Analysis Of Jhumpa Lahiri's Novel 'The Namesake'

In her essay “My Two Lives,” Jhumpa Lahiri, an Indian American, explains the balance between the identities of the two countries inside her heart, as well as her psychological struggle between her bicultural identities. She describes herself as an Indian-American because she moved with her family from India to the United States when she was very young. However, confused with her identity through her growth, she feels that she doesn’t belong to either of the two countries because of its completely different cultures. When she is at home, she deals with her parents in an Indian way, which is strange compared to the American way that she come across outside. She says that she has a distinctive identity in spite of her Indian appearance

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.

to America with grace and compassion. This story by Jhumpa Lahiri, is an allegory establishing an identity with using symbolic meaning between two cultures that intersect. The themes throughout the story refer to immigrant experiences, the conflict of cultures, the contrast of assimilation and the connection between generations. The Namesake, opens the worlds of emotions Ashima experiences, while straddling her two worlds. This story of identity allows readers to travel with Ashima on an intimate journey through her life as an immigrant.

The makeup of our everyday lives is influenced immensely by the culture we are a part of. In Bengali culture, a person is usually given two names, a pet name and a proper name. Families who move from Calcutta often struggle to assimilate to American life and maintain their cultural heritage. In the novel, The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, Gogol’s changing of his name along with his romantic relationships with Ruth and Maxine show his initial rejection of Bengali identity and culture. This essay will give an explanation into the ways in which Gogol rejected his culture, first by changing his name, but also through his close relationships with American girls.

Most people use the phrase,“ home is where the heart is” to describe a home, but without a heart in it you're lost in a world looking for it. In Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, The Namesake, Gogol is a guy who’s divided between two worlds: his American life and fitting in like a regular everyday American guy, and his family's traditional heritage lifestyle. Along with ...While Gogol refers to home in more than one location along with his relationship with women are relevant to help him search what he is lacking in his life and finding the right place for him is where he wishes not to remember of Pemberton road.

Jhumpa Lahiri in The Namesake illustrates the assimilation of Gogol as a second generation American immigrant, where Gogol faces the assimilation of becoming an American. Throughout the novel, Gogol has been struggling with his name. From kindergarten to college, Gogol has questioned the reason why he was called Nikhil when he was a child, to the reason why he was called Gogol when he was in college. Having a Russian name, Gogol often encounters questions from people around him, asking the reason of his name. Gogol was not given an Indian name from his Indian family or an American name from the fact that he was born in America, to emphasize that how hard an individual try to assimilate into a different

Many second generation minorities from immigrant parents are driven subconsciously to conform to new culture and social norms. For foreign born parents and native born children integrating the two cultures they inhabit brings about different obstacles and experiences. In Jhumpa’s “The Namesake” the protagonist Gogol is a native born American with foreign born parents. The difference with birth location plays an important role in assimilating to a new society in a new geography. The difficulty for parents is the fact that they’ve spent a decent amount of time accustomed to a new geography, language, culture and society which makes it difficult to feel comfortable when all of that changes. For Gogol the difficulty only lies with the cultural norms imposed by his parent’s and the culture and social norms that are constantly presented in the new society.

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 Mira Nair’s film, The Namesake, the disparate cultures of India and America affirms to the binary paradigm of “the one” and “the other”, manifesting the dominance of one from the other and its impact to influence and cause cultural and identity issues. The collision of the two cultures forms a process of trying to construct an identity and a destruction of an ethnic identity, with different factors to consider such as space and other sociocultural codes. This film about the Indian American also shows the concept of model-minority image, standards and expectations imposed to Asian Americans. The Namesake embodies the cultural and identity issues of an Asian American, particularly the Indian Americans, exemplifying the experiences of the

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,

In Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Mrs. Sen’s”, Eliot’s babysitter, Mrs. Sen, has a daily ritual of chopping vegetables with her blade from India. However, during the chopping process, Eliot is not allowed to move around the room unless it is absolutely necessary. Mrs. Sen is an immigrant and does not like living in America. She misses India, leading to her reminiscing about her past. This reminiscing prevents Mrs. Sen from integrating into her new surroundings. When people focus on their cultural past, they can be prevented from assimilating into their new surroundings.

The Namesake film gives a strong view on inter-subjectivity which is the shared public symbolic systems of a culture. For example, when Ashima asks her husband, Ashoke , "do you want me to say I love you like Americans", and he replies "yes". Also, when Maxine, who is Nikhil's girlfriend, notices a kurta dress, which is indian dress, and says "I grew up with fabrics". The Namesake covers culture clashes which leads to consequences on a group of people. Also, the clip derives a sense of visual imperialism which is photographs that provide visual evidence to commit myths about race and culture. For example, Nikhil is taking pictures of his sister, when she is wearing the Indian official dress, although his sister was born and raised in

Jhumpa Lahiri’s short stories in Interpreter of Maladies all deal with some aspect of belonging to more than one cultural group, whether it be Indian, American, etc. Though they each attempt to compromise with the changes in their life, whether it be moving to a different country or having an arranged marriage, the characters are disconnected from their identities or loved ones. A large part of American and Indian culture is marriage, whether it be arranged or of the person’s choice. But marriage is not an easy thing to handle if you aren’t prepared for it, and this is very prevalent in Interpreter of Maladies. Two examples this essay will speak about are Twinkle in This Blessed House and the narrator in The Third and Final Continent.

Jasmine is a novel of emigration and assimilation, both on physical and psychological levels. In this novel, Bharati Mukherjee novelizes the process of Americanization by tracing a young Indian woman’s experiences of trauma and achievement in her attempt to forge a new identity for herself. The story is told from the first-person point of view by the female protagonist, who undergoes multiple identity transformations in her quest for self-empowerment and happiness. Mukherjee uses the movielike techniques of flashback and cross-cutting to fuse Jasmine’s past and present. The novel is immersed in violence.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake (2003) is a culture-oriented, more precisely, a Bengali diasporic culture-oriented novel. As a diasporic novel it represents the diasporic themes like displaced, dislocated and deterritorised feelings of the first generation expatriates like Ashima Ganguli, the female protagonist of the novel; assimilated, translational and transcultural tendency among the diasporic people, especially among the second generation immigrants in the novel like Gogol Ganguli, Sonali Ganguli and Moushumi Mazoomdar; a feeling of nostalgia towards the natal/imaginary homeland by the first generation expatriates like Ashima Ganguli; the community feeling among the diasporic people; the familial, human relationships within a diasporic family in a diasporic land and other traits. Ashima Ganguli is moored in diasporic land with her feelings of rootlessness/uprooting/re-rooting/tracking root and also finds routes to discover her at home in many homes in the world. The Bengali diasporic cultures are amalgamated dexterously in the texture of the novel. Lahiri’s The Namesake was adapted as a film in 2006, released on March 9, 2007, following screenings at film festivals in Toronto and New York City. The film is directed by an Indian born filmmaker Mira Nair, living in the US. Sooni Taraporevala adapted the novel into a screenplay. The film received positive reviews/acclaims from American critics and won ‘Love is Folly International Film Festival’ (Bulgaria)-"Golden