Predicament of Name in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake

Abstract

Man is known by his name. He gets identity in the society by his name. Name helps in getting the social status too. When one migrates to unknown territory the question of identity arises and remains unanswerable. The question of identity is always difficult especially for people who are culturally displaced. Culturally displaced people live in two worlds. As Nikolai Gogol in ‘The Overcoat' describes that ‘The reader should realize himself that it could not have happened otherwise, and that to give him any other name was quite out of question.' The Namesake is a story about the struggles and hardships of a Bengali couple who immigrate to the United States to make a life outside of everything they know. The author Jhumpa Lahiri believes that immigrants have the feeling of exile and the constant sense of alienation when they start life on a foreign land. It causes loneliness and the knowledge of and longing for a lost world (mother land) are more explicit and distressing than for their children.  The Namesake narrates story about the assimilation of an Indian Bengali Family, the Gangulis, from Calcutta, into America, over thirty years (from 1968-2000). The cultural dilemmas experienced by them and their American born children are different. They suffer spatial, cultural and emotional dislocations in their effort to settle "home” in the new land where as their children- Gogol and Sonia are born on the American land-new land struggle to assimilate with the Indian culture and traditions.