What's in a Name?

What's in a Name? The Namesake is a book that I have an odd relationship with. My first time reading it was five years ago, as part of my high school syllabus, an endeavour which I followed up with swift rereads over the course of two years. While this was mostly an attempt to claw my way towards good marks in English literature, the time committed ingrained the text into my brain. And now, more than three years since I last read it, my initial opinion has doubly reinforced: I am not a member of the target audience. The Namesake is a book that focuses on the Ganguli family. Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli, a couple freshly wed in an arranged marriage, immigrate to Massachusetts, where they welcome baby Gogol into the world. Six years later, a daughter, Sonia, is born to the family; and as the decades pass, we see the quartet’s changing behaviours and attitudes towards their lives as immigrants. To say that all four receive attention is a stretch. Gogol and Ashima are represented the most in the book, and even of the two, Gogol is by far the character who we spend the most time with, and to whom the title refers to. Gogol’s character is, in many meanings of the word, somewhat of a chud. This trait is reinforced both in his relationship with his heritage, identity, and with the people around him. His various romantic endeavours make up most of the latter half of the book, and while his love interests serve mostly as outlets for his selfish needs via acting as projections of his internal conflicts, even in their characterisation it is often clear that Gogol is by no means an ideal partner. But while his relationships are key to engaging with the character, I want to focus more on the central motif of the book: his name. Ashoke Ganguli got into a horrifying train accident as a young man and was indirectly saved by a copy of The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol. This context is an emotional undercurrent to the plot, something that Gogol himself doesn’t learn about until much later in his life, and the reason that his father named him the way he did in the first place. While Gogol is more of an affectionate nickname (daak naam, to be specific), and Nikhil is his ‘good name’ (bhalo naam), “Gogol” is what ends up on his birth certificate, and when he was young it was the only name he responded to. I can, to an extent, relate to both the struggles of legal formatting affecting names (and the experience of having a name that draws attention). When I got my first passport, they required a middle name, using my father’s first name for the purpose. In the process of doing this, however, the system my name was entered into only accepted first and last name fields; and now my first name is technically “Yohaan Kaizad” for all legal purposes, with no middle name to speak of. Similarly, I had very few interactions where introducing my surname as “Master” hasn’t raised eyebrows (in one case, a mutual friend thought that I had made it up for nearly three years of friendship). Yet this is where my ability to relate to Gogol sharply ends. Lahiri portrays the inertia of culture throughout  The Namesake, treating it as a monolith that hangs over everyone, either pushing you forward or holding you back. Nikhil trudges through the pages, dragging a culture he has never experienced behind him, wading forward to reach an imagined state of being that is unattainable. He settles down with a fellow Bengali American immigrant, Moushumi, who has balanced the opposing forces of her own cultural halves by embracing French culture and language, distancing herself from the two countries that could have claim over her. His inability to see beyond himself alienates her more and more, until eventually he becomes the very representation of the worst aspects of both cultures’ demands and expectations from her. She rekindles an old fling, having an affair with a Russian French middle-aged academic, which eventually leads to a divorce. Yet I don’t think culture is characterised fairly in the book. Lahiri writes for people who have either solidified their connection with their home culture already and are now forced to adapt to a new one (like Ashoke and Ashima), or those who need to reckon with their heritage despite having spent their whole lives in a different environment (like Gogol or Sonia). Lahiri treats the immigrant experience as something that can be approximated by combining these two extremes and fails to comment on the vast range of immigrant experience unique to those who fall in between. I was born in India and spent nearly a decade there before moving to Singapore. A decade later, and now I’m here, in the UK. The experience of going to a foreign country for education is extremely prevalent, and fellow immigrants who have been through it end up experiencing their own culture unique to that circumstance. Reckoning that part of our identities is not as simple as accepting the separate cultures we also belong to. Lahiri treats the immigrant experience as something that can be approximated by combining these two extremes and fails to comment on the vast range of immigrant experience unique to those who fall in between. The morality of the book in general is strongly geared towards that acceptance: we are prompted to cheer for Ashima when she forms bonds and learns to appreciate America, or for Nikhil when Ashoke’s death prompts him to stop turning his back on his Indian roots. The very idea of Moushumi rejecting both of her halves positions her as antithetical to the Ganguli family, and while she isn’t explicitly villainised, her affair and divorce pushes her out of the story. The Namesake lives in a world that readers born in the US or the UK can understand, where culture is food, language and stories; where culture can be visited, named, stamped and relearned. It portrays diaspora journeys as some sort of titration, where you must lean back and forth and sway between the influences that shape you until you learn a happy middle ground. Lahiri tries to sell a tantalising prospect to her readers, ending the novel with Ashima deciding to spend half her year in India and half her year in America so she can get her perfect fill of both cultures. Yet I can’t help but feel like that’s not the reality for most of my fellow diaspora. Humans are not perfectly elastic, and being moulded into one culture after the next doesn’t always leave you in a state where you can find your footing in heritage again. Maybe there’s a world where changing your name can fix everything, where it can make you steady footed and reveals a hidden lock where you just need to bend yourself in the right way and you’ll be the perfect key. But unfortunately, The Namesake could never quite convince me of that.