Priyanka
Sharma
Priyanka Sharma is an
independent researcher and she completed her Master’s Degree (Gold Medalist) in
English Literature in 2014 and M. Phil in 2016 from Central University of
Odisha, Koraput. Her interests include Postcolonial Studies, South Asian
Literature, Film & Literature and Himalayan Studies
Abstract
Whether it is a forced or
a conscious re-location, the migrants are neither able to cast off their
inherited legacy nor encapsulate themselves in the new socio-cultural
environment. In a perilous balance between two cultures, building a bridge by
forging a middle path is similar to the act of walking on a tight rope. Such is
the life of the immigrants who venture out to make their own living away from
their native lands. The migrant writers bring out the problems of the impact of
migration on people with respect to the situation of identity crisis emerging
out of various factors in an alien location. This paper will study the crisis
of identity as experienced by the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake from a postcolonial
perspective.
Keywords:
Jhumpa
Lahiri; migration; identity crisis; diaspora, culture; immigrant
We are like “chiffon sarees” – a sort
of cross-breed attempting to adjust to the pressures of a new world, while
actually being from another older one. (Jussawalla 583)
In
a perilous balance between two cultures, building a bridge by forging a middle
path is similar to the act of walking on a tight rope. Such is the life of the
immigrants who venture out to make their own living away from their native
lands. This paper will study the crisis of identity as experienced by the
characters in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The
Namesake (2006) from a postcolonial perspective. The eminent critic, Stuart
Hall, in Colonial Discourses and Post
Colonial Theory: A Reader (1994) observes “diaspora identities are those
which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through
transformation and difference.” According to him, the diaspora experience “is
defined, not by the essence or purity but by recognition of heterogeneity and
diversity, by a conception of ‘identity’ which lives with and through, not
despite, differences” (402).
To
understand Lahiri’s predicament from the roots, we need to look into Indian
Diaspora in the United States of America (USA). Hiral Macwan in the article “Struggle
for Identity and Diaspora in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake” mentions that the first significant
presence of the Indians appeared almost one hundred years ago when peasants
from the province of Punjab started migrating the West Coast for seeking employment
in Washington load mills and California’s vast agricultural fields (45-46). Though
predominantly Sikhs, they were described in the popular press as “Hindus”, and
almost from the beginning they were seen as incomparable, possessed of
“immodest and filthy habits”, the “most undesirable of all the eastern Asiatic
races….” (45-46). The subsequent waves of migration included students and “professional
Indians” especially in the early sixties went to the United States as a part of
“brain drain” (Spivak 61). Moreover, the IT wave and rising economy attracted a
large number of Indians who emigrated to the USA. In certain cases, migration
was triggered by political factors and religious discrimination as well (Macwan
45-46).
As the novel The Namesake opens we find Ashima Ganguly in the kitchen preparing
a concoction which she has been consuming since her pregnancy. Right from the
beginning Lahiri sheds light on the diasporic sensibilities through the
description of the settings or characters. She leaves traces at places for the
readers to grasp the things left unsaid. For instance, Ashima’s wish for
mustard oil is an essential ingredient in the kitchen of every Indian
household. A drop or two of mustard oil would complete her combination of “Rice
Krispies, Planter peanuts, chopped red onion,” to which she adds “salt, lemon
juice, thin slices of green chili pepper” (Lahiri 1).
In
the hospital where she is admitted to deliver her first child, numerous
thoughts cross her mind. “She wonders if she is the only Indian person in the
hospital, but a gentle twitch from the baby reminds her that she is,
technically speaking, not alone” (3-4). In fact, she finds it very strange that
her child will be born in a hospital where people enter as patients or to die.
In India instead the lady is sent away from her in-laws or husbands to her
parents’ home, giving birth to the child under the supervision of the
neighbourhood women.
But nothing feels normal to Ashima.
For the past eighteen months, ever since she’s arrived in Cambridge nothing has
felt normal at all. It’s not so much pain, which she knows, somehow, she will
survive. It’s the consequence: motherhood in a foreign land… That it was
happening so far from home, unmonitored and unobserved by those she loved… But
she is terrified to raise a child in a country where she is related to no one,
where she knows so little, where life seems so tentative and spare. (5-6)
Ashima
has been struggling for eighteen months, since the day she landed in America.
Born and brought up in a typical Indian Bengali household, she feels uprooted
in the foreign land. A sense of loss, nostalgia coupled with the fear of bringing
up her child alone in America define the emotional predicament of the migrants.
It is true that the first-generation migrants would experience it even more intensely.
Smriti Singh comments:
It is said about
Indian women that they are born in an expatriate state and the movements away
from home to an alien country is only an accentuation of gendered exile they
have borne all along. Survival in their case is the need to survive the pain of
uprooting and the ‘shock of arrival’. This is followed by the struggle to
surmount the obstacles and comfortably adapt to the new environment. (62)
The
conflict within an individual because of the contrast between the environment
within the house of an Indian family and the American setting outside,
generally gives rise to the situation of crisis. One cannot adhere to either of
the two cultures. This is the case especially with Gogol Ganguli, the
protagonist of The Namesake. His
result of identity crisis is nevertheless also because of his name. Awaiting a
letter to be arrived from Ashima’s grandmother which contains the name of the
child to be born to Ashima, the couple end up naming their child “Gogol” under
the pressure of hospital authorities. It is officially mandatory to give their
child a legal name before getting discharged from the hospital. In India,
“names can wait” and the elders of the family decide the ‘good name’, usually
when the child has to enroll himself in a school (25).
Jhumpa
Lahiri, like Gogol, is her pet name which her school authorities record as the
official name as it is easier than her other names like Nilanjana or Sudeshna.
And through these and for other reasons she feels neglected. In an interview
released by Houghton Mifflin Company she explains: “As a young child, I felt
that the Indian part of me was unacknowledged, and therefore somehow negated,
by my American environment, and vice versa. I felt that I led two very separate
lives” (Das 178).
This
problem of naming/mis-naming, faced by Ashoke and Ashima in America is an
example of the kind of cultural dilemma the immigrants face in the foreign
land. It is difficult to make the foreigners understand this distinction. The
manners of the immigrants are mocked at. As a result they feel bewildered at
this humiliation. They show all forms of resistance. It is here, at this
juncture the conflict occurs when the there is a tension between the codes of
the two distinct cultures.
Lahiri
quotes Dostoyevsky’s saying in the novel – “We all came out of Gogol’s
overcoat” (78). When she was asked in an interview as above, if the Russian
novelist Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol had any influence on her as a writer, she
replied:
“I’m
not sure influence is the right word. I don’t turn to Gogol as consistently as
I do to certain other writers when I’m struggling with character or language.
His writing is more overtly comic, more antic and absurd than mine tends to be.
But I admire his work enormously and reread a lot of it as I was working on the
novel, in addition to reading biographical material. “The overcoat” is such a
superb story. It really does haunt me the way it haunts the character of Ashoke
in the novel …without the inspiration of Nikolai Gogol, without his name and
without his writing, my novel would never, have been conceived. In that
respect, this book came out of Gogol’s overcoat, quite literally.” (Das 180-181)
To
understand the significance of this in the life of Ashoke and ultimately as an
inheritance to his son Gogol, we need to analyze the life-changing episode in
the life of Ashoke. On October 20, 1961, when Ashoke is twenty–two, he travels
to Ranchi from Howrah to visit his grandparents. The only book he carries is a
collection of short stories by Nikolai Gogol, gifted to him by his grandfather
when he graduates from class twelve. As the train starts pulling from the
station, he begins rereading his favourite in the collection, “The Overcoat”.
What is captivating for him is the story of Akaky Akakievich, a humble clerk,
who loves his work of merely copying the contents of any document written by
others. His colleagues used to bully this odd, weird, impoverished clerk.
Each time reading the account of
Akaky’s christening, the series of queer names his mother had rejected he
laughed aloud. Ashoke was always devastated when Akaky was robbed… leaving him
cold and vulnerable, and Akaky’s death some pages later, never failed to bring
tears to his eyes… Just as Akaky’s ghost haunted the final pages, so did it
haunt a place deep in Ashoke’s soul, shedding light on all that was irrational,
all that was inevitable about the world. (14)
Here in the train, Ashoke has a chance
meeting with Mr. Ghosh, a co-traveller who advises him to visit England and
America while he is still young and free. “Do yourself a favour. Before it’s
too late, without thinking too much about it first, pack a pillow and a blanket
and see as much of the world as you can. You will not regret it. One day it
will be too late” he tells Ashoke (16).
At
two-thirty in the morning, 209 kilometers from Calcutta, this train meets with
an accident. This is the most traumatic incident of his life, the thought of
which makes him shudder even now. Badly injured and lying amid the rubble that
night, he hears the voice of the rescue party, and somehow is able to raise his
hand clutching the page of ‘The Overcoat’ which finally brings him to notice,
therefore he gets rescued. This accident makes him limp slightly at the left
foot for his life. But it is a kind of rebirth to him. Not only because of his
deep-seated love for his favourite author, which he considers the lucky charm
for saving his life, Ashoke holds the author in deep regard and seeks
inspiration from him. He feels special kind of kinship with him. As a person he
wants to leave India and travel to various places in order to carve a new
identity different from the one he had in India. Like Ashoke, even Nikolai
Gogol had spent most of his adult life outside his home. Therefore, he keeps
the name of his first-born child as ‘Gogol’, unaware of the fact that this pet
name would turn into an official name which would torment his child throughout
his growing years.
Ashima
raises Gogol with pride. Since Ashoke has been “hired as an Assistant Professor
of Electrical Engineering at the University” they shift to a University town
outside Boston (48). It is more distressing for Ashima, much more than moving
from Calcutta to Cambridge. Feeling lonely and displaced in the foreign land,
Ashima begins to realize:
… being a foreigner… is a sort of
life –long – pregnancy – a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous
felling of out of sorts. It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what
had once been ordinary life, only to discover that previous life had vanished, replaced
by something more complicated and demanding. Like pregnancy, being a foreigner,
Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers,
the same combination of pity and respect. (49)
To
be in a foreign country and to sustain oneself is a very big challenge. The
above quoted lines are true not only for Ashima but any immigrant. The “constant
burden” mentioned by Lahiri is the burden on their shoulders to not only keep
themselves intact in the foreign land but also to preserve or conserve the
culture and the tradition of their native lands which the immigrants carry with
themselves. The feeling of being out of place, dislocated or displaced is one
of the central themes of diasporic writing and Lahiri has been successful enough
to portray the same through the character of Ashima. Although the
second-generation immigrants adopt and assimilate in the host country yet their
identity is related to the migration history of their parents and grandparents.
The first generation migrants always have a greater difficulty settling down in
a new land than the second generation who fit much easily, like Gogol and
Sonia.
As
a child Gogol could hardly understand the reasons behind the sudden change of
his name at school. When he is repeatedly asked questions by calling him
‘Nikhil’ at school by the principal Mrs. Lapidus, Gogol does not respond. It is
perplexing for her to understand that if the child has been legally named as
‘Gogol Ganguli’, why is there the need to call him by ‘Nikhil’ at the school.
Finally, she settles at the name of ‘Gogol’ since she realizes that only when
addressed by this name does the child respond. This happens because the
principal is unaware of the general trend of naming the kids in an Indian
Bengali household. It is taxing for the Americans to understand this tradition
of naming. To avoid unnecessary speculation or confusion, at the time of the
birth of Gogol’s sister, Ashoke and Ashima are ready with a name – ‘Sonali’.
Assimilation,
i.e., individuals or groups of differing heritages acquiring the basic habits,
attitudes and modes of life of an embracing culture is visible in the novel at
many instances.
The Gangulis learn to roast turkeys,
albeit rubbed with garlic and cumin and cayenne, at Thanksgiving, to nail
wreath to their door in December, to wrap woolen scarves around snowmen, to
colour boiled eggs violet or pink at Easter and hide them around the house. For
the sake of Gogol and Sonia they celebrate, with progressively increasing
fanfare, the birth of Christ, an event the children look forward to far more
than the worship of Durga and Saraswati. (64)
Gogol and Sonia themselves love being at home
during Christmas, while during pujas, they are required to throw marigold
petals at a card board effigy of a goddess and eat bland vegetarian food. “At
the insistence of Gogol, Ashima makes him an American dinner once a week as a
treat” (65). Young Gogol hates his Bengali classes and wishes to be at a ballet
or softball practice, and also because it keeps him away from his drawing
classes.
The
peculiarity of his name becomes prominent to him when one day in the sixth
grade on a field trip, the children are taken to a graveyard and are asked to
trace out the names by rubbing crayons against the newsprint. Gogol, one after
another, comes across very unique names, their oddness and flamboyance appeals
to him. But back at home Ashima is horrified at hearing this kind of a project.
She does not make place for the rubbings in the kitchen where his other
creations are displayed. But for reasons unexplained he cannot do away with
them. He finds a kind of connection with the names. He puts them behind his
chest of drawers rather than throwing away the paper rolls as instructed by his
mother.
The
fascination for the peculiarity of his name is not for long because gradually
this same peculiarity torments him. On Gogol’s fourteenth birthday Ashoke gifts
him The Short Stories of Nikolai Gogol.
“Do you know what Dostoyevsky once said?” says Ashoke as he reaches to the door
of Gogol’s room. “We all came out of Gogol overcoat”. “What’s that supposed to
mean?” retorts Gogol all confused. “It will make sense to you one day”, remarks
Ashoke (78). Probably what he means to say here is that had it not for the
Russian author, Gogol would not have been born. Ashoke somehow feels indebted
to the author for the pages of his short story saving his own life in the train
wreck. Also, he followed the author’s example and made his life outside homeland.
Just as the pages of the book protected him, on a deeper level cosmic power
protects all human beings, and so does the overcoat.
Ashoke
wants his son to know the reasons behind gifting him the book because of the
sentiments attached to it. But he does not want to narrate the story of his
near-to-death experience to his child on his birthday. So he decides to keep
everything to himself, until one night when Gogol comes home in the weekend
during his graduation years, Ashoke does reveal the entire story to him. Gogol
is utterly shocked at this revelation. Until then he just knew the fact that
Nikolai Gogol was his father’s favourite author and his father limps because he
probably met with an accident while playing soccer, but now he feels like a
stone and he becomes numb for a moment. Different emotions run through him like
disgust, embarrassment, and fear. He takes time to “absorb the information, feeling
awkward, oddly ashamed, at fault” (120). He apologizes to his dad and suddenly
the pet name which he has been hearing all this while means completely
different to him. A name related to such a ‘catastrophe’ Gogol asks his father,
“Do I remind you of that night?” “Not at all. You remind me of everything that
followed” says Ashoke (124).
Here
we can clearly draw a line of demarcation between the fourteen year old Gogol,
who tosses away the book gifted to him by his dad and the one to whom the truth
is revealed. Probably, Ashoke does the right thing by not revealing to him the
story because at that age, Gogol would not have been able to understand the
sentiments attached to his name. There is always a unique quality in the
relationships that exists among people in India like father–son,
mother–daughter, husband–wife, brother–sister or friends. All these relations
are bound by sentiments of love, understanding, friendship and many more
emotions. No matter how far people stay, but the warmth of love always binds
them together. Gogol, although feels restless at home, as he grows up, confines
himself to his own room in the college days because he loves being there all
alone, on his own, without any sort of prohibitions upon him.
In
his growing years Gogol suffers from the stigma that he feels attached to his
name. A name he got by accident. Every now and then he is asked questions
regarding his name. Gogol has a different perception of his name:
The writer he is named after – Gogol
isn’t his first name. His first name is Nikolai. Not only does Gogol Ganguli
have a pet name turned good name, but a last name turned first name. And so, it
occurs to him that no one he knows in the world, in Russia or India or America
or anywhere, shares his name. Not even the source of his namesake. (78)
In fact, identity is one’s state of being.
It is what or who a person is and how distinct he is from others. Amartya Sen
defines identity as fluid, multi-dimensional, pluralistic that cannot be limited
to a singular identity. The question of identity arises due to migration and
exile particularly after the end of colonial rule. It becomes a very complex
phenomenon in the era of globalization, to locate and define a specific place
for oneself. Kathryn Woodward in Identity
and Difference argues:
Identities
in the contemporary world derive from a multiplicity of sources from
nationality, ethnicity, social class, community, gender, sexuality – sources
may conflict in the construction of identity positions and lead to contradictory
fragmented identities…. Identity gives us an idea who we are and how we relate
to others and to the world in which we live. (1)
It
is seen that identity is often constructed in terms of binary oppositions –
self/other, us/them, insider/outsider, black/white, man/woman etc. And these
binaries are culturally determined. Stuart Hall also makes an interesting study
in his essay “Culture Identity and Diaspora” (2003) where he says, “Identity is
not as transparent and unproblematic as we think.” According to Hall there are
two kinds of identity – “first, identity as being that includes a sense of
commonality, and second, identity as ‘becoming’” He remarks this with relation
to diasporic identities and uses Derrida’s theory of ‘difference/differance’ to
explain the same. For him ‘difference’ becomes ‘differance’ when meaning is
always postponed or deferred by a chain of signifiers. That means, the meaning
is not fixed, static or stable. Similarly, identities are forever changing,
with no fixities or stability (401-402).
Although
Gogol and Sonia have Indian ancestry, they are Americans by birth. Apart from
their own home, they do not get the Indian atmosphere anywhere. Therefore, when
they visit India, they aren’t at ease with the typical Bengali household
habits, customs and rituals. Gogol and Sonia suffer from cultural conflict
under such circumstances. Gogol and Sonia “from time to time, privately admit
to excruciating cravings, for hamburgers or a slice of pepperoni pizza or a
cold glass of milk” (84).
In
their visit to Delhi, Gogol and Sonia are powerfully affected by the legend of
how the thumbs were cut off of the twenty–two thousand builders who built the
Taj Mahal. Gogol attempts to sketch the dome and some part of the façade but
the grace of the building evades and he quits the attempt. Perhaps this can be
compared to that situation when any westerner tries to understand India, its
culture, heritage and tradition but ultimately finds himself utterly befuddled
amidst everything. Like the character of Mrs. Moore, the sympathetic, old lady
from E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India,
who although sincerely attempts to understand India fails in her attempt,
especially in the cave episode where she does not enter the Marabar Caves
because she feels puzzled by the entire situation. Although Gogol isn’t
completely a foreigner but by being born and brought up in America and visiting
India as a tourist once in a couple of years, it becomes difficult for him to
decipher the true meaning.
In
one of his classes Gogol is taught the short story of The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol enlisted in the syllabus. As Mr.
Lawson proceeds in his teaching, Gogol starts retreating into himself more and
more.
He is celebrated today as one of
Russia’s most brilliant writers …eccentric genius. Gogol’s life, in a nutshell,
was a steady decline into madness …an intelligent, queer and sickly creature …a
hypochondriac and a deeply paranoid, frustrated man …morbidly melancholic,
given to fits of severe depression. (91)
Gogol
feels that his parents have never mentioned this part of the writer. He can no
longer tolerate the voice of his teacher. He lowers his head on the desk,
presses his ears with both his hands to prevent himself from hearing the
teacher’s voice and shuts his eyes. Till now it is the eccentricity of the name
which becomes intolerable to him but now learning about the pathetic life of
writer, he cannot even feel the slightest of connection with the name. He feels
as though he and his works are being attacked when his classmates express
displeasure after knowing about Nikolai Gogol. “To read the story, he believes,
would mean paying tribute to his namesake, accepting it somehow. Still,
listening to his classmates complain, he feels perversely responsible, as if
his own work were being attacked” (92).
These
activities of Gogol are a clear indication that he is not at all at ease with
his name. As it is, an immigrant feels
‘nowhere’ in the host country, on top of that, Gogol, although a second
generation immigrant, feels ostracized because of the peculiarity of his name.
He cannot even connect to his own name and he starts feeling ashamed. He is
tired of the constant questions, or shrinking of faces when they hear his name
for the first time. Because of this low self-esteem he dates nobody in high
school, does not attend dances or parties and suffers quiet crushes. But the
impact of environment proves to play an important role and therefore Gogol
starts to experiment with things which were considered taboo such as cigarettes
and smoking pot. At one such party he meets a girl named Kim, who introduces
herself to him but when it comes for Gogol’s turn, he starts getting perplexed,
desperately searching for another name and finally settles on ‘Nikhil’, the
other name which was once chosen for him. At the age of eighteen, he rejects
his name or rather the identity imposed by his father. The name “Nikhil” serves
as his symbolic overcoat by wearing which he would become an American thereby
erasing the presence of Gogol. As readers we tend to feel that the problem in
the novel is only regarding the name- “Gogol”. But at a deeper level we realize
that it reflects a larger anxiety whereby the migrant people can neither call
themselves completely Indians nor completely Americans.
Sitting
in the waiting room of a dentist, he comes across the article ‘Second
Baptisms’, published in an issue of Reader’s Digest. He realizes that many
famous celebrities, laureates, actors and writers have their names changed.
Therefore he now wants to change his name. He “feels that he is overstepping
them (parents), correcting a mistake they’ve made” (101). He wishes to come out
of that shadow of his parents and yearns to assert his one independent
identity.
… now that he is Nikhil it’s easier to ignore
his parents, to tune out their concerns and pleas… It is as Nikhil, that in the
first semester, he grows a goatee, starts smoking Camel Lights at parties and
while writing papers and before exams, loses his virginity at a party with a
girl …there is only one complication: he does not feel like Nikhil …after eighteen
years of Gogol, two months of Nikhil feel scant, inconsequential. (106)
Identity
is dynamic, multiple, and multi-faceted. This is what Gogol needs to
understand. Gogol thinks that he should be either an Indian or an American at a
single point of time which in turn triggers his identity crisis. He should be
open to accept multiplicity and ambiguity. Judith Caesar, a critic of Lahiri’s
works is of the opinion that, Ashoke Ganguli does the perfect thing by trying
to give his sons two names to survive in this complex world. Had Gogol accepted
his ‘bhalonam’ and ‘daaknaam’, his problem of identity would be solved. It
would assert that he is perceived differently by different people at different
situations - who he is to his family, the people who love and care for him and
the other he, who is the one to the outside world.
When
Gogol starts dating Ruth, he wants to tell his parents about his first
girlfriend but “he has no patience for their surprise, their nervousness, their
quiet disappointment, and their questions about what Ruth’s parents did and
whether or not the relationship was serious” (115). In fact, Gogol pities his
parents thinking that they have had no experience of being young and in love.
His relationship with Ruth is severed after she leaves for a summer course in
Oxford.
Gogol
considers his parents as the ones who cannot normally accept that their son is
seeing somebody. In India, it is usually the parents who select the partners
for their children, unlike America where the children take their own
independent decisions with no interference from the parents. The social norms
and codes play a significant role in India plays unlike in America where couples
are given the independence to stay together or fall apart. Through these
details, we realize the differences that exist among various cultures. So
naturally when the children of the migrants grow up in a new culture, they tend
to identify with a new worldview leading to an awkward intergenerational
conflict between the parents and the children. The contrast between first
generation and second-generation migrants clearly reveals the difficulties of
the process of acculturation.
In
1994, after graduating from Columbia University in architecture Gogol takes up
a job with a new firm at New York. There he gets involved with his second
girlfriend Maxine, whom he meets at a party. Gogol is invited to dinner one day
and the genial atmosphere at her home completely takes over him. He starts
visiting them often, and much to his strangeness he likes the frankness and
openness with which Maxine’s parents handle the matter. He is never used to
this kind of amiability. Her parents are least bothered about their visits. In fact,
he goes back to her home after work as a routine. He even stays overnight and
makes love to her. To his utter dismay, “Gerald and Lydia think nothing, in the
mornings, when he and Maxine join them downstairs in the kitchen, their hair
uncombed, seeking bowls of café au lait and toasted slices of French bread and
jam. The first morning he sleeps over he’s been mortified to face them,” but
they are not bothered as usual. It is just not possible for him to fall in love
with Maxine alone. He is in love with “the house, and Gerald and Lydia’s manner
of living” (137). Seeing her parents, curled up in sofa in a romantic mood, he
is reminded of his own parents’ relationship which is “an utterly private,
uncelebrated thing” (138). Within six months he gets the keys to their house,
formally presented to him “on a silver tiffany chain” (140). He does all the
chores of the house as Americans do like taking the dog out for a walk,
preparing for weekend parties, washing the dishes and much more.
Gogol’s
own internal conflict with himself makes him ponder over the differences
between Maxine and himself. The biggest difference he finds is that unlike him,
she happily accepts her life and the fact that who she is as an individual. She
does not crave to be somebody else at any time. She respects her origin, her
home, her birthplace, and her past affairs. She does not feel suffocated around
her parent’s presence as he does. She sincerely loves dwelling beside them in
her own secure place. This study of the differences by Gogol reflects his
desperation for the resolution of his inner conflict bringing his own
stability. With this subtlety Lahiri brings out the diasporic sensibilities.
Maxine’s
parents go to their Lake house in New Hampshire, leaving Maxine and Gogol by
themselves. Although he has the entire house to himself, he does not feel
independent. He feels that even in their absence, Gerald and Lydia are
supervising his activities. A sense to become the master of the house
overpowers. Though Gogol makes conscious efforts to be different from his
parents and live away from the shadows of Bengali culture, he experiences
cultural dilemma on a number of occasions. The in-between-ness and belonging to
nowhere is experienced by him more intensely. According to Rushdie migrants
suffer from “triple disruption comprising the loss of roots both the linguistic
and social dislocation” (279).
Gogol
visits his parents with Maxine whom he had instructed that they would not be
able to touch each other or kiss in front of his parents, and no wine would be
served with lunch. Maxine is amused. She takes this as “a single afternoon’s
challenge, an anomaly never to be repeated” (146). Maxine addresses his parents
by their first name as Americans do. Gogol cannot process that these are not
the problems of his family or shortcomings which he should be ashamed of but it
is the result of cultural differences. Like a betrayer, he rejects everything
Indian starting from food habits to clothing and conversational style but more
than anything else he rejects his own identity.
At
Maxine’s lake house Gogol loves being aloof, cut off from the outside world. He
starts appreciating that idyllic place. He enjoys running around the lake with
Gerald, swimming over to their grandparent’s house with Maxine, spending the
entire nights by the lake making love to her, and sitting idly with nothing to
do. He doubts if his parents would like such a life.
They would have
felt lonely in this setting, remarking that they were the only Indians. They
would not want to go hiking, as he and Maxine and Gerald and Lydia do almost
everyday, up the rocky mountain trails, to watch the sun set over the valley...
His mother would not put on a bathing suit or swim. (155)
The
incident of his father’s death has left Gogol cold and numb from within. He does
not engage in conversation with Maxine at the dinner table, is indifferent in
bed and becomes too private in his thoughts and activities. He visits his
family every weekend and converses over telephone every evening. The guilt of
distancing himself from his family, distances himself from Maxine. Gogol
finally walks out of the relationship with her.
After
his father’s death Gogol fondly remembers the times he has spent with him. One
among them is when Ashoke takes Gogol on a walk on Cape Cod, standing over the
last piece of land from where they could go no further. Ashoke says, “Try to
remember it always …Remember that you and I made this journey, that we went together
to a place where there was nowhere left to go” (187). Although these lines do
not make any sense to him then, but now he somewhere realizes that his father
wanted him to discover a path for himself to assert his own identity.
Like
Gogol, Moushumi Mazoomdar is the daughter of immigrant parents from India. Though
unwilling, Gogol meets her under the pressure of Ashima and develops a liking
for her. At a party with Moushumi’s friends, Donald and Astrid, who are
acquainted to her through her ex-fiancé Graham, addresses Gogol as ‘Graham’ by
mistake, while Moushumi reveals to all that Gogol has changed his name to
‘Nikhil’. Gogol does not expect her to blurt out the secret. “He stares at her,
stunned. He has never told her not to tell anyone. He simply assumed she never
would. His expression is lost on her; she smiles back at him, unaware of what
she has done” (243). Even Moushumi suffers from the same problem as Gogol.
Instead of creating her own identity, she searches for stability and identity through
multiple relationships. Moushumi begins an extra-marital affair with Dimitri
Desjardin which ends her marriage with Gogol. Probably they chose one another
unconsciously in order to remain connected to their family values and childhood
after being disillusioned from their previous affairs. Moushumi’s sense of
identity is much more insecure and complex since she suffers from a broken
relationship. This relationship had given her identity but when it is shattered
even her own identity is shattered. Gogol is only a substitute of ‘Graham’, her
former fiancé. The most ironical thing out here is that according to the
preconceived notion that people from the same cultural background would live in
harmony, is reversed. Gogol’s parents consider his involvement with Maxine as
momentary. She is an American and her American way of life troubles them. But
according to Ashima, in the case of Moushumi she tries to make an almost
perfect match by getting his son Gogol married to a girl of Indian ancestry;
still their marriage does not work.
Ashima,
proving true to the meaning of her name ‘without borders’, decides to live in
America for six months and in India for six months. After having lived in the
Pembeston Road for twenty–seven years, a widow of fifty–three, she is ready to
depart to India in the end. During the final get-together at their home, Gogol
comes across ‘The Short Stories of Nikolai Gogol’, presented to him on his
birthday by his father. It still bears the inscription: “… for Gogol Ganguli
…The man who gave you his name, from the man who gave you your name” (288).
Gogol realizes that after his mother is gone, the name Gogol Ganguli would
vanish from the lips of his loved ones and so “… cease to exist” (289). This
troubles him rather than giving him peace. The name which he hates so much is
the first thing his father gives him. “The givers of Gogol’s name are far away
from him now. One dead. Another, a widow, on the verge of different sort of
departure, in order to dwell, as his father does, in a separate world” (289).
Although the novel ends here but it is now that Gogol will understand the
significance of the sentence “We all came out of Gogol’s overcoat” (78).
Salman Rushdie in his Imaginary Homelands reflects upon the
ambiguity associated with a migrant’s space through the following words:
Our identity is at
once plural and partial. Sometimes we feel that we straddle two cultures; at
other times, that we fall between two stools …But however ambiguous and
shifting this ground may be, it is not an infertile territory for a writer to
occupy. If literature is in part the business of finding new angles at which to
enter reality, then once again our distance, our long geographical perspective,
may provide us with such angles. (18)
This openness of perception is a byproduct
of diaspora and helps an individual recognize that the world is an open
platform where various interpretations are possible, depicting positivity and
progressiveness. Ashima evolves from being a dependent, introvert, coy and
home-bound lady to an independent, bold and strong personality. She would not
be confined to one country. This shows that not only does she have a deep
affinity for India but also now she starts considering America her home where
she has spent her life with Ashoke and her children. It is there, in America,
that she matures as an individual in all respects. While Gogol, by all means
starts realizing that one cannot stick to a particular identity at a time but
one has to have multiple identities in order to survive. Also, by understanding
the deep-seated meanings, associated with the events of one’s life, one can
attain peace and stability.
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