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Displaced Immigrants In The Namesake
Jhumpa Lahiri in her works, The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowland, travels through her experiences of an Indian woman across the world. She deals with the multicultural society both from ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, seeking to find her native identity as well as the identity in the adopted country. In her novels, first-generation immigrant women are always in constant search of their identity. Her women characters belonging to diasporic communities face the cultural dilemma. Throughout the novels, Jhumpa Lahiri tries to depict the predicament of women and she tries to focus on parenthood and marital relations.
Lahiri’s works have a deep insight into women’s problems and dilemmas, with a realistic portrait of a contemporary woman. The female protagonists in her novels are in constant search of meaning and value in their life. She explains the cross-cultural experiences of dislocated women and the condition of belonging in the maze of cultural plurality. In the novel, The Namesake, Lahiri discusses the sense of alienation, anxiety, and disillusionment that the characters faced once they have migrated abroad. In The Namesake, Ashima and Ashoke migrate to the US, the socio-economic influence prompts their migration.
In The Namesake, Ashoke Ganguli moves to the United States to pursue his Ph.D. in fiber optics at MIT. As a Bengali middle-class boy, he doesn’t have any intention of going abroad initially, and he also believes that a good book can help a person “travel without moving an inch”(TN 16).
Later, Ashoka changed his mind when he met a stranger, Mr.Ghosh, on the Train during the travel to Jamshedpur to visit his grandparents. On that fateful night, he met with an accident, the train wreck. The Rescuers find him holding the book, “The Overcoat”. He thanks Nikholai Gogol, a Russian author for saving his life as he had been awake reading Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat’. Soon he comes to know that Mr.Ghosh is dead. That fateful night becomes an etched memory forever. Ashoke becomes bedridden for several months as he had several injuries. Then, he decides to go abroad to pursue his studies, once he regained strength.
After two years stay in America, Ashoke returns to Calcutta. His parents arranged the marriage for him with Ashima Bhaduri, nineteen years old Bengali girl. Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli leave their tradition-bound life in Calcutta and moved to settle in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Ashima tries to adapt herself to a new spatial and cultural setting, since her landing in America. Ashima has no high dream of going to Boston, a place so far from her parents, but the marriage creates no ill-feeling in her- “Won’t he be there?”(9). Ashima leaves Calcutta to fly alone with Ashoke, with a heavy heart and lots of instructions from her family members and relatives who come to see her off at Dum Dum Airport, “ not to eat beef or wear skirts or cut off her hair and forget the family the moment she landed in Boston”(37).
The Namesake opens with the pregnant Ashima trying to make a spicy Bengali snack, which is usually sold in the sidewalks of Calcutta, with the American ingredients:
“ Ashima Ganguli stands in the Kitchen of a Central Square Apartment, combining Rice
Krispies and planters peanuts and chopped red onion and adds salt lemon juices, thin
slices of green chili pepper – a humble appropriation of the snack sold for pennies on
Calcutta sidewalks and on Railway station throughout India- Tasting from a cupped palm,
she frowns; as usual, something is missing”. (TN 1)
In the novel The Namesake, the tale begins in the kitchen, and Lahiri’s novel contains aromas and flavors of food. In this novel, the dinners and parties were Indian Bengali food, served on occasions of communion among the members of the Bengali community. Throughout the novel, food plays a major role and it acts as a link between the characters and their own traditions. Hence, those Bengali traditions become “Americanized”( ).
In the three-room apartment in Boston, Ashima feels homesick and upset. She feels spatially and emotionally dislocated from the comfortable ‘home’ of her father full of loved ones and she wishes to go back. Ashima remains lost in the memories of her ‘home’. She spends on re-reading Bengali short stories, poems, and articles from the Bengali Magazines she has bought from Calcutta. Thinking of Motherhood in a foreign land disturbs her badly: “ That was happening so far from home, unmonitored and unobserved by those whom she loved, had made it more miraculous still. But she is terrified to raise a child in a country where she is related to no one, where she knows little, where life seems so tentative and space”(6).
Ashima is longing for her homeland. She does not have a happy life in her host land, because there is always thought of her family ruined her mind. If she had been in India, she would have been surrounded by innumerable relatives, but now there is no one there to accompany her. She severely misses her relatives in Calcutta. Her unhappiness and loneliness are reflected in the attempts to recreate her homeland through memory and Nostalgia.
She sinks in nostalgia: “ In India, she thinks to herself, women go home to their parents to give birth, away from husbands and in-laws and household cares, retreating briefly to childhood when the baby arrives”(TN 4).
