A major leitmotif of the diasporic discourse is its supposed complexities and ambivalences due to the tensions between localities and spatio-temporal dualities. For large groups of people around the world the concept of identity is precariously lodged within an episteme of real or imagined displacements and self-imposed sense of exile. In the late-modern celebratory argument on behalf of diasporas, diasporic communities are said to occupy a broader zone where the most vibrant kinds of interaction take place, and where ethnicity and nation are kept separate. Evidently, the term helps critiquing essentialist notion of identity which as Paul Gilroy writes “should be cherished for its ability to pose the relationship between ethnic sameness and differentiation: a changing same.”
The Indian Diaspora can probably be traced to ancient times when Buddhist monks travelled to the remote corner of Asia. However, nineteenth and twentieth centuries are considered to be the periods of Indian Diaspora, when Indians in large numbers went to other countries in search of job opportunities. The Indians living in a host country continue to live in a sandwich world, refusing to give up their cultural roots, as they still hope for assimilation and acculturation in their land.
Jhumpa Lahiri and Diasporic Identity
As a popular young writer of Indian background, Jhumpa Lahiri is a sort of representative figure for the Diasporans who do not fully understand what it means to straddle the line between two cultures. Her novel The Namesake as well as the short story collection Interpreter of Maladies provides the reader with pictures of the life of expatriates. Lahiri explores the ideas of cultural and personal isolations and identities through her various characters. She was torn apart, between the hyphenated identities of Indian-American.
The Name as Identity
Addressing the themes of immigration, collision of cultures and the importance of names, the novel The Namesake portrays the struggle of immigration and the issues of identity. The protagonist is constantly reminded of the uniqueness of his name, ‘Gogol’. Throughout the novel, Gogol is haunted by this strange name. Even when he changes it to Nikhil, he realizes that he cannot get away from it.
It is Nikolai Gogol, considered as the main influence in the development of the nineteenth century Russian Realism, that inspires Ashoke Ganguli to christen his first-born son as Gogol. To him, Gogol was his saviour because it was a volume of Gogol’s writings that he was reading when the terrible train accident took place.
When it is time for Gogol to begin school, his unusual name which is only his ‘daaknam’ (pet name) and the need for ‘bhaalonaam’ (official name) disconcerts him. The name Nikhil is artfully connected to the old — not only is it a perfectly respectable Bengali good name, meaning “he who is entire, encompassing all,” but it also bears a satisfying resemblance to Nikolai, the first name of the Russian Gogol.
Gogol’s Identity Crisis
It was from his fourteenth birthday that Gogol senses the importance of his unique name. In his high school days, Gogol hears from Mr. Lawson about the writer Gogol’s life — his friendship with Pushkin, his dismay at the reception of his comic play The Government Inspector, his paranoid frustration, his morbidity, his melancholia, his depression, his steady decline into madness, his slow death by starvation. Strangely enough, like the writer Gogol, the protagonist Gogol turns out to be a loner.
Gogol changes his name to Nikhil as he begins his freshman year at Yale. But even the change of his name does not change the course of luck in his life. His relationships with women are also doomed to failure. Passing attractions for Ruth and the longish affair with Maxine leave him disappointed and alone. When he realizes that Moushumi was having an affair, “he felt the chill of her secrecy, numbing him like a poison spreading quickly through his veins.”
Resolution
The case of Gogol can be likened to Jhumpa Lahiri herself. As the novel ends, however, Gogol learns that the answer is not to fully abandon or attempt to diminish either culture, but to mesh the two together. Gogol is not fully in tune with his identity until he realizes that it is embellished by both cultures. He does not have to be one or the other; he does not have to choose. He is made up of both, and instead of weakening his pride is strengthened by this.
Works Cited
- Alcoff, Linda Martin. “Identities: Modern and Postmodern.” Identities: Race, Class, Gender and Nationality. (Ed). U.K: Blackwell, 2003.
- Bhabha, Homi K. “Cultural Diversity and Cultural Differences.” The Post-colonial Studies Reader. (Ed). Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. London: Routledge, 1995.
- Desai, Jigna. Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film. New York: Routledge, 2004.
- Gandhi, Leela. Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. Australia: Allen & Unwin, 1998.
- Gilory, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993.
- Griffiths, Gareth. “The Myth of Authenticity.” The Post-colonial Studies Reader. (Ed). Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. London: Routledge, 1995.
- Hall, Stuart. “New Ethnicities.” The Post-colonial Studies Reader. (Ed). Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. London: Routledge, 1995.
- Lahiri, Jhumpa. The Namesake. New Delhi: Harper Collins, 1999.
- Mansfield, Nick. Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway. Australia: Allen & Unwin, 2000.
- McRobbie, Angela. Postmodernism and Popular Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
- Mishra, Vijay. “The Familiar Temporariness — Naipaul, Diaspora and the Literary Imagination: A Personal Narrative.” The South Asian Diaspora: Transnational Networks and Changing Identities. (Ed). Rajesh Rai and Peter Reeves. London: Routledge, 2009.
- Ponzanesi, Sandra. Paradoxes of Post colonial Culture: Contemporary Women Writers of the Indian and Afro-Italian Diaspora. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004.
- Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticisms 1981-1991. London: Granta Books, 1991.
- Said, Edward. “Jane Austen and Empire.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. (Ed) Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Australia: Blackwell, 2004.