The Namesake

The main topic of Lahiri’s novel The Namesake deals with the way immigrants to the US conform to their new lives and how they establish a functional connection between their country of origin and their new life in America. Focusing on the Indian Bengali Ganguli family, the author examines how Ashima and Ashoke as first-generation immigrants, adapt to a new culture, and how Gogol, an American-born Bengali, deals with his complex cultural identity.

At the opening of the novel, Ashoke is completing his PhD at MIT, which implies that his status in the US is already established to a certain degree. This allows him to marry a woman his parents have chosen for him, in following with Bengali customs, and bring her to the US. Ashima abandons her studies of literature and arrives to America, feeling a deep sense of dislocation and alienation. As opposed to Ashoke, she has no obligations on which to focus, and as she soon becomes pregnant, she feels trapped in a double state of exile: from her country and from social life. In her eyes, America is at first cold, grey, and inhospitable, and she feels afraid to leave the apartment. In the meantime, Ashoke, to whom the author dedicates less attention, appears to settle peacefully into his new life, his third “birth,” after having survived a catastrophic train accident in India.