Jhumpa Lahiri The Namesake Essay

Ganguli family had both good and bad experiences in America, a country which is intensely foreign to them. They faced a lot of problems to adjust in a foreign country after leaving back their family and coming far from their own native society to a place which is very new to them and near people who are very different from them. They both tried to maintain the cultures and rituals of both the societies. While Ashoke’s was enjoying the American society, Ashima was missing her family and was day by day getting homesick. She finds difficult to understand the rituals and customs of American society but she maintained proper balance between both the societies in India and America. In one way she made her children watch English serials and on the other hand she taught them Indian traditions. This proves her love for both the societies. This can be known by the lines mentioned in the novel:

The Mukherjee sisters contrast in the way they live. For example, Mira wedded an Indian student and soon after developed her green card, stress free. While Bharati didn’t, due to her husband’s North Dakota

In the process, theyencounter the crisis of dual identities, face the cultural dilemma and fear the loss of their ethnic identity while struggling to acculturate in the multicultural society. The first and second generations perform the role of cultural mediators between the adopted culture and the culture of their motherland. The paper focusses on Lahiri’s depiction of Bengali culture in The Namesake ranging from the dress, food habits, festivals,customs, religious ceremonies, music and patterns of behavior of the first generation immigrants in America who unremittingly strive to transmit them tothe second generation

Jhumpa Lahiri’s second story “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” presents the relationship between an Indian family and their friend Mr. Pirzada, a Bangladeshi migrant. The narrator of the story is a ten year old girl Lilia who is not aware of the history of the Indian subcontinent related to freedom struggle, civil war of East Pakistani etc. We see that Mr. Pirzada, Lilia’s father and mother take dinner with one another while at the same time they listen to the evening news. Though they are now in America but they want to know what is going on in their native places. It shows their longings for their respective countries though they are

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri Living in America, the Ganguli’s have the difficult choice of choosing between two dramatically different cultures. As a second generation Indian American, Gogol Ganguli is expected to preserve the ideals of his traditionally Indian parents while still successfully assimilating into mainstream American culture. In “The Namesake,” Jhumpa Lahiri reveals the stark contrasts between the perceptions of Ashima, Ashoke and Gogol in relation to

Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story, “Interpreter of Maladies,” follows the adventure of an American-Indian family who are taking the role of tourists in their own native homeland. The Das family is inherently Indian, but the experience of being born and raised in America has diluted their cultural background. The Das family is a symbol of both American and Indian cultures intermixing, and due to this, the family does not completely belong in either culture.

Being in a situation where one has no choice but to change their entire lifestyle around is never a desired experience. This normally occurs as the aftermath of immigrating into a new country that one may not have too many familiarities with. In the award winning novel, The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri has successfully captured and portrayed the reality of the struggles and difficulties one would face through immigration. This was done so through the use of emotions and challenges that the character,

Mukherjee points out, how her sister and her use to dress alike, have the same way of expression in political views, social issues and how they were planning to come to America for two years to get their degree and go back to India to marry the grooms of their father’s choosing.

Immigrants to America face a major challenge when they first arrive. These immigrants from all different backgrounds and cultures feel like outsiders in America because the culture they have been immersed in their entire lives is no longer present in America. In Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli come to the United States after they have lived in India for nearly thirty years. Ashoke and Ashima are only familiar with the Bengali customs and traditions; they have no sense of the American culture. In America, they have a son Gogol. Ashima and Ashoke surround Gogol in Bengali culture in any way they can in America. Even Gogol grows up in a Bengali household, Gogol identifies more with the American culture throughout his entire adolescence and into his adult life. As Gogol grows older, he tries to avoid his parents at all costs. The direct clash of Gogol’s American culture and his parents’ Bengali culture is what caused the separation between Gogol and his parents.

American immigrants live a double life balancing two different cultures. In a collection of short stories, Jhampa Lahiri, author of Interpreter of Maladies, illustrates Indian-Americans caught between two identities. First, in Lahiri’s “Temporary Matter”, she uses commonplaces such as death, divorce, and pain in a story about an Indian couple living in America. In order to show that people of different cultures share similar issues, she writes about experiences commonly felt by a given audience. Shukumar and Shoba’s marriage is failing due to the loss of their child at birth.

As a young child, Lahiri struggled to find a place where she belonged in America. At home, she followed the customs of her parents, speaking Bengali and eating their food. Even though, outside of home Lahiri felt the need to hide these things from her friends. Despite the fact of her living in America, she never really felt “American.” As Lahiri got older, she began to accept her Indian heritage and brought some of it into her American life. The traditions did not always act in harmony but they helped her find peace. Her parents also helped her find acceptance in her culture. She said “Everything will change once they die. They will take certain things with them--conversations in another tongue, and perceptions about the difficulties of being

Jhumpa Lahiri, reflecting on her personal experiences and her keen observation of diasporic culture, brings lawful and touching experiences to the predicament of the Gangulis in the foreign land. The novel is indeed a work that is created by a woman who understands the convolutions that arises from a cultural merger. The novel does an excellent job of mixing along side by side the autonomous, integrated American way of life in a manner that avoids suggesting the dominance of one over the other. The Namesake does not propose the importance of either fully clasping one's cultural heritage or completely integrating into American culture; instead, it allows the reader to apprehend , if not completely, the complexity of negotiating a life where one has a foot in American culture, and the other in their ideal Bengali tradition .In short, the novel is a the a guide of experience for immigrant population of Indian

The Namesake is the first novel of Lahiri and it was originally a novella published in The new yorker and was later expanded to a full length novel. It explores many of the same emotional and cultural themes as her Pulitzer Price winning short story collection Interpreter of Maladies. Moving between events in Calcutta, Boston and New York city, the novel examines the caught between two conflicting cultures with highly distingtreligious, social and idealogical differences.This novel clearly describes the struggles ofa Bengali couple who migrated to the United States for form a new lifein outside. This story of the novel begins as Ashok and Ashima leave from Calcutta and settle in Central Square, in Cambridge,Massachusetts. Through a series

To love and to be loved is elementary to human mind just as food, clothing and shelter are to the body. Family emerges as a powerful nexus in Indian society simply because it ensures the existence of somebody who needs to be loved and who reciprocates the love. All nine stories in Lahiri’s collection present characters who consciously or unconsciously crave for an adherence to a strong and stable root – a nation, a culture, a religion or a family– while longing to nourish and support a dependent soul within the familial institution; an intense desire for being rooted and being the root.

The week in class we read the short story, A Temporary Matter by Jhumpa Lahiri. In this story, Lahiri tells the story of a distant couple who is experiencing a power outage, in which Shoba and Shukumar spend time together for the first time since the death of their newborn child. Through these nights, the couple opens up to each other about secrets they never told each other prior to his power outage; this ultimately ends in Shukumar admitting to Shoba that he was able to hold their baby and that it was a boy. Although, their relationship was arguably broken beyond repair, this event of spending time together was an important attempt at finding the spark they once had. This act by Shukumar and Shoba reminded me of the quote, “Success in life