The Namesake As a Text VS Movie
The Namesake is a 2003 novel written by Pulitzer prize award winning writer Jhumpa Lahiri. Her interpreter of Maladies won Pulitzer prize for its brilliant diasporic theme. The novel minutely highlights the theme of diasporic characters of first and second generation through Ashoke, Ashima, Gogol and Sonia. The main protagonist Gogol from second generation suffers from a dual identity. He is called 'ABCD' (American Born Confused Desi).
The Namesake
Summary of the novel The Namesake:-
The Namesake: Text vs. Film Adaptation
"Like her subtle, precise stories, this novel moves quietly, eloquently across its central arc from the birth of a son to the death of the father … Lahiri's narrative moves lightly through time, landing on selected years, as one would move through the pages of a photo album. Her point of view shuttles between the parents and their son, and is richly sympathetic to both generations … In this post-modern era, culture fragments and ties of blood disappoint. Lahiri honors a bond stronger, and more transcendent than either of those." (Hallgren, 2003)
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A remarkable critical review by Sherri Hallgren on The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Journal is very important that focuses on Lahiri's portrayal of Cultural Collision between the two generations of Diasporic people. Jhumpa Lahiri's award winning novel The Namesake provides a comprehensive guide to the readers through the study of cultural bias and disposition of the diasporic people. Lahiri, the narrator tells the story of a young married couple Ashoke and Ashima Ganguly who, from a Bengali family of Calcutta, start living in New York and their
giving birth to Gogol centres the major issue of the novel. Nikhil Gogol Ganguly brings up with American cultures and traditions but at home and neighbourhood, he learns Bengali culture. Lahiri through the character of Gogol has created an autobiographical trace in the novel. Being a daughter of first generation Bengali immigrant parents and a raconteur, she has vividly depicted the cultural gap between the first and the second generations, the sense of rootlessness and an unaccustomed feeling in accepting another culture. She gradually constructs her own mode of writing in a flashback narrative technique. Her contribution in depicting the cultural crisis among the main characters through the phenomenal novel is so enormous and vivid that leads her to achieve a grand success.
"The art of film making is shot with physical mental and intellectual challenges but interestingly it is these challenges which fascinate the filmmaker. And the film made by overcoming all the circumstantial adversities may not always be a grand or great one, but the greatest reward that if filmmaker is ultimately blessed with is that the entire process involving all the strains, hardships, frustrations and even failures change him into a qualitatively better human being than he was before starting the process." (Dey, 2005)
This emphatic positive note said on the context of Satyajit Ray's essay A Long Time on the Little Road which is so meaningful and reliable in this context tells the film director's passionate dedication in making the entire film. Mira Nair, a renowned film director of 'Diasporic Film' has embedded a great personality after directing two popular movies Monsoon Wedding (2001) and Vanity Fair (2004) in Hollywood industry. She has directed ‗The Namesake‘ movie which has earned eighty-six percent positive reviews. Her enormous film-making style has enchanted the audience so much that helps her achieve a renowned position. The research on film adaptations explores some fruitful areas by a continuous investigative study and by this, the aesthetic value of a film can be compared with the novel or book. She, the film director of the movie through her deep investigative study on the film script and the novel has pointed out major themes and to highlight those themes, she has used many objective correlatives by adding background music.
peril images and sounds and sad meaningful Bengali songs etc. Her foreseeable focus and intellectuality and also her deep engagement with the movie are so magnificent that it can be viewed if anyone watches her films. Mira Nair along with Irrfan Khan, Tabu and Sooni Taraporvella has opined in an interview in Los Angeles that ‗The Namesake‘ is a film that was born out of the Novel of Jhumpa but it was also the film born out of knowledge of Boston City and Calcutta. It is a hybrid film and it tends to do so...." (History, 2012) She also expressed that ‗The namesake‘ is a field that holds a great anonymous Bengali culture and the Bengali films directed by Satyajit Ray who has a great intellectuality and foresight in making films, are so realistic and inspiring that engrave an impression in her mind. ‗The Namesake‘ is a film based on the reality of the diasporic people. The scenes are arranged chronologically and seem to be true to life.
Mira Nair presents the movie plot in a chronological narrative form. The chronological scenes are neatly arranged from the inception of the film. The bespectacled and scholarly attitude has been given to a suitable actor Irrfan Khan who, throughout the film, leads the role of a mature father. He possesses to have his kids good future. Tabu, the role maker of Ashima Ganguly who has grown up in the city of Calcutta is now bringing up her kids in a country which is completely alien to her. The scene starts with the train accident and Ashok's obsession in reading his grandfather's gifted book the collection of short stories by Nikolai Gogol, a Russian author, which would later become very indicative with the gradual progress of the movie. Then Ashok and Ashima's marriage and their living together and their suffering in bringing up their kids Gogol and Sonia in a completely different world have been scripted consecutively. The diasporic people are unhappy in an alien world because they are neither satisfied with their singular identity (root identity) nor with their diasporic identity (dual identity). They suffer the fear of schizophrenia that is the loss of the original communal identity and at the same time they try to accustom themselves with the new communal identity. Their longing for homecoming is not fulfilled because the homeland exists in the minds of the diasporas as an absence and they reproduce an imaginary world of their homeland. Ashima seems to be romanticizing the moment when Gogol is born, that his Calcutta family members would be there beside her if she had been in India. In this cinema Ashoke and Ashima are suffering internally but they sacrifice everything for their kids' future. At the beginning, Ashima faces difficulties in making contacts with American citizens, especially when she is admitted in a hospital before giving to birth Gogol because of her grammatical error while speaking, her English fluency and pronunciation that have been shown in the film. Their gradual consistency in adopting the new culture, tradition and ritual is supposed to be a big sacrifice for the sake of their kids. They always want to have Gogol married to an Indian woman because they desire their children to balance the same culture, ritual and tradition what they have carried till now. Gogol who was born as an American citizen did not feel American culture problematic because it is his born culture, but what makes him worry is his name ‗Gogol‘.
The Namesake as a Movie
The main focus of the movie emphasizes on the iconic image of the multicultural heterogeneity of the novel. It also focuses on the loneliness and alienation and facing difficulties in adopting the cultural and social milieu of a new world of the first generation and the suffering of the cultural crisis and identity which is an imposed one, of the second generation. Nair seems to be representing the problem of identification of Gogol's name. Gogol thinks that the nickname that has been given to him is a conflicting and imposed one because he grows up in American culture but his Russian name is irrelevant to his attitude and personality: ―he hates that his name is both absurd and Obscure, that it has nothing to do with who he is, that it is neither Indian nor American but of all things Russian. He hates having to live with it, with a pet name turned good name, day after day, second after second‖ (Lahiri, 2003). Then he changes his middle name 'Gogol' and tells his parents to call him 'Nikhil'. After three years of this incident, his father tells him the whole story of 1961 train accident and how he was rescued at that time. Through the movie, this train accident and the importance of the book in the context of his name 'Nikhil Gogol' have been shown multiple times to emphasize its relation with the name. At the end, Nikhil opens the book and reads the first page: ―The man who gave you his name, from the man who gave you your name‖ (Khan, 2006).
