art, and food on people’s lives. Lahiri, throughout The Namesake, makes reference to the cultural practices not only of Bengalis and Americans, but of Britons and Europeans as well.

The Namesake is a novel of identities—and of the way people shape and change those identities over time. Lahiri draws on a history of English-language and European fiction dating back hundreds of years. She makes use, in particular, of a genre known as the Bildungsroman, or “novel of education,” to track Ashima, Ashoke, and Nikhil/Gogol through time. Lahiri demonstrates how each of these characters grows, falls in love, and suffers misfortune. She depicts them both as members of families and communities and as individuals, with needs and wants that are particular to them. As much as it is a novel about Bengali-American experience, The Namesake is also a novel of what it means to “make” and “name” oneself within a culture, be it American or otherwise.

Lahiri demonstrates these concerns most clearly in the title of the work. Ashoke initially names his son “Gogol,” after Nikolai Gogol, a famous Russian author whose fictions have special importance to Ashoke. For years, Gogol finds his name strange, then a burden. He does not understand why his father wished to name him after a bizarre, impoverished artist, whose stories, like “The Nose,” are often sad, strange, and unlike “real life.” Over time, however, Gogol comes to understand the train-wreck during which his father was reading Gogol’s work. This occurs after Gogol has changed his name to Nikhil, and begun introducing himself this way to friends in college. Thus, just as Gogol feels he has escaped his “burden” of a name, given him by his parents, he begins to understand the importance that that name has for Ashoke and Ashima.

Gogol’s gradual understanding of what “Gogol” means maps onto his development as a student, architect, friend, and romantic partner over many years. The world Lahiri creates both stresses the importance of names and shows that all names, all identities, exist in flux. Gogol becomes Gogol, but by the end of the novel, he finds himself reading Nikolai Gogol in his old home near Boston. When he is a younger man, he wants only to escape the identities he feels are imposed on him by his family. But he learns, over time, to understand the struggles of his parents’ generation, and the differences between those struggles and his own.

The Namesake is as much a reflection of the author’s many cultural and intellectual interests as it is an account of the immigrant experience. More than a book “for” or “about” Bengali-Americans, The Namesake takes up questions salient to any American, in any cultural community.

·      The Namesake: A Struggle for Identity

The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri, is a story of culture, race, and inheritance and how these factors mold our attitudes and direct our lives in an ever-changing society. The novel follows the lives of Ashima and Asoke Ganguli, and how they left behind a life in India that they had grown to know and love to live the American dream and provide the best life for themselves and their children. Gogol, their only son, and the carrier of their family name, struggles incessantly to find his identity while attempting to mold to his family‟s expectations and the expectations of American society. The latter dictated that adhering to the model of the Standard North American family establishes normalcy. Gogol engages in a constant struggle to remain loyal to both worlds. Hence, the major theme portrayed in the novel is one of identity. This them is illustrated vividly by examining the importance of one‟s culture and background, gender, and name as the definition of patriarchal lineage and destiny in life. Such factors that contribute to problems with identity are not only recognizable in Indian cultures, but can become hindrances for many immigrants who enter the United States each year.

 The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri, is a story of culture, race, and inheritance, and how these factors mold our attitudes and direct our lives in a society that is ever-changing. The novel tells of the lives of Ashima and Asoke Ganguli and how they leave behind a life in India that they had grown to know and love to live the American dream and provide the best life for themselves and their children. Gogol, their only son, and the carrier of their family name, struggle incessantly to find his identity while attempting to mold his family‟s expectations with the expectations he feels in American Society. The major theme portrayed in the novel is identity, vividly illustrated by examining the importance of one‟s name as the definition of patriarchal lineage, background, and gender as a means by which one‟s destiny in life is dictated. Such factors that contribute to problems with identity are not only recognizable in Indian cultures, but can become hindrances for many immigrants who enter the United States each year. There can be a great sense of identity in one‟s name and there can be great significance in the maintenance of a good family name. For example, I would hear my friend say over and over again, “It‟s not just a name!”, as he battled to come to terms with the fact that he had been left branded with the name of the father who had abandoned him, and was the one person he hated the most. It didn‟t take him long to get his name legally changed, for the pain of carrying on the legacy of that man was something that he could no longer bear. I couldn‟t understand at the time, but his name really wasn‟t just a name; it was a reminder of his past life, which would continuously haunt him if he did nothing about it. Such are the tribulations that the Ganguli family faces in The Namesake. Ashima and Askoke want to give their son a name that will add meaning and  purpose to his life.

 One chosen by his maternal great-grandmother would have be sacred and perfect in every way. When this was not possible, Ashoke gave his son a name that represented hope for a better life and second chances - but it also represented tragedy. The young Ashoke is consumed in the work of Nikolai Gogol on the train ride back home, and refuses to part from the tattered book even in the late hours of the night. The quiet of the early morning is abruptly broken when Ashoke‟s car derails, and he and the pages of his novel are thrust upon the cold, wet soil outside the train. Rescuers pace about the wreckage in search of the few that survived. Had it not been for the pages of Nikolai Gogol that were clutched in the hands of Ashoke and lay crumpled next to his limp body, he may have never been found amongst the rubble that covered him. Knowledge of the source of his name redefines the path that his life begins to take. Similarly to my friend, and like the mangled pages of Nikolai Gogol at the scene of Ashoke‟s train wreck, Gogol‟s life is filled with dead-ends, disappointments, and confusion as he struggles to figure out who he is and where the curse of his namesake will lead him next. Conversely, the names of Gogol‟s parents: Asima (“she who is limitless, without borders”) and Ashoke (“he who transcends grief”) were chosen with care according to Hindi customs. Their names drive their lives in a positive direction and, even in their hardest times, provide them with the strength and determination to persevere. Ashoke‟s name was one to be respected particularly, and according to the practices of his culture, it is sacred and never to be uttered by his wife. Such respect for names also rings true in other cultures that I have encountered. One in particular with which I have had first-hand experience is the Korean culture. In high school, I spent long afternoons and early4 Mako: NSU Undergraduate Student Journal, Vol. 1 [2007], Art. 2 https://nsuworks.nova.edu/mako/vol1/iss1/2 Struggle for Identity 5 release days visiting with a friend who had not long ago migrated from Korea. While with her, I observed that she would constantly refer to her brother as Opa and her father as Apa. Never would she utter the names of her father or brother while in their presence, for this would be a sign of disrespect and irreverence. In my own family, I have observed that referring to an older brother or sister by their first name is something looked down upon by the generation in which my paternal grandmother lived. They refer to older siblings as „brother‟ or „sister‟. In essence, culture dictates that, through names and titles, age is a means by which one establishes his or her identity with regard to social status. From my observations, this practice is pervasive, and it is only recently that many have begun to turn their backs on this long-established custom. In essence, the names that the protagonists carry in The Namesake not only add meaning and direction to their lives, but give them a sense of cultural identity and belonging among other Bengalis. However, their Bengali names and heritage provide distress and discontent as they try to find their place in American society. Though named after a famous Russian writer, Gogol‟s name is a representation of his being bound to a backward Bengali heritage of which he longs to break free. Ever since his youth, Gogol‟s father, Ashoke, idolized Nikolai Gogol not only for his writing, but for the new meaning of life that he brought to him. Nikolai Gogol‟s characters represented the humble beginnings of Ashoke‟s father‟s life, and their story is always one that Ashoke can identify with. The stories shed insight on mysteries of the world that once were inconspicuous to him, and the ghosts of Nikolai Gogol‟s characters reside in „a place deep in Ashoke‟s soul‟ (Lahiri, 2003, p14). It is for this reason that Gogol rejects his name. It connects him to the seemingly nonsensical traditions that in the past he was forced to honor and that hindered him from living a free and fulfilling life; the name connected him to his father.

 If Gogol is Russian, how is this connected to Bengali heritage exactly? So, Gogol, who has spent his entire life in America, chooses to reject his name – not because he is ashamed of his associations to his father – but because he is ashamed of his history and longs to „fit in‟ with the apparently much superior American society. Being a part of an immigrant family from Jamaica, I have observed this sort of mindset amongst other immigrant families from my country and other parts of the world. The need to be accepted is something that we have all encountered. For instance, when a friend of mine told me that her grandfather had changed their family name upon migrating to the U.S., it came as a great shock to me. It was feared that their apparent Middle-eastern names would have them targeted as followers of extremist Islam. And due to the negative attention that such groups were receiving at the time, they did not want to be identified as members. Their name, an emblem of a rich and beautiful heritage, was abandoned for one that would be accepted – one that was American. Thus, culture and upbringing as a way of establishing one‟s identity is a dominant theme in the novel. Cultural differences also give rise to the identity crises that the protagonists encounter. The Namesake follows the lives of Ashoke and Gogol, father and son living in two different times. Though they are both of Indian ancestry and both live under the strict statutes of the Indian culture, Gogol‟s cultural identity is bombarded by intense consumerism, materialism, and the open-mindedness that was characteristic of American society during the 1970‟s. He considers his parents‟ homeland in India to be backward and wishes not to be associated with the traditions that many of his family 6 Mako: NSU Undergraduate Student members have adopted.

Though his parents raise him in the way that they believe a Bengali is to be raised, Gogol establishes early on in his life that he is indeed an American. However, his choice is met with much protest by his family. So he decides to conform to their wishes to not deviate from Bengali customs. This leads to much confusion for Gogol as he tries to meet what is expected of him as an American and an Indian. This situation is similar to the life story of Barack Obama, detailed in his autobiography Dreams from My Father, which I recently read. Being of European American and African ancestry, Senator Obama constantly struggles to find his place among the African and European Americans in the United States. He is always placed in the position of choosing one over the other and is never able to represent both cultures, which he most strongly embraces. Struggles with identity such as Senator Obama‟s are ubiquitous in American society today, being that there is an increasing demand to conform to certain norms. These struggles are particularly felt by immigrants who come to America with the hopes of bettering their lives by adopting societal standards with regards to their views of what the ideal family is in order to achieve a sense of normalcy. Similarly, those of the growing multiethnic community are often strongly encouraged to identify themselves as one race and keep within those racial boundaries, lest they be seen as „out of the ordinary.‟ Though The Namesake focuses primarily on name, culture, and inheritance as a way of establishing one‟s identity, it also sheds light on the ways in which gender helps to define a person‟s life. In the novel, Ashima‟s entire life revolves around her children and she feels an emptiness within her whenever a major stage of their lives has come and gone. Her primary purpose in life is to care for her children and husband, and she has 7 Dawes: The Namesake: A Struggle for Identity Published by NSUWorks, 2007 Struggle for Identity 8 been primed for this role ever since her childhood spent keenly observing other women in her family. Such observations mold her identity as the primary care-giver, and dictate that deviating from this way of life is of no advantage. In the novel, the author states that while Ashima is in labor with her first child, “in spite of her growing discomfort, she‟d been astonished by her body‟s ability to make life, exactly as her mother and grandmothers had done” (Lahiri, 2003, p6). She has found her identity in life: motherhood. And, it is the way that nature has perfectly intended. Unlike Ashima who gives up her job upon marrying, women in America today have access to more educational opportunities and perform roles that include a variety of activities in addition to the more traditional expectations of home-making and raising children. Though my own mother has had the opportunity to experience privileges that Ashima had never known, she still takes a traditional stance on the roles of wives in the home. I have found from my own experience that my mother (who does not work outside the home) dedicates much time to „taking care of the family,‟ and considers motherhood to be one of the most important experiences in womanhood. She has encouraged my sister and me to place great importance on this role since she has found it to be a rewarding and fulfilling experience. Like Ashima, my mother came to develop this outlook by constantly watching her mother and grandmothers. Ashoke sees himself as the head of the household and feels responsible for the well-being and happiness of his entire family. For instance, as Ashima complains that she does not have the strength to raise a baby alone, away from her extended family, Ashoke feels responsible for her heartache because it was he who had taken her away from her family and a life that she had grown to know and love. Similarly, in my family, my father 8 is seemingly the more emotionally stable party and considers himself responsible for the family‟s financial and spiritual growth, though my mother plays an integral role in these issues. Hence, the family dynamics presented in The Namesake are very similar to those in „Normal American Society‟ today. Hence, the societal mindset that gender grounds one‟s identity is strongly supported. Because the Gangulis carry with them myriad traditions and practices upon migrating to the United States, their son finds it difficult to establish himself in society and find his own identity. This is vividly illustrated by examining the importance of one‟s name as the definition of patriarchal lineage, background, and gender as a means by which one‟s destiny in life is dictated. The never-ending search for identity has been an increasing issue for many in today‟s society, particularly among those who have recently migrated to the country. (Dawes)

·      IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE IN JHUMPA LAHIRI’S THE NAMESAKE

The word diaspora has gained universal currency.  According to Oxford Advanced Learners’ Dictionary, diaspora means “the movement of people from any nation or group away from their own country” (423). This word stemmed from Jewish history, referred to in the Bible in the book of Leviticus chapter 19 verses 33 and 34, where the Lord commanded Moses to proclaim to the people of Israel as follows: “Do not take advantage of foreigners (immigrants) in your land; do not wrong them. They must be treated like any other citizen; love them as yourself, for remember that you too were foreigners (immigrants) in the land of Egypt” (The Living Bible 89).

The diasporas or the immigrants all over the world enjoy their temporary or permanent stay as well as suffer in their life in the host countries which are sometimes hostile. The migration of Indians to the USA increased after the promulgation of Immigration Act in 1965. The twentieth century has witnessed many an Indian migrating across the geographical boundaries for various reasons. Among these immigrants, especially the ones who moved into the USA over a period of time, there are some distinguished diasporic writers such as Anita Desai, Bharati Mukherjee, V.S. Naipaul, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, and Jhumpa Lahiri, and their critiques have thrown light on issues like displacement, hybridity, quest for identity, cultural conflicts, alienation, and gender inequality.

Introduced to the literary world, through her first novel in English, The Namesake, in 2003, which was even converted into a film retaining the title, the Indian diasporic writer, Jhumpa Lahiri, has penned two novels and two short story collections. The dictum “Life touches upon a person sometimes with a bouquet of flowers and sometimes with a thorn bush” points out the fact that everyone in the world enjoys the bliss of good things and suffer from the agony of misfortunes. And Lahiri is no exception to this universal truth and so she portrays in this novel the simple joys and happy moments as well as struggles, sacrifices, and sufferings of the immigrants. And as to their experiences, Lahiri’s subjects of focus are material prosperity and academic pursuits, dislocation and displacement, cultural conflicts, loneliness, language barrier, loss of identity, sense of belonging, gender issues, marital conflicts, and the generation gap between the first and the second-generation immigrants.

Firstly, this paper examines Lahiri’s delineation of the brighter side of the life —many an advantage or a benefit—of the immigrants in their hostland in the novel, The Namesake. Although the immigrants in this novel find it initially a little difficult to adapt to the way of life of the host country, they lead a sophisticated life which makes their stay in the alien land more comfortable. They earn as much as possible and are contented with their income. Lahiri has explicated in The Namesake the exuberant life, some of her characters lead. They get slowly adapted to the alien culture. For instance, in the beginning of the novel Ashima prepares her favorite Indian food and at the end of the novel she has learnt to prepare Christmas cake. As an immigrant in the USA, Ashoke enhances his educational qualification by pursuing Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at MIT, and as a result he gets employment in a University, and in course of time even he purchases a house on Pemberton road which helps his family lead a comfortable and sophisticated life. His immigrant status has helped him promote his academic and professional pursuits, resulting in intellectual and economic gain.

Secondly, Lahiri’s depiction of the darker side of the immigrant experiences in The Namesake is analyzed in this paper from various perspectives and at different depths of meaning. In this novel, the important characters such as Ashima, Ashoke, Gogle, and Moushumi experience loneliness and alienation. As the host society does not fully accommodate their wishes, they feel alienated. The term alienation is inextricably tied to loneliness as to Ashima. While Ashoke is pursuing his studies at MIT, most of the days, Ashima is alone in her apartment feeling terribly lonely. And then again she feels the pangs of loneliness when she is admitted at the maternity ward, with no known persons around her either to comfort or to console. She is exceedingly afraid of raising a child in a country where she is related to no one, where she knows so little, where life seems so burdensome and worrisome that she fumes with indignation: “I’m saying I don’t want to raise Gogol alone in this country. It’s not right. I want to go back” (33).

Gogol is another character who is trying to escape from the clutches of alienation. Gogol feels alienated, especially when he realizes that no one in India or America or elsewhere in the world bears his name. When Gogol is fourteen he starts hating his name and he responds rudely when he is asked about his name. At the college party, Gogol is reluctant to introduce himself to Kim as Gogol, so he asserts that his name is Nikhil. The agony felt by Gogol is the agony of Jhumpa Lahiri. Jumpa Lahiri was born as Nilanjana Sudeshna, but she had a pet name, Jumpha, which was found easy to pronounce by her class teacher and so she became Jhumpa Lahiri. The same feeling she puts into her character Gogol who never likes to be called by this name. Gogol considers himself an America whereas American society considers him an Indian.

Language barrier, presented in this novel, is also an issue which needs critical attention. Ashima and Ashoke arrive at a hospital for confinement. After she is allotted a bed in the maternity ward, Ashima looks for her husband, but he has stepped behind the curtain around her bed and utters in Bengali as follows: “I’ll be back”(3)— a language, neither the nurses nor the doctors speak. The curtain is a physical barrier and at the same time it also stands for language barrier, because of Asoke’s utterance in Bengali in the United States. Ashima and Ashoke send their children, Gogol and Sonia, to learn the Bengali language and also to attend culture classes every Saturday, but this initiative by their parents “fails to unsettle them that their children sound just like Americans, expertly conversing in a language that still at times confounds them in accents they are accustomed not to trust”(65).

Lahiri poignantly presents marital disharmony that has raised its ugly head in the lives of Indian immigrants owing to the differences between the host and the native countries’ culture. The marital conflict arises because “ in India a strict set of guidelines dictates how husbands and wives act both publicly and privately, in America, such guidelines are not as clear-cut and often, are thrown out guidelines altogether” (Pradhan, 137). The difference between the first-generation and the second-generation immigrants with regard to their notion of marriage is easily perceptible in this novel. The second-generation immigrants have not realized or understood that it is their duty to remain as couple till the end of their life, as the first-generation Indian immigrants like Ashima and Ashoke do believe. The second-generation immigrants, Gogol and Moushumi, lead a happy married life for a year. But after a few months, Moushumi does not like to continue her wedded life with him. She wants to live with her lover, Dimitri, with whom she had had a relationship even before she married Gogol. She spells out to Gogol about her love affair with Dimitri, and applies for a divorce, and then flies back to New York. The American culture has wrought changes in the second-generation immigrants’ attitude towards marriage and married life.

Lahiri presents cross-cultural issue succinctly in The Namesake. This issue is analyzed from two perspectives in this novel: one is the first-generation immigrants’ difficulty in assimilating into the host culture and the second-generation immigrants’ ease in adapting to the cultural practices of the host society. The immigrants make attempts fill the cultural gap, and in the process, they move gradually towards assimilation into and adaptation to the host culture. And accordingly, “The immigrant experience is complicated as a sensitive immigrant finds himself or herself perpetually at a transit station fraught with memories of the original home which are struggling with the realities of the new world” (Dubey,22). Initially, Ashoke does not like the celebration of Christmas and Thanks Giving, but he accepts these Christian practices for the sake of his children, and Gogol, after his father’s demise, recalls his father’s change of attitude: “it was for him (Gogol), for Sonia, and that his parents had gone to the trouble of learning these customs”(286).

Lahiri portrays the sufferings of the second-generation immigrants in The Namesake as a consequence of cross-cultural conflict. For instance, Gogol, sandwiched between the cultures of the country of their parents and the country of their birth, struggles to carry the burden of two cultures and two names. Gogol’s name Nikhil resembles an American name, and yet Gogol and his past life follow him everywhere as a shadow. He makes all efforts to erase his native identity and as a result he even does not introduce his parents to his American girlfriends, Ruth and Maxine. The death of Gogol’s father brings about a great change in him. He is convinced that he cannot abandon or diminish the importance of both cultures. He realizes “identity as a production, which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside representation” (Hall, 10). He learns to strike a balance between the two cultures. The realization that he is made up of two cultures strengthens his pride, instead of weakening his morale. He has assimilated American culture and values without losing Indian identity altogether. He feels no shame for his name, and also, he feels proud to be called Nikhil Gogol Ganguli.

While delineating the immigrant experiences of her characters in her novel, The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri employs some fictional techniques such as stream of consciousness, inconclusive end that gives freedom to her readers for drawing their own conclusions, and coining a terse title which provides clue to the content. The sweet and bitter experiences of the immigrants presented by Lahiri in The Namesake have been examined from various perspectives and at different levels in this paper. (Dr. C. Isaac Jebastine)

·      A study of the clash of cultures in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake

“The greatest journeys are the ones that bring you home” Jumpa Lahiri The Namesake. The clash of cultures takes place when people belonging to one nation move to another in search of greener pastures. This cultural blending, intermingling, leading to identity crisis has given birth to several best sellers. In a way to connect and come closer to that place, the closeness to the culture, the native language and the rules evoke a psychological oppression resulting to dilemma of cultural clash and identity. All around the world people struggle with a sense of self-individualization, which is the internal battle each person has to face in order to discover one’s true identity. The quest to find oneself is a difficult and lengthy endeauvor that can take a lifetime to accomplish. In the Novel The Namesake by Lahiri, identity is illustrated by intensely examining the importance of one’s background, name and culture. The main characters in the story try to uncover the reasoning behind their lineage. Jhumpa Lahiri, a daughter of an immigrant is one of the postcolonial writers who faced clashes between two cultures. In The Namesake, Lahiri presents the character of Ashoke and Ashima where they feel nostalgia as they migrate to a new land and through the feeling of diaspora, they recollect the memories back at home especially in the character of Ashima. It also deals with the cultural identity crisis which is faced by both the generations of the immigrants. In the case of the first generation, the immigrants face dilemma, consciousness of being an outsider and cultural identity crisis due to the language, dressing sense and food habits. But the second generation immigrants mainly face the crisis in relation to the personality, identity and adjustment in an alien land. The present paper deals with the issue of the migration to present the pain and the problems that are faced by the immigrants and in the end come back to their roots. Indeed, they complete their journey from pain to gain.

The idea of a homeland and identity have come under attack under the present scenario. According to the critics like Homi K. Bhabha, Avtar Brah and Stuart Hall, the floating nature of home and fluid identity have replaced the age-old concepts of fixed ‘home’ and identity as well. The flow of the people across different countries breaks the concept of true home. The notion of home not only construes the sense of self, but also ties with the human emotion, feelings, sentiments, proximity and intimacy. Beyond the spatial territory, ‘home’ is associated with emotional territory. Homi K. Bhaba talks of hybridity as the ‘third space’. The identity as suggested by Bhabha, indicates the impure identity rather than fixed identity. Dual or hybrid identity construct an identity crisis in one's creating home of familiarity in the overseas countries. The second generation immigrants find it hardly possible to adhere to the identity of the parental land. The first generation may find their national identity changed politically, but they are able to fasten with their original homeland culturally, linguistically and ethnically. In the contemporary era, immigration, exile and expatriation are related to home, identity, nostalgia, memory and isolation. These are the recurrent themes in the diasporic writings of the post-colonial writers like V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Bharti Mukherjee, Agha Shahid Ali, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kiran Desai and many others. Now, literature is regarded as a creation of culture and helps to know about multiculturalism.

Born on July 11, 1967, in London, England, to Bengali parentage, author Jhumpa Lahiri published her debut in 1999, Interpreter of Maladies, winning the Pulitzer Prize. The Namesake established Lahiri's ability to write lyrical narrative and her genius for writing moving and detailed accounts of everyday life is well established. Michiko Kakutani, one of the most respected reviewers at the New York Times, writes: "Jhumpa Lahiri's quietly dazzling new novel, 'The Namesake,' is that rare thing: an intimate, closely observed family portrait that effortlessly and discreetly unfolds to disclose a capacious social vision." She focuses mostly on first-generation Indian American immigrants and their struggle to raise a family in a country very different from theirs. Her stories describe their efforts to keep their children acquainted with Indian culture and traditions and to keep them close even after they have grown up in order to hang onto the Indian tradition of a joint family, in which the parents, their children and the children's families live under the same roof. Cultural identity is what provides the initial impetus for Gogol to run away. He is confused about much related to his identity and his sense of being in the world. The Namesake, spans over 30 years in their life and tells the story of the Ganguli family, whose move from Calcutta to New York evokes a lifelong balancing act to adapt to a new world while remembering the old. The couple's firstborn, Gogol, and sister Sonia grow up amid these divided loyalties, struggling to find their own identity without losing their heritage. She portrays in this novel the simple joys and happy moments as well as struggles, sacrifices, and sufferings of the immigrants. Her subjects of focus are material prosperity and academic pursuits, dislocation and displacement, cultural conflicts, loneliness, language barrier, loss of identity, sense of belonging, gender issues, marital conflicts, and the generation gap between the first and the second-generation immigrants.

After moving to America, the couple have the first child, a boy. New to the country and not having any sorts of communication with relatives except for letters the family is given the task to name their child. The father of the boy, Ashoke, gives his son the name Gogol, after a sentimental memory. The novel focuses on Gogol’s struggle over his name as a jumping off point to explore large issues of cultural identity, integration and assimilation. Gogol is so named after the Russian novelist, apparently his father believes that sitting up in train reading Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat” rescued him from a train accident back in 1961. Gogol finds his strange name a continuous nuisance, and ultimately he changes it to Nikhil. At one point of time when his father presented him a book of short stories by Nikolai Gogol for his fourteenth birthday, Gogol simply tosses it showing a disinterested attitude. Later when he is a senior at Yale, his father finally reveals him the story of his name. As Gogol’s affairs with Maxine and Moushmi do not last long. At the end of the novel, Gogol has come to terms with the issues of his own identity, he does not disregard the traditional Bengali customs anymore. The role of fate that played upon his life made him realize the importance of one’s own tradition and families. After losing his father he is saddened and begins to regard the ways his father taught him. The tale comes full circle when the protagonist heads home for a Bengali Christmas and rediscovers his father’s gift of Gogol’s short stories. When Gogol is about to start Kindergarden he is asked to change his name. He feels that changing his name may end up changing him or make him become a different person. Ashima and Ashoke send their children, Gogol and Sonia, to learn the Bengali language and also to attend culture classes every Saturday, but still, “their children sound just like Americans, expertly conversing in a language that still at times confounds them in accents they are accustomed not to trust” (65).

The cultural identity crisis is faced by generations of immigrants due to language, food habits, dress code and personal identity. In Gogol’s case it is due to his name. The feeling of nostalgia, loneliness and homelessness is also divided systematically. The important characters such as Ashima, Ashoke, Gogol, and Moushumi experience loneliness and alienation. As the host society does not fully accommodate their wishes, they feel alienated. In Ashima’s case it is due to migration. Gogol and Moushmi face it due to cultural hybridity. Ashoke and Ghosh are permanently dislocated from the world. They leave all homes behind and reach the other world. The term alienation is inextricably tied to loneliness as to Ashima. While Ashoke is pursuing his studies at MIT, most of the days, Ashima is alone in her apartment feeling terribly lonely. And then again she feels the pangs of loneliness when she is admitted at the maternityward, with no known persons around her either to comfort or to console. She is exceedingly afraid of raising a child in a country where she is related to no one, where she knows so little, where life seems so burdensome and worrisome that she fumes with indignation: “I’m saying I don’t want to raise Gogol alone in this country. It’s not right. I want to go back” (33).

 In The Namesake, the cross culture issues analyzed from two perspectives: one is the first-generation immigrants’ difficulty in assimilating into the host culture and the second-generation immigrants’ ease in adapting to the cultural practices of the host society. The immigrants make attempts fill the cultural gap, and in the process, they move gradually towards assimilation into and adaptation of the host culture as “a sensitive immigrant finds himself or herself perpetually at a transit station fraught with memories of the original home which are struggling with the realities of the new world” (Dubey,22). Initially, Ashoke accepts the celebration of Christmas and Thanks Giving aftert intial hesitation, for the sake of his children, as Gogol, after his father’s demise, acknowledges it: “it was for him (Gogol), for Sonia, and that his parents had gone to the trouble of learning these customs”(286).

Gogol belongs to the second generation immigrants who face the cross culture conflict, who finds himself sandwiched between the cultures of the country of their parents and the country of their birth. He struggles to carry the burden of two cultures and two names. He makes all efforts to erase his native identity and as a result he even does not introduce his parents to his American girlfriends, Ruth and Maxine. Gogol is Lahiri’s autobiographical double. She herself belongs to the second generation of Indian Diaspora whose ongoing quest for identity never seems to end. They feel sandwiched between the country of their parents and the country of their birth. They are to maintain ties between the ideologies of these two countries which are poles apart. But in this process, they are caught between acute identity crisis from where there is nowhere to go. Lahiri finds herself quite a stranger to both of the countries - in India she is an American and in America she is an Indian. Golgol tries to put a wall between his past and his present but it is not easy. The adoption of ‘Nikhil’ is a part to live only in the present, but the ghost of Gogol clings to him that he signs his old name unconsciously, he does not respond immediately when he is addressed as Nikhil. He tries to become an entirely different person from what really he is. Gogol struggles to carry the burden of two names. Nikhil resembles American names, yet ‘Gogal’ and his past follow him everywhere. He experiences a feeling of being inbetween. He is considered an ‘ABCD’ “America–Born Confused Desi” But he considers himself an American. American society says, “But you’re Indian” (157).

Gogol is an outsider in American society whereas he does not feel intimacy with Indianness. So ‘who he is’ becomes a great problem. What determines identity? The death of his father brings great change in him. He realizes that his identity is embellished by both cultures and comes to know “identity as a production, which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside representation” (Hall 10). He does not have to be one or the other; he does not have to choose. He is made up of both andit should strengthen his pride instead of weakening it. He feels no shame. He has assimilated himself in American culture and values, at the same time retaining his parents’ Indian heritage and now proud of his name ‘Nikhil Gogol Ganguly’ and all it means. Gogol tries to cope up with the situation to gain a new identity which does not need a particular nationality and hence different from the old one. So there starts a journey “to rediscover his roots, his self, his hyphenated identity and to revitalize the in-betweenness of cultures, the alternate culture.”(Fernandes 117). He actively participates in the formation of his new and ever-widening identification. Thus it is not the name only which determines identity. Cultural hybridism is the other aspect which has a telling effect on his identity. He belongs to many cultures at once and identity may not be determined by national boundaries only. As locations change, identity can also change. One must not be excessively obsessed with one’s cultural legacy, because it is not something meaningless; rather, it is deep rooted in one’s collective psyche. “Fanon argued that the first step for ‘colonised’ people in finding a voice and an identity is to reclaim their own past” (Barry 193). Identity is not just who I am. Identity is not stable and unitary rather it is multiple and ever-widening. It is the past only, which with the present prepares a way to the future. As the novel, The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri comes to an end, it can be seen that Gogol has finally come to realize the true value of his parents and has come to appreciate them for the hardships they’ve faced through immigration and separation. As he attempts to swallow the idea that “his mother is really going, that for months she will be so far”, he comes to realize just how hard it was for both his parents to leave their own parents for such a long time. Through this fact, he finally gains appreciation of the hardships his parents faced when they came to America and he understands that his parents have gone through these hardships, in order to give him the life he has lived and is currently living in America. Further, he believes his parents got through such hardships with “a stamina he fears he does not possess himself”.

By stating that he doesn’t believe he will be able to endure this experience of separation, Gogol shows understanding of the difficulty of the task that his parents have fulfilled. The irony created from his new sense of appreciation for his parents is quite representative of just how much Gogol has developed throughout the novel. This irony is created through the fact that for most of his life, Gogol was simply attempting to escape and ignore his parents, however only when he has lost Ashoke and is on the verge of losing Ashima does he truly realize just how important they are. Gogol no longer feels the need to distance himself from his parents; rather he feels sorrow at the idea of separation between him and his mother which shows the extreme magnitude to which his connection to his parents has grown. Only through experiencing the hardships his parents faced does Gogol come to appreciate his parents. This idea of Gogol’s appreciation and connection with his parents also indicates his increasing interest in his own Bengali culture. He regrets for not having cherished his time in India and for “all those trips to Calcutta he’d once resented”. Therefore near the end of the novel, it can be seenthat Gogol has reached a state where he is no longer afraid of his roots, in fact he’s now ready to embrace them. Moreover, Diaspora writings contribute on a world wide scale, the cultures of different societies. Diaspora literature thus builds information which results in solving many cultural and psychological problems. It helps to re-discover the unity and completeness of India. The Namesake works as a network to solidify the different parts of the states in India and also in relation with the other parts of the world like America. The Indian philosophy has its notion that the world is a family to an extent. Gogol’s relationship with his parents in the mid twenties shows that he is rebellious towards the life style his parents have in America. Gogol and Maxine break up after having arguments about Gogol going to Calcutta without her. “Maxine going so far one day admit that she felt jealous of his mother and sister,” (p.188) Rather than putting his materialistic and sexual desires first, Gogol starts to spend more time with his family and, starts to care about them after realizing the significant role his father had in the family. Gogol is reunited with a childhood family friend Moushumi and they start dating. The first encounter they had Gogol introduced himself as Nikhil to someone who once knew him as Gogol. Moushumi still calls him Nikhil; this is perhaps a secret bond they have together. Gogol and Moushumi never thought that they would be dating a Bengali even though both their parents pressured them into doing so. “She was convinced in her bones that there would be no one at all. Sometimes she wondered if it was her horror of being married to someone she didn’t love that had caused her, subconsciously, to shut herself off.” (p.213) During their relationship Gogol, remembers the Bengali parties they both attended. Perhaps the tragic death of Ashoke has woken Gogols awareness of the importance of family.

Conclusion:

 On the basis of foregoing discussion, it can be said that Jhumpa Lehiri has very meticulously portrayed the clash of cultures, and convincingly brought out the crises which bedevil the protagonists. The novel analyses old mindset of the first generation and second generation immigrants and the conflicts that arise out of these. While the themes of nostalgia, culture shock and unsettling are addressed through the characters Ashima and Ashoke, the themes of identity crisis and culture stereotyping are addressed through the experiences of Gogol. Lahiri’s send a clear message to people who are dreaming to settle in different countries for a better life that the experience they are going to encounter may not be an unmixed blessing. They are going to face the cultural shock, rootlessness, sense of alienation, nostalgia and identity crisis. Hence The Namesake can be considered a voyage towards self-recognition, self-definition, and self-realization. (Jindal)

Works Cited

Dawes, Terry-Ann. "The Namesake: A Struggle for Identity." Mako: NSU Undergraduate Student Journal 1 (n.d.).

Dr. C. Isaac Jebastine, M. Subarna. IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE IN JHUMPA LAHIRI’S THE NAMESAKE. 14 March 2016. 30 December 2018 <https://ashvamegh.net/immigrant-experience-jhumpa-lahiri-the-namesake/>.

Jindal, Dr. Madhu. "A study of the clash of cultures in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake." International Journal of Academic Research and Development 3 (2018): 726-729.

Slideshare.in . 25 December 2018 <https://www.slideshare.net/syedmubashirmosavi/diaspora-43732740>.

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