Flora, Fauna and the Banana: Sep 11, 2007

The Namesake

by Jhumpa Lahiri

It was not without uneasiness that I took it upon myself to comment on this novel when both my co-bloggers are Indians; but The Namesake is the best novel I have read in a long while, and that is always reason enough to be a little forward

Despite her birth in London and her lifelong residence in the US, Jhumpa Lahiri confesses herself resigned to the label “Indian American”, and her preferred subject matter does justice to this description. The Namesake deals with the experiences of a family of Indian (Bengali) immigrants in America, the Gangulis; Ashoke, the father, and Ashima, the mother, are cleft between their loyalty to their Bengali origins and the need to adapt to their adopted country, while their son Gogol is bent on shedding his Bengali legacy and embracing an all-out American existence. Out of this material, Lahiri has created what is to my view an impressive and delightful narrative.

So far my Indian friends have been unanimous in liking the book less than I did. (I must exonerate Sujata, who is still to take the plunge.) One obvious reason for this is that they are much more familiar with Indian English writers, which renders them less impressionable and much keener to spot the stereotypical. Another is that they take for granted a great deal in Indian culture that may surprise the interested dummy. I am slowly getting acquainted with India and its complexities, being already able to have occasional insights where all used to be darkness. When Ashima’s mother tells her to “go straight to the bedroom and prepare herself,” because “a man was waiting to see her,” my recent knowledge of arranged marriages in India loaded her sentence with implications that are lost on a dummier-than-me while being commonplace for Indians. The same applies to Gogol’s difficulties in learning to write Bengali, a language I have been toying with myself: I could easily sympathise with his pains, which wouldn’t sound so true to people who have never struggled with a Brahmic script or who have known one since forever. For these and other glimpses of understanding and sympathy I couldn’t help feeling grateful. The same applies to the conspicuousness of the American university circuit in the book; I am now hoping to enter that very world, which makes any realistic depictions of it deeply interesting for me.

So, yes, my present interests were a major personal factor behind my good opinion of the novel, and they can’t be shared by readers differently placed. That said, I still think there are considerable merits of another sort in The Namesake, merits which are less dependent on personal circumstances. If it is true that Lahiri’s theme (the so-called “diasporic predicament”) is now stereotypical among Indian English writers, it is also true that stereotypes may be originally and skilfully handled. Lahiri’s characters are engagingly portrayed (Ashima is a tour de force), she has a special eye for the telling detail, some passages are truly well contrived (the package lost in the train, the phone call from India contrasting with the local, “American” noise of water running from an open tap, Ashima's lonely nights before a TV with the sound off), and descriptions are overall well controlled, avoiding at once the extremes of prudishness and that concentration on sordidness I was sorry to find in Arundhati Roy and Anita Desai. Moreover, the usual charge that The Namesake lacks thematic cohesiveness (for instance, in the seeming irrelevance of the title and in the alleged looseness of its second half) doesn’t seem fair to my view. I will try to justify the opposite claim: that the title is all-important and informs the main thread of the novel, which is consistently pursued in both halves of it.

Readers of the book know that the protagonist was named after the novelist Nikolai Gogol, whose tale “The Overcoat” led to Ashoke being rescued from a train disaster in India before his son’s birth. The protagonist, then, is the novelist’s “namesake”, and his obscure relation to the true Gogol is a major source of wonder for readers. What is then the parallel, besides the fact that the historical Gogol also dropped a surname and visited Rome? I will suggest one below, which won’t be very relevant, however, unless I advance a previous bit of information. The younger cousins of Jhumpa Lahiri had a friend, a little boy, whose pet name was Gogol, and since her acquaintance with him Lahiri had wanted to write about a character with that name¹. She was in a position to appreciate the problems such a character would face, since her own name (originally meant to be a pet name — a Bengali daknam) had been an early source of vexation to her. Now, although I am sure she could have found some more meaningful parallel in case she had looked for it, “Gogol” does bring an important implication: like the novel’s protagonist, Nikolai Gogol was a man who steered away from his Ukrainian heritage in order to embrace Russian culture and language. Given Lahiri’s previous fondness for the name, this parallel was probably enough to justify her choice.

If that was all, we might justly say that the title is a trifle. But the word “namesake” here has symbolic implications as well: it stands not only for the association of Gogol with a writer he prefers not to know, but also for his association with a culture he prefers not to acknowledge. From the start, the name “Gogol” stands for the Bengali immigrant contained in the protagonist. When his father finally tells him the secret reason behind his name (the train accident that also made him decide to leave India), the sound of that name suddenly

means something completely new, bound up with a catastrophe he has unwittingly embodied for years. “Is that what you think of when you think of me?” Gogol asks him. “Do I remind you of that night?”

“Not at all,” his father says eventually, one had going to his ribs, a habitual gesture that has baffled Gogol until now. “You remind me of everything that followed.”

“Everything that followed” is the immigration experience, the complex attempt to find a new place to live without becoming deracinated in the process. The word “Gogol” is intrinsically related to all that, so that in the context of the novel to keep that name, to be a “namesake”, is to be a Bengali immigrant, only half-American.

Emancipation, on the other hand, must involve a change in status. Gogol’s status as a “namesake” is accordingly fleeting: he changes his name to Nikhil, which coincides with his move away from his family and from his Bengali inheritance. The second half of the novel concentrates at first on his attempts to bury Gogol and be Nikhil for good. This quest for a thorough americanness is illustrated by his long affair with Maxine. His father’s death, however, shatters his determination, and his relationship crashes down. It is from this point, when “Nikhil” has already built an existence of his own, that echoes from his former life as Gogol — from his former status as a namesake — start calling him back to his family. His next big affair with Moushumi is a result of his re-approximation to his mother. But Moushumi herself is way too de-Bengalised to be a fit match for him at such a juncture: she was determined from childhood to avoid Bengalis, she can’t write the language, she knows about his name but makes a joke of it. “Gogol” has no serious place in her life. And “Nikhil” can no longer stand on his own.

What started as a movement towards independence has become a movement towards disorientation, with Gogol willing to accept his Bengali side in the very moment when he could no longer sustain it. This feeling reaches its height for Gogol when his mother, after years of widowhood, decides to move back to Calcutta:

Without people in the world to call him Gogol, no matter how long he himself lives, Gogol Ganguli will, once and for all, vanish from the lips of loved ones, and so, cease to exist. Yet the thought of this eventual demise provides no sense of victory, no solace. It provides no solace at all.

This kind of fear — the fear that the passing away of the original immigrants will result in the offspring having no firm identity — is very much shared by the writer. In Lahiri’s words:

I have always believed that I lack the authority my parents bring to being Indian. But as long as they live they protect me from feeling like an impostor. Their passing will mark not only the loss of the people who created me but the loss of a singular way of life, a singular struggle. (...)

Everything will change once they die. They will take certain things with them—conversations in another tongue, and perceptions about the difficulties of being foreign. Without them, the back-and-forth life my family leads, both literally and figuratively, will at last approach stillness. An anchor will drop, and a line of connection will be severed.²

That movement from denial to acceptance to deracination is the main thread of the book, and the author, as I hope to have shown, never loses sight of it. In the final chapter Gogol finally realises that never again will he be able to be a “namesake” (bearing in mind the symbolic implications of the word), and that his life will be thereafter confined to his partial identity as Nikhil. It is then that he goes back to the old volume of Gogol’s short stories that his father had left him. It was his first and last link to a world that from then on would belong to the past.