Analysis Of Jhumpa Lahiri's Novel 'The Namesake'

Jhumpa Lahiri, who won the Pulitzer Prize in the year 2000 for her Interpreter of Maladies, is a brilliant novelist. Her first novel The Namesake forms the basis of the present study. Lahiri has the first-hand experience to authentically portray the diasporic experience of the second generation of immigrants in America. At the same time, she had taken pains to imagine the experience of loss and nostalgia of the first generation immigrants also. Jhumpa Lahiri was born Nilanjana Svadeshna on July 11, 1967 in London to Bengali parents. As a child, Lahiri moved with her family to Rhode Island where Jhumpa spend her adolescence. Lahiri went on to attend Bernard College, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in English and later attending Boston University.

As Ashima’s water breaks, she calls out to Ashoke, her husband. However, she does not use his name because this would not be proper. According to Ashima, calling one’s husband by his name is “not the type of thing Bengali wives do, a husband’s name is something intimate and therefore unspoken, cleverly patched over”. From this statement we are shown how important privacy is to Bengali families. Bengali children are given two names: one is “daknam”, that is, pet name, used only by family and close friends, and the other is “bhalonam” that is used by the rest of the society. At birth, Gogol is given a et name as his official name because his official name, sent in a letter from his great grandmother in India, gets lost in the mail. Upon entering kindergarten, Gogol is told by his family that he is to be called Nikhil, his “bhalonam”, by teachers and the other children at school. Gogol rejects his proper name and wants to be called Gogol by society as well as his family. This decision made on the first day of kindergarten school causes him years of distress as it was also his first attempt to reject a dual

When Gogol makes American culture a part of himself, for example, by making its cuisine his own, he can no longer identify himself as separate from it. As Gogol partakes of these high-class, expensive meals, they become part of him and he becomes part of them. He is both assimilating and assimilated. Though his mimicry, the unfamiliar becomes familiar as he tries to adapt to their culinary tastes and practices as his own. His mimicry of these habits gains him a place in the privileged sphere. However, his assimilation is not a very comfortable act for Gogol. As Homi K. Bhabha has put it, mimicry “emerges as the representation of a difference that is itself a disavowal”. This disavowal via mimicry is illustrated when Lahiri writes that, Gogol is conscious of the fact that his immersion in Maxine’s family is a betrayal of his own. Gogol’s moving away from his parents and seeking a life separate from theirs might be interpreted as an exercise in cultural displacement: he did not want to go home on weekends, or to go with them to pujos and Bengali parties, or to remain unquestionably in their world. Gogol struggles with the pain of being a second generation Indian American. Lahiri’s The Namesake is an example of the Contemporary immigrant narration which doesn’t place the idea of an ‘American Drama” at the centre of the story, but rather positions the immigrant ethnic family