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The Women's Review of Books, March 2004 v21 i6 p9(2)

   Names and nicknames. (Book Review) Sen, Mandira.

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The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003, 298 pp., $240.00 hardcover.

Reflecting on the power of names as markers of identity, Jhumpa Lahiri takes the reader through the life of Gogol Ganguli, a second-generation male US immigrant from India. She delineates with insight and empathy how two generations of the Ganguli family come to terms with their very different lives and how, despite resistance and alienation, manage to build a bridge to each other. In a nation of immigrants, such stories are hardly unusual. Immigrants loosely grouped as "Asian" are beginning to write about their parents' homelands. In this novel, Lahiri introduces her Western readers to Bengali upper-caste, (Hindus of high ritual status), middle-class, well-educated immigrants who came to the US in the late 1960s to work in the medical and engineering professions or to teach in universities. Their middle-class status sets the Bengalis apart from many American immigrant communities, though the experience of cleaving to the ethnic community remains the same.

Lahiri's novel begins with Gogol Ganguli's father, Ashoke, who comes to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a graduate student in engineering. He later returns to Calcutta for an arranged marriage with Ashima Bhaduri, whose name provides a marker; like Ashoke, she is also a Brahmin--not surprising, as marriages are generally arranged on caste lines. Caste, however, does not play much of a role in The Namesake; it ceases to be of much relevance in America, where the commonalities of class and ethnic interests cement bonds within the community. Indeed for the second generation, Gogol and his sister Sonia, caste hardly rears its head. What is more interesting is that race as such is scarcely considered either. As educated immigrants within a university community, whose children are high achievers in a society that respects achievement, perhaps Lahiri's characters have been shielded from racial discrimination. But the lack of it in their lives is surprising. Throughout the book, Gogol's closest relationships are with mainstream American whites.

The importance of nomenclature to an alien society resonates throughout the novel. Lahiri discusses the practice of assigning two names, a pet name and a "good" name, that sets the Bengalis apart both abroad and in India:

   In Bengali the word for pet name
   is daknam, meaning, literally the
   name by which one is called by
   friends, family, and other intimates,
   at home and in other private,
   unguarded moments. Pet names
   are a ... reminder that life is not
   always so serious, so formal, so
   complicated. They are a reminder,
   too, that one is not all things to all
   people ... Every pet name is paired
   with a good name, a bhalonam, for
   identification in the outside world.
   Consequently, good names appear
   on envelopes, on diplomas, in telephone
   directories and in all other
   public places ... (p. 25)

Interestingly, the author herself uses her daknam, Jhumpa, as a bhalonam (I am indebted for this observation to Indrajit Hazra, who also points out that only Bengalis will have perceived it).

Gogol Ganguli's problem, as he sees it, is that he has been saddled with a daknam in the place of a bhalonam. Readers learn why he has been given this name well before Gogol does: Ashoke was saved from a train wreck because the pages in a book of short stories by the Russian writer, Gogol, fluttered in his hand, catching a rescuer's eye. Gogol first hears the story as a college student who has been feeling estranged from his family, and this moment of enlightenment is perhaps the most important in the book, and contributes to the building of the fragile bridge between the generations:

   And suddenly the sound of his pet
   name, uttered by his father as he
   has been accustomed to hearing it
   all his life, 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 ...
   Do I remind you of that night?'
 
   'Not at all,' his father says eventually
   ... 'You remind me of everything
   that followed.' (p. 124)

Before he leaves for Yale, Gogol reinvents himself by a legal deed as "Nikhil" ("he who is entire, encompassing all"), his parent' chosen bhalonam for him. And the name does free him from his parents' constraints. It is as Nikhil that he embarks on his adult life, as Nikhil that he loses his virginity at a party, as Nikhil that he begins to have relationships with white American women, keeping his private life secret from his parents:

   By the following year his parents
   know vaguely about Ruth. Though
   he has been to the farmhouse in
   Maine twice, meeting her father
   and her stepmother. Sonia, who
   secretly has a boyfriend these days,
   is the only person in his family to
   have met Ruth ... His parents have
   expressed no curiosity about his
   girlfriend. His relationship with her
   is one accomplishment in his life
   about which they are not in the
   least bit proud or pleased. (p. 116)

Thus, as Nikhil, he becomes part of the mainstream, not just a hyphenated American. On the surface, he lives a life not at all different from those of his fellow American students, yet the name Gogol still has a hold over him. Even his younger sister, Sonia, who has found it easier to break out of their parents' restrictive boundaries, insists on calling him Gogol or Goggles. She has abbreviated her own name, Sonali ("the golden one"), to Sona, and then changed it to Sonia, a link to the Russian literary culture her father enjoyed, and a more usual name in America. Sonia cuts her hair, goes to dances, and has a secret boyfriend while still in high school, yet urges her brother not to change his name because "he is Gogol."

Nikhil's university years and his first lob at a large architecture consulting company in New York--for he has broken free of the Indian immigrant parents' insistence on medicine, engineering, or some more "established" profession-enable him to distance himself further from his background. Yet Nikhil, so American in his education and apparent reinvention, still has enough of the glamour of difference to attract women like Maxine, an assistant editor with a New York art publisher whom he meets at a Tribeca loft party. He soon moves into her flat above her parents' beautiful Greek Revival house, in a remote block between Ninth and Tenth Avenues, perhaps the only part of the novel that appears like a fairy tale. "Intrigued by his background, by his years at Yale and Columbia, and his career as an architect, his Mediterranean looks," Maxine's parents accept him readily as their daughter's live-in partner. Throughout this relationship, Nikhil moves as far away as he can from his parents' world, trying to avoid being grouped with the ABCDs (American Born Confused/Conflicted Desis [Indians]), an acronym coined in India for the US immigrants who hover uncertainly between two identities.

Nikhil's parents, meanwhile, begin to slowly put out feelers into American society. During Nikhil's childhood, their social life took place completely within a Bengali circuit. Visits to Atlanta, Toronto, or Chicago were made solely to visit other Bengalis. There were also visits to Calcutta with the unwilling children in tow. These witnessed their parents' affirmation of their Indian identities in a surreal daze: "Within minutes, before their eyes Ashoke and Ashima slip into bolder, less complicated versions of themselves, their voices louder, their smiles wider, revealing a confidence Gogol and Sonia never see on Pemberton Road."

Back in America, they retreat into the safety of their Indian community. It is not until she is over 40 and takes a job at a public library that Ashirna makes American friends. When Ashoke leaves to work for two semesters at a university near Cleveland, she decides to remain behind so that she can continue her work, asserting her independence for the first time. Ashoke dies unexpectedly in Cleveland, and his death affects Nikhil critically. He gravitates to his family and tries to support his mother through her grief. Nikhil's devotion to his mother leads to a break with Maxine, who cannot understand his new priorities. After some time, Nikhil allows himself to be introduced to Moushumi, like him a secondgeneration Indian immigrant, whom he had known as a child. She, who had fled the pressures of her parents to become scholar of French literature, agrees to the match, and soon they marry They have much in common. Yet Moushumi feels drawn back into the world that had threatened in stifle her, and the marriage breaks up. Where does it leave Nikhil? He returns home once more to help his mother dismantle Pemberton Road as part of her decision to live six months in India (with an American passport) and six months in America.

Jhumpa Lahiri's beautifully crafted and elegantly written novel will speak to many. It is as different as it can be from the exotic outpourings of Indian immigrants writing in English for whom the home country provides a canvas for their magical interpretations. Here, Lahiri writes of people who need to make sense of their own destinies, in their own terms. It is interesting that, in Lahiri's account, Sonia has a much easier time adapting to the new society than Nikhil does. What if Lahiri's protagonist bad been a woman? Would she have been like Sonia, who participates easily in the white American mainstream during her high school days and later lives the life of a college student in California, changing apartments and roommates with ease, possibly because her parents have realized that they cannot enforce their preferences? Sonia sees herself as wholly American, selecting her partner, a Chinese American, without any help, or opposition, from her parents. Yet she remains committed to her Indian family, moving back to live with her mother after her father's death. Perhaps she is the catalyst that draws her mother into a more American lifestyle, helping her to break away from the old mold of the perpetually self-sacrificing mother or the unobtrusive widow who must never gratify herself. Or would she have been like Moushumi, who adapts by searching out a third identity in a French cosmopolitan character, getting away as far as she can from India and Indians? Perhaps Lahiri did not want to create a character whose experience would be too close to her own as a second-generation immigrant. By choosing to focus on a man who has difficulty reconciling his identity, she steers away from providing easy answers, offering readers a complex look into the immigrant experience.