The Namesake By Jhumpa Lahiri

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

Everyone all experience a period of questioning their identity at some degree, whether it be as long as a life time or just a few years. In the The Namesake, Gogol, the main character, experiences identity crisis while struggling to fit between two different cultures. Throughout reading The Namesake, readers understand, yet question, Gogol’s desire to rebel against the the world of his Indian self. One world, his Bengali heritage, is unique compared to the majority of American people. The other offers a “normal” American life in the United States, requiring Gogol’s efforts to assimilate. As a result of the conflicts between them, Gogol lives a life of pushing and pulling between these two worlds as opposed to accepting his nationality. Unlike

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.

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

This book depicts the national and cultural status of the immigrant mother, who is able to preserve the traditions of her Indian heritage that connect her to her homeland. Ensuring a successful future for her American-born children is coordinated with the privilege of being an American citizen. Ashima yearns for her homeland and her family that she left behind when

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.

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.

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.

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

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,

An individual’s identity is reflected in many aspects of their character. On of the aspects which affect a person’s identity is culture; culture plays a major role in the formation of an individual's character. It imposes customs which ultimately manifest through a person’s identity. The clear link between culture and identity suggests that conflict with one’s culture may affect a person’s sense of self. Jhumpa Lahiri explores this type of conflict in the novel The Namesake, in which Gogol Ganguli is stuck between two cultures the Bengali traditions of his parents and the American culture he grows up with. The novel explores Gogol’s conflict with both cultures and how it ultimately impacts the development of his identity.

In Jhumpa Lahiri’s, The NameSake, the author uses indirect characterization to show the development of Ashima’s character over the course of the text. Ashima has had to adapt to many different living ways. Ashmia, the mother of main character Gogol Ganguli, had to change her Bengali lifestyle while living in America. Ashmia has shown to grow as a person through her experiences with her appearance and her individual conflicts of the Bengali vs. American culture.

The novel takes the leaders deep into the Gogol Gangulis' immigrant experience: their puzzlement at and isolation from a non native culture, their loss of connection with families in India,where happenings occur different from them; their seeking old links in a circle ofother Bengali immigrants, several of whom become substitute aunts and uncles to Gogol and his sister, Sonia. An ongoing struggle is showed it as first generation immigrants and their children struggle to find their places and adjust themselves in the society. As the Ganguli parents struggle to adapt to a culture different from the one they used to be a part of , Gogol and Sonia, their children struggle, trying simultaneously to respect their roots while accomodating to the American society. The novel is the difficulty of identifying with the new world , old world, or both. First generation immigrants straddling two worlds, they strive