A World Order By Jhumpa Lahiri

The film I have chosen is “The Namesake” by Jhumpra Lahiri. A traditional Bengali Indian family, the Ganguli’s, are moving to New England and are trying to stay engulfed in their unique cultural identity. Ashoke Ganguli brings his new wife, Ashima, to a strange new world, leaving her lonely and confused of a culture outside of her own. Ashima needs to learn to love a man she does not know, to customize herself to a country she is unfamiliar with, and to hold true to her values in a culture foreign to her traditional beliefs. In this paper I will inform the reader of the Family structure, social class on gender as well as material culture and nonmaterial culture pertaining to the Ganguli’s and how they made a place in American society. I

Gogol grapples with his name throughout the majority of the novel, yet this tension was in the makings even before his birth. Ashoke and Ashima being immigrants set Gogol up to live in two different cultures, American and Bengali. Many children of immigrants may feel like Gogol, having one foot in each world. Gogol framed his struggle with cultural identity through something tangible, his name. In Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, The Namesake, Gogol’s struggle with cultural identity is exposed most greatly by the name others call him and his reaction to it.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth is comprised of eight short stories about different Indian families’ struggles in America, many of them going through the immigrant experience. The conflicts are with friends and family, and also with themselves, as each of them attempt to find their own identity along with fitting in with the rest of society. One of the causes of these struggles that because the families in the stories are mixed in terms of generation. Many of the adults in the stories were first generation immigrants from India, while many of the children were raised in the United States, which is the second generation. This led to blending of culture and at the same time, clashes between the immigrant mentality of living and the American mentality of living. In Unaccustomed Earth, Lahiri demonstrates to the reader the important influence of environment, specifically culture and how it impacts parental teachings, on the personality and development of an individuals’ identity, and how the actions and development of characters can affect one’s family and friends; the impact of environment and culture is shown especially by the characters and stories “Hell-Heaven” and “Hema and Kaushik”.

Change can be painful. This is true especially when it comes to a human’s journey of growing up and forming one’s own identity. In The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri, the novel follows the protagonist, Gogol, as he grows up and struggles with balancing his Bengali identity with Western culture. The reader discovers that on his path to developing independence he chooses to push his family away, which ends up having negative effects, but he believes that he is doing the right thing. Therefore, in The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri uses irony to argue that it is human nature to want to separate oneself from one’s family and childhood in order to establish a

Jared Diamond is a world renowned scientist, author, Pulitzer Prize winner, and currently a geography professor at UCLA. Of his six books published, we will be looking at the last chapter of his fourth book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. In this book Diamond utilizes the comparative method to find resemblance in past societal collapses with our current society. In the chapter entitled, "The World as Polder: What Does it Mean to Us Today," Diamond points out that there are indeed many parallels between past and present societies and that our modern day society is currently on a path of self destruction , through examples such as globalization and the interdependency of each country.

For some people finding out who they are is not exactly the hardest thing to do in the world, some know it from the moment they are born. There are, however, also other people who have to struggle and search for their identities. The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri is the story of a boy who does just that. It focuses on the Ganguli’s, a Bengali family, who, after moving homes from India to the United States, struggle to uphold a delicate balance between honoring the traditions of their heritage and assimilating into the American culture. Although Ashoke and Ashima’s parents are proud of the sacrifices they have made to provide their children with as many opportunities as they could, their son, Gogol, strives to create his own identity without leaving his heritage behind. In the novel Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, Gogol faces many struggles while searching for his identity.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Namesake” examines an immigrant bengali family that has moved from India to America, and tries to hold their bengali culture while trying to accept American lifestyles. Ashima and Gogol each struggle with their cultural identity throughout Lahiri’s novel. The pressure of western society and the crisis of losing one’s culture and identity is demonstrated through the characterization and Gogol and Ashima’s relationships while living in America.

Dev Patel Ms. Meier AP Literature and Composition 8/2/14 The Namesake Outline I. Major Characters: A. Gogol Ganguli: rebellious, divided between cultures, searches for a new identity Gogol Ganguli, the son of Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli, is a first generation American. Born in America to Indian immigrants, Gogol struggles to find his own identity and to fit into American society as he continues to witness the differences between his American and his traditional Indian cultures. Gogol also struggles to understand the significance of his namesake.

Forming a new identity in a foreign country is not an easy task. Immigrants usually face challenges to identify themselves. Identity formation is the development of one’s distinctive personality due to particular reasons such as new environment, new culture and conflicts. During the process, some characters from Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake either create or deny the bond with their own culture; some undergo conflicts among generations. Those processes reflect significantly in Ashima and Gogol throughout the book. The degree of assimilations determines to what extent the characters have formed the new identity in the new culture.

In Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake, Moushumi Mazoomdar is a Bengali-American woman who marries Nikhil Ganguli, a main character. Like Nikhil, she struggles with her cultural identity and the expectations that are associated with each of the cultures that “claim” her. Moushumi is a second generation Bengali-American who feels that her Bengali and American cultures are not reconcilable. Lahiri expresses this tension when first introducing Moushumi: Nikhil’s mother identifies her by discussing her broken engagement to an American man, and as a reaction to this failed relationship, she is set up with Nikhil, another Bengali-American (Lahiri 192). The Moushumi that Nikhil re-connects with, dates, and eventually marries has undergone a significant transformation in her appearance and personality. The Moushumi that Nikhil had encountered in his family’s Bengali social circles was an obedient daughter who took piano lessons, wore lace-collar shirts, and carried extra weight (Lahiri 214). However, through college and adult life, Moushumi forged a separate identity. She became exotic, confident, and daring, with “pleasingly feline features” that reflect the change (Lahiri 193). Moushumi’s need to break from her “the two countries that could claim her” led her to form a new identity characterized by her striving to achieve immersion in another culture, upper-class cosmopolitanism, and romantic success, but Lahiri portrays the rejection of her cultures as a contributor to Moushumi’s

Lahiri’s leading man, Gogol Ganguli, participates in multiple, overlapping journeys, starting the moment his parents, Ashima and Ashoke, set foot in the United States: an unfamiliar territory to their Indian roots. Gogol, born soon after their arrival, must then oscillate between American and Indian practices. This causes him to have perplexing identity issues, first emerging when his parents attempt to give him a different name, Nikhil, for

The Namesake, written by Jhumpa Lahira, a famous Indian writer who won the Pulitzer Prize for her story collection Interpreter of Maladies, brilliantly illustrates the immigrant experience and the tangled ties between generations. In this novel, the main characters Ashima and her husband, Ashoke, were first generation immigrants in the United States from India. The whole story begins with Ashima's pregnancy and her nostalgia of her hometown, and a sense of melancholy revealed from the first chapter. While Ashima felt insecure and worried about her new life in the United States, her husband Ashoke, rather wanted to settle in and struggle for a new life. All of uncertainty and reluctance of this new-coming couple faded way when their son,

A Bengali girl named Ashima partakes in a marriage arranged to Ashoke Ganguli. After the ceremony the new couple left India to move to the United States where Ashoke has started to build a new life. They were going to face the cultural differences together, as one. For Ashima, this was difficult. Her new husband had to earn a living to support the two of them so she often found herself home alone. Not knowing the English language or culture at that became very depressing for her she felt lonely and lost. After a while the couple gave birth to a baby boy. Ashoke makes the decision to call his newborn, Gogol, after a Russian author. Later his American name becomes Nicky. The happy parents later give

In the Namesake written by Jhumpa Lahiri, America is often referred to as the land of opportunity despite how foreign immigrants are still being treated as second class citizens such as an outcast. Throughout the novel The Namesake the parents of Gogol, Ashoke Ganguli and Ashima Ganguli brought their family to America to find their opportunity despite their strong beliefs in their Bengali culture. Going against their Bengali belief, Ashok and Ashima settled in america with their baby boy Gogol and their baby girl Sonia. Throughout the novel The Namesake Gogol has been struggling to find himself and make peace. Gradually throughout the story Gogol begins to wonder why his parents made the decision to come to america, Despite their strong Bengali beliefs to stay in india. Gogol’s crisis to finding himself slowly deteriorates when he finds himself come to peace with who he is. The author, Jhumpa Lahiri shows Gogol improving and developing as a mature character intellectually, socially, and emotionally despite all the hardships that Gogol had faced.

The immigrant experience affects families in a unique manner wherein ethnicity, and therefore, identity becomes something continuously negotiated. Jhumpa Lahiri’s contemporary novel, “The Namesake,” beautifully illustrates the complexities of generational culture clashes and the process of self-individualization over the course of this experience. Lahiri challenges the often-one-dimensional approach to ethnic identity by allowing readers an intimate and omnipresent look into the internal struggles of the Gangulis, a first-and-second-generation Bengali family, following their relocation to America. The novel incorporates a heavy presence of reading, and the abundant representation of books and documents throughout it are vital to its