Reihan has written an interesting post on Jhumpa Lahiri, and now The New Republic has an entire article on her fiction, so it is time that I dusted off my remarks on the film adaptation of her novel, The Namesake, which I started writing months ago but never finished.  I haven’t read the novel, so I can’t comment on how successful Mira Nair’s adaptation is, but I can congratulate Mira Nair on making another outstanding film. (Warning–spoilers follow.)

Given my interests in Indian cinema and Russian literature, you might have thought that I would have seen The Namesake much earlier than I did, but in fact I had only found the time to watch it on video when it first came out.  After the first viewing, I had the impression that it was excellent, so excellent indeed that I felt compelled to watch it again soon afterwards.  I still think it is very good and certainly worth watching more than once.  Directed by Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding, Vanity Fair), one of the better directors of our day, The Namesake tells the story of a Bengali family in New York and particularly the story of the relationship between the father, Ashok (Irfan Khan), and his son (Kal Penn), whom he named Gogol after his favourite author.  The son’s name remains a source of constant anxiety and discontent until he finally comes to understand the more personal reason why his father gave him the name.  Those familiar with the BBC miniseries Second Generation will find many of the same themes of the tension between father and child and the strains of assimilation on cultural tradition, but The Namesake, working from the novel of the same title by Jhumpa Lahiri, obviously does not have the King Lear references nor does it touch on the problems of religious intercommunal divisions (though both are focused on the lives of Bengali immigrant families).  The Namesake paints a much more intimate portrait of a small, nuclear family in the New York suburbs.  Again, like Second Generation, the film concludes with the return of one of the parents to Calcutta, which represents a homecoming and also a sort of refuge from the “lonely country” that had nonetheless briefly become the family’s home.

The aspect of the story I found particularly powerful was the problems attached with marrying within the community.  After the death of his father and the alienation of his white girlfriend that results from preparation for the funeral rites, the main character, Gogol, or Nikhil (his shubh nam), as he prefers to be known once he becomes an adult, is re-introduced to a Bengali woman whom he had met years before, Moshumi, whose condescending attitude towards all things American was matched only by her anti-social, bookworm habits.  Moshumi has transformed herself during her time in France, becoming both an accomplished academic and more of a worldly, ‘liberated’ woman.  Gogol is taken in by her sensuality, and to a large degree because of their shared Bengali heritage they wed quickly.  Too quickly, as it turns out, as Moshumi falls back into her libertine ways and has an affair with an old French boyfriend.  When she admits the affair to him, she says, “Maybe it isn’t enough that we’re both Bengali.”  As he says, that wasn’t why he married her, but the pressure to marry within the community created the conditions for an unusually bad marriage that had been undertaken for the wrong reasons.  This struck me as the most poignant moment in the story.

In their last meeting before his father’s death, Ashok tells Gogol why he had given him the name of the Russian author.  He tells the story of reading Gogol’s The Overcoat on the way to visit his grandfather by train, and of the train wreck that had nearly killed him.  Gogol asks if his father thinks of the accident when he thinks of him, and Ashok says, “Not at all.  Because every day since then has been a gift.”  Naming his son after the eccentric and brilliant 19th century writer had been his tribute to his own survival during that accident; it had been his gift to his son.  When Gogol was graduating from high school, his father had given him a book of Gogol’s short stories, which the son had ignored until after his marriage had failed, only to discover it at the last party to be held at the family house before his mother went home to Calcutta.  The dedication read, “The man who gave you his name, from the man who gave you your name.”  Finally, Gogol was reconciled to what his father had intended by giving him that name–a celebration of his survival and of his love.