By Any Other Name, By Santha Rama Rau

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.

One source once stated, “By masking the discomfort, of being pre-judged” (Mora 40). People should examine their culture in order to better understand how it affects their identity and perceptions. In order to understand one’s cultural identity, he or she needs to understand what the term means. According to one source, cultural identity can be defined as “We all have unique identities that we develop within our cultures, but these identities are not fixed or static” (Trumbull and Pacheco 10). Various aspects of a person’s life that may determine his or her cultural identity music, community, family, ethnicity, relationships, religion, clothing, and food. After analyzing several texts, the reader recognizes that four important

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.

Individuals should learn to accept themselves for who they are, not what society wants them to accept. As we continue to evolve, we build up our own characters, and they are typically a mix of the ethnicity and culture we inherit from our family, various encounters in our life, distinctive identity and personality we have. Our character and identity is not something that we get easily, it's an intricate process. The story “The Other Family” by Himani Bannerji is based on a mother and a daughter who immigrates to Canada. They belong to a black family, but after the immigration they are living in the dominance of the white society.The school is considered as the hegemony of Canada and teacher is considered as the mainstream, it is a sort of social institution that a hegemony shape but they does not know the awareness of marginalized groups. The mother feels anxious when she sees a drawing of a white family by her daughter. It was the misperceptions of the kid that lead to forget her identity or she was too small to identify it. So to examine about the identity of the marginalized individual the beginning is to focus on the quality of the education. It is necessary for every school system to teach equality and inclusions of every group status so that the marginalized group are not left isolated from the society. Secondly, the fear of the marginalized parents from losing their kids in the mainstream society shows their lack of confidence in their own cultural pride. Since

In Santha Rama Rau’s story, “By Any Other Name,” she describes her experiences at the Anglo-Indian school to which she and her sister, Premila, are sent when Premila is eight and Santha is five and a half. Because the girls have been home schooled by their mother up to this point they find the transition to their new school strange and disconnecting. Santha’s sister, Premila, is initially willing to try and adapt to the culture and customs of her new environment; however, when a teacher is openly racist, Premila displays an impressive strength of character.

Being an outsider is caused by social class no matter where one is in the world. In Santha Rama Rau’s memoir of her childhood as an Indian girl in British controlled India, she talked about how she and her sister were seen as outsiders in their British run school

The two sisters,Premila and Santha in the short story “By Any Other Name” shows on how people in their new school would mistreated them due to their ethnicity. Both Premila and Santha went to a Anglo-Indian day school in Zorinabad where a teacher decided to changed their names to Pamela and Cynthia. Pamela was Premila and Cynthia was Santha ,the teacher decided to change their names because they were too difficult for her to pronounce.The Indian children sat in the back of the classroom and the

In the memoir “By Any Other Name” by Santha Ram Rau, we learn how cultural identity can be weakened within someone however, never truly stripped. A name reflects your cultural identity along with everything about who your are. When arrived at school, Santha and Premila learned they didn’t have proper english names as the headmistress exclaimed “[M]y dears, those [names] are much too hard for me. Suppose we give you pretty English names.”(1). Your name reflects upon your cultural identity, as many places around the world have different spellings, annunciation, and name popularity. Changing your name cuts the connections one has with their culture as english names don’t tie back with indian culture. Cultural language also ties with one’s identity

America is a nation built on the foundation of freedom and equality. Today, America is one of the most religiously diverse countries in the world, but also one of the most religiously dived. Eboo Patel, author of the novel Sacred Ground, is an activist for the integration of pluralism into American culture. Throughout the novel he expresses his ideas for more interfaith programs to broaden the knowledge of the younger generation with the hope of eliminating bigotry amongst various religions. Patel’s crucial message is that many people often misjudge or jump to conclusions, in this case about religions, which they don’t know much about. College is a place to break these barriers because it is a time for self-exploration and new ideas to be formed.

“I do not wish for women to have power over men, but over themselves” Mary Wollstonecraft. In the vast majority of places around the world, men have the upper hand over women, whether it is in the household, workplace, or government. Even in America, the land of the free, women are still discriminated against to a slight extent. A man and woman could have the exact same job, but the man would bring home a greater salary than the woman. In spite of the fact that this is unfair, at least women in America are permitted to work. Khaled Hosseini brings awareness to the women of Afghanistan who are victims of the inhumane and unjust laws of the Taliban. In his novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Hosseini uses agonizing scenes and imagery to analyze the ways Afghan women continue to subsist in an oppressive and discriminatory society from the 1950s to today.

A person’s heritage and cultural identity may be lost when moving to a new country where the culture is different and other cultures are not easily accepted. In the short story “Hindus”, Bharati Mukherjee uses setting, characters and the plot to discuss what it is like to lose your cultural identity while being a visible minority in America. Mukherjee uses the plot to describe the events that take place in the main characters life that lead her to realize how different the culture and life is in the America’s. She also uses the characters as a way of demonstrating how moving away from one’s culture and heritage can change a person’s perspective and ways of thinking. Mukerjee also uses setting in her story to identity the physical differences in culture between living in India and America. Alike the setting and characters, the plot helps describe the loss of culture with a sequence of events.

In this text Mohanty argues that contemporary western feminist writing on Third World women contributes to the reproduction of colonial discourses where women in the South are represented as an undifferentiated “other”. Mohanty examines how liberal and socialist feminist scholarship use analytics strategies that creates an essentialist construction of the category woman, universalist assumptions of sexist oppression and how this contributes to the perpetuation of colonialist relations between the north and south(Mohanty 1991:55). She criticises Western feminist discourse for constructing “the third world woman” as a homogeneous “powerless” and vulnerable group, while women in the North still represent the modern and liberated woman

In Privilege, Shamus Khan examines how the once exclusively prestigious boarding school, St. Paul’s, is now open to a more diverse influx of elite students. This includes lower income individuals, nonwhites, and women. Even with this newfound openness, there is still a persisting inequity present. One prominent type of inequality at the institution is the gender differences displayed. These gender inequities are evident through the double standards of academic achievement and the portrayal of sexuality of the girls at St. Paul’s.

Shaihu Umar, a novel written by Alhaji Balewe. The introduction of the story captivated my attention as it starts off with a student of Shaihu Umar asking questions about Shaihu Umar. That is how Shaihu Umar starts to talk about his life story. Most of the stories revolves around Shaihu’s childhood. Shaihu had traveled from the town he was born to Egypt. During all the time, he met with many misfortunes. He was first kidnapped by a man, leading to the separation from his mother. Then, he was snatched by the head slaves, and lastly became a son of Arabs. All of them are nice to him, even when he was a slave. Many people regard slavery as evil because of how the slave owners treat the slaves. However, most slave owners in this book are portrayed as kind, except the owners and Cadi whom appeared at the end of Umar’s mother’s story.

“I’m Nikhil” (Jhumpa Lahiri 96) these are the words that Gogol uttered for the first