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Avani Saxena
Dr. Priya H. Kumar
M.A. English Previous Year (Semester II)
13 April 2015
An Analysis of Psyche of Diasporic Individuals: The Namesake
This paper analyses various recurring themes among diasporic writing and life itself. It
attempts to trace the reminiscences of a romanticized/ un-romanticized homeland that migrated
individuals live-with in a new land. The central idea of the paper is to bring to light the
psychological alienation that diasporic individuals feel even after living for a considerable period
of time in a new place and that too having been moved semi-voluntarily. With a study of
different characters and events from the novel, The Namesake, it tries to implore Robin Cohen’s
idea that not all the migrated population could by default be classified as diasporic. Also, role of
memory in daily discourse and in overall functioning of life for this community is discussed (as
dealt by Aisha Khan in her essay.) A part of it would also be focusing upon Dibyesh Anand’s
proposal of diaspora as a moving concept; linking it with Aisha khan’s views about how
memorialization takes different forms over generations.
The Namesake (2003) is the debut novel of Indian-American author, Jhumpa Lahiri. The
novel covering a long span of almost thirty years (beginning from 1968 or alternatively 1961)
deals with the life and its dilemmas of two generations of Ganguli family migrated from the then
Calcutta, India to Massachusetts, U.S.A. The character sketches of various main characters are
detailed and fully developed. Lahiri has hardly left a scope for any ambiguity about what a

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character goes through mentally and physiologically at any point of time.1
Mental thought
processing, reflections, dilemmas of characters like Ashima, Ashok and Gogol are on surface
stark open & accessible and not something left for individual imagination and interpretation.
Very much like the Gangulis, Lahiri herself has experienced movement and migration in life.Her
case could be better seen under the light of character of Gogol, a second generation migrant.
Lahiri like Gogol in the novel has much conflict throughout her life about a good name and a pet
name. 2
“Living with a pet name and a good name, in a place where such distinctions do not exist- surely
that was emblematic of the greatest confusion of all.”3
This is what she has to say about it in reality, “I always felt so embarrassed by my name .
. . You feel like you're causing someone pain just by being who you are.”And this is one relic
(i.e. a different name) of an alien world of Indian sub-continent that continues to baffle Gogol
throughout. It is because of the fact that his name was unlike others that he couldn’t associate
himself with anyone in America . . . where one could easily find a Jack or a Smith; but never a
Gogol Ganguli. The conflict was however heightened for him since his first name was not even
of Indian origin but a name, that too a last name, of a Ukrainian author, Nikolai Gogol. This
detachment found a partial relief in witnessing in India (Calcutta) numerous shops, people and
businesses in name of Ganguli.4
Such curious affinities towards Gogol’s homeland are reflective
in descriptions like where when his relatives assembled to see his family off at Dum-Dum
airport:
1
it would be apt to mention here the publication of the text (that I have used for all citation purposes) – which is by
Mariner Books
2
a good name in Bengali is a name used for all official purposes and a pet name to be called-out by all family and
closed acquaintances
3
Note: text in italics is direct citation from the novel
4
Ganguli- a popular last name in Calcutta (Kolkata)

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“At the airport the row of people who had greeted them . . . those with whom he shares a name if
not his life, assemble once more on the balcony . . .”
A diasporic individual often has double consciousness5
and in the same context one of the
most torn apart of all the characters in the novel is Ashima, Gogol’s mother. Born and brought
up in Calcutta she moves to America on getting married to Ashok. She is the most citable
example of psychological alienation that almost all of diasporic individuals go through. Her
thoughts could at any instance or through even a slight triggering leads her immediately to her
past in India. Her country of origin has such a strong hold on her psyche that it is nearly
impossible for her to not compare any and everything in her present to her past. From simple
groceries to important rituals she fails never in making a contrast and eventually feeling
incomplete in the host country. 6
“One day she cries when she goes to the kitchen to make dinner and discovers that they’ve run
out of rice. She goes upstairs . . . but the rice in Judy’s canister is brown. To be polite, Ashima
takes a cup, but downstairs she throws it away.”
While talking about such recollections in daily discourse let me bring-in the idea of pan-
community among diasporas. Ashima or for that matter any immigrant tries to mobilize and form
a community of one’s own. After all such people in Aisha Khan’s words “share a common
memory” of migration and its re-iteration through celebration of various customs lends them a
sense of solidarity among its members. Such a community is formed not on basis of similar
tastes but due to similar circumstances and to gain strength & visibility in an alien land.
5
an idea propounded by Vijay Agnew
6
idea of host country as dealt by Robin Cohen- which makes an immigrant look always like a ‘guest’

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“He avoids them7
, for they remind him too much of the way his parents choose to live,
befriending people not so much because they like them, but because of a past they happen to
share.”
As Khan puts it, “Discourses about gaining correct knowledge through religious rites is
about making perceived absence present, making the ambiguous more stark . . . in large part
through self-empowerment by self-edification that challenges vulnerability.” And this perceived
absence is exactly what I am trying to iterate is the alienation that diasporic migrants go
through.Taking this argument further one could find passages in the novel that points out to the
condition of being lonely in the host country. It was during the birth of Gogol that Ashima
consciously reflects that her baby has perhaps been delivered in most solitary circumstances.
“Without a single grandparent or parent . . . the baby’s birth, like most everything else in
America, feels somehow haphazard, only half true . . . she can’t help but pity him. She has never
known of a person entering the world so alone, so deprived.”
Instead of absorbing-in the happiness of childbirth in an environment which is both conducive
and friendly, Ashima’s thoughts effortlessly take her to notice that her baby is not blessed by the
physical presence of her elders.
Pondering over this constant memorialization of past by Ashima makes one think of
Ashok as a more complex character. He nowhere explicitly recalls a memory of a comforting
homeland. What merely becomes a part of his recollections is the traumatic near-death train
accident that he had faced in his twenties.If this constant remembrance qualifies him in Robin
Cohen’s terms a member of diaspora is debatable.
7
them- is used for any ABCD acquaintance in the novel; where ABCD is an acronym for ‘American-born confused
deshi’

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Cohen suggests certain common features8
that a community/ individual must have to be
categorized as a diaspora. In the light of his qualifiers, if we think over the fifth pointer, i.e. a
desire to plan a return movement to one’s homeland, Ashok doesn’t seem to possess any such
visible longings. All the more, he recalls a stranger, Mr. Ghosh on train who has regretted
coming back to India on his wife’s demands. But at the same time, except for this, he displays all
other characteristics of being in a foreign land with reminiscences, viz, forming co-ethnic social
groups, strong ties with ancestral homeland and relatives, following and practicing native rituals,
so on and so forth. If we look deeper into his character we may note that probably Ashok is
different from Ashima only in temperament and attitude and not in characteristic desires of an
immigrant. He is not oblivion of his alien roots rather realistic about it. He displays great
patience when some kids in the neighborhood played a racist prank by disfiguring letters on his
name-plate. He is not in denial of his condition nor has he inter-mingled completely with the
Americans rather he accepts it that he can never be wholly absorbed in the land and continues to
live like this- creating now and then a little world of memories by hosting elaborate celebrations
with his Bengali comrades.9
To sum it up, one could classify him as a liminal being, one who
could neither leave the new land for definite comparable advantages and where he can never be
8
Robin Cohen’s list of common features of a diaspora based on Safran’s desiderata and his own modification to
that list: 1. dispersal from an original homeland, often traumatically, to two ormore foreign regions;
2. alternatively, the expansion from a homeland in search of work, inpursuit of trade or to further colonial
ambitions;
3. a collective memory and myth about the homeland, including itslocation, history and achievements;
4. an idealization of the putative ancestral home and a collectivecommitment to its maintenance,
restoration, safety and prosperity,even to its creation;
5. the development of a return movement that gains collective approbation;
6. a strong ethnic group conciousness sustained over a long time andbased on a sense of distinctiveness, a
common history and the beliefin a common fate;
7. a troubled relationship with host societies, suggesting a lack ofacceptance at the least or the possibility
that another calamitymight befall the group;
8. a sense of empathy and solidarity with co-ethnic members in othercountries of settlement; and
9. the possibility of a distinctive creative, enriching life in host countrieswith a tolerance for pluralism.
9
As Cohen writes, “In the age of cyberspace, a diaspora can, to some degree, be held together or re-created through
the mind, through cultural artefacts and through a shared imagination.”

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completely accepted nor could he go back &be comforted in his homeland where he doesn’t
know he will still be welcome or not. This makes me want to narrate Trishanku’s
curse10
:“Trishanku, a mortal king in hindu folklore, wanted to reach heaven in his mortal state.
He enlisted the aid of the sage Vishwamitra, who propelled him skywards with his yogic powers.
But heaven refused him entry, saying that only those who have left their body can enter heaven.
He was sent back, but Earth refused to accept him saying she would grant entry to none once
they left earth.” Similar was the plight of Ashok! The question - if he could be qualified as a
diasporic immigrant in Cohen’s terms (since he doesn’t cherish a desire to return) is open-ended.
Another incident in the novel which effortlessly brings-out the constant feeling of
alienation is Ashima’s comparison of being a foreigner with pregnancy. It is a state wherein
people of the host-country neither accepts your belonging with them wholly nor could dismiss
your presence altogether. Like being pregnant makes you different from the rest of the world; as
if carrying a part of your existence only within yourself;similarly being an immigrant makes you
present yet alien from the rest of the new world.
“For being a foreigner, Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy- a
perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts . . . is something that elicits
the same curiosity from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect.”
Elaborating on the same lines, I infer that it is a perpetual longing to be liberated of the burden
and be mixed with the alike. And true in a globalized world, a foreigner (especially from a
developing country to a first world nation state) cannot but be looked upon with a mixed outlook
of respect (more likely because one is still a guest in the place) and pity-because all sorts of
10
an extractfrom an essay titled Another Approach to Reading Our Yesterdays by Uma Parameswaran

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sympathetic reasons are associated with one’s departure from familiar homeland and seen as
bearing a constant burden of unlikeliness.11
And thus in order to not feel vulnerable they memorialize various rituals and never let
their significance fade. Khan observes that it is not details of the rituals at meta-level that matters
but significance they hold in daily discourse. For example, ceremonies like naming, rice-
ceremony or annaprasan, or even wedding of Gogol and Moushmi are dealt in great detail in the
novel. These are the reminiscences of an identity and culture to which they are familiar and are
skeptical to let-go. The notion of memory, culture and rituals is something which is preserved in
an existence such as of diasporas. It is an act of keeping the desh alive in minds of an ABCD.
Further, Aisha Khan mentions that these memorialization take different forms over time12
and that the collective memory of the new diaspora is more a feeling of guilt. Ashima and Ashok
belongs to this category of diaspora who migrated for better future prospects and their guilt could
be seen reflective in the fact that they go out of their ways (even when the money is not much to
spare) to buy presents for every relation in India.
This change in form of the concept is also dealt by Dibyesh Anand as diasporic
consciousness being a “travelling concept.”13
Anand argues that “as a trace of titanium in an iron
alloy can transform its properties” similarly “historical and cultural contexts have had
constitutive influence on its present-day meaning.” Thus it could be said that with time the
meaning and relevance of themes associated with the idea of diaspora alters. For the first
11
In words of James Clifford, “a consciousness comprised of loss and hope”- loss of identity or at least its traceable
roots and hope of acceptance in a foreign land- both (loss and hope) are lived simultaneously within a diasporic
consciousness.
12
Khan writes, “unlike 19th- and early 20th-century Indian emigrants. . . late 20th-century South Asian diasporic
populations in the nation states of the ‘First World’ see themselves as betrayers, that is, as abandoning the ones left
behind in the homeland, those who will always lack comparable advantages.”
13
Dibyesh Anand in his essay, A Contemporary Story of Diaspora, mentions what Edward Said emphasizes, “ . . . by
virtue of having moved from one place and time to another an idea or theory gains, or loses in strength, and whether
a theory in one historical period and national culture becomes altogether different for another period or situation.”

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generation migrants it is the first-hand experience of migration that is constantly lived as a
diaspora, whereas for the following generations it is more in the form of identity crisis. Here, an
example of Gogol could be cited. He was never really aware of what being an Indian or in India
was like. A part of him always knew that he definitely is different but yet could never bring
himself to believe that he was a native of the kind of India he had been to. The question, where
are you from, was throughout a problematic one for him. As Lahiri mentions in the novel for
him:
“Gogol has never heard the term ABCD. He eventually gathers that it stands for “American-
born confused deshi.” In other words, him.”
He really longed to belong a little more to any of his two identities, either Nick or a Nikhil- any
one which would do away with his liminality. This desire is very reflective in the following lines
when he compares himself to his girlfriend, Maxine:
“She has the gift of accepting her life . . . he realizes that she has never wished she were anyone
other than herself, raised in any other place, in any other way. This, in his opinion, is the biggest
difference between them . . .”
Thus, even though born and brought up in an American environment, Gogol too on many levels
faced a sense of detachment from the place. The other way of his life; life as a Bengali was
something he never shared with even closest American acquaintances. And to an extent, this very
secret life made him end his relationship with Maxine after his father’s death, which he finally
partially embraces.
Interestingly, Gogol shares this trait with his author herself. Lahiri in an interview with
the Newsweek once said, “When I first started writing I was not conscious that my subject was
the Indian-American experience. . . At home I followed the customs of my parents, speaking

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Bengali and eating rice and dal with my fingers. These ordinary facts seemed part of a secret,
utterly alien way of life, and I took pains to hide them from my American friends.”
Such memories and iterations from the past form an inescapable link for a diasporic
individual. The hold is so strong on one’s psyche that it is almost impossible to re-mould the
personality. Even though when the physical adjustment takes place with time, mental set-up
remains somewhere torn apart between carriage of two very distinct identities; very much like
the conflict which Gogol faced literally after he changed his name.
“But after eighteen years of Gogol, two months of Nikhil feel scant, in consequential. At times he
feels as if he’s cast himself in a play, acting the part of twins, indistinguishable to the naked eye
yet fundamentally different.”
To conclude, I would like to re-discuss the idea of living as a diaspora as gathered from
perspectives of Ashima, Ashok and Gogol. It is like living a reality which is only half-true and
half-told. Jhumpa Lahiri is assuredly successful in depicting the functioning of self and of daily
life shaped by a memory of origin or experience lived continuously as a whole. These
reminiscences of one’s homeland when weighed against socio-cultural factors of a new host land
prove to be immensely impactful in molding a diasporic individual’s psyche. The novel indeed is
one apt way to peek-a-boo into consciousness of diasporas; giving an elaborate picture of crisis
of liminality in the functional lives of immigrants. The idea of homeland for such a community is
personified in Toni Morrison’s words as, “Something that is loved is never lost.”
Word Count: 2596

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Works Cited
Agnew, Vijay. “The Quest for the Soul in the Diaspora” Diaspora, Memory and Identity
(University of Toronto Press, December 2005): 268-290. Web. 24 March 2015.
<http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3138/9781442673878>
Anand, Dibyesh. “A Contemporary Story of Diaspora: The Tibetan Version” (Diaspora 12:2,
2013): 213. Print.
Barry, Peter. “Postmodernism” Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural
Theory (Viva Books Private Limited, 2013): 78-88. Print.
Cohen, Robin. “Classical notions of diaspora: transcending the Jewish tradition” Global
diasporas: An introduction (UCL Press, 1997): 26-27. Print.
Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”. Web. 20 March 2015.
<http://www.rlwclarke.net/Theory/SourcesPrimary/HallCulturalIdentityandDiaspora.pdf
>
Khan, Aisha. “Rites and Rights of Passage: Seeking a Diasporic Consciousness” Cultural
Dynamics (2007 19:141). Print.
Lahiri, Jhumpa. The Namesake (Mariner Books edition, 2004). Print.
Parameswaran, Uma. “Dispelling the spells of memory” Another Approach to Reading Our
Yesterdays. Web. 07 March 2015.
Sharma, Monika. “Rootless Gogol – Quest for Identity in The Namesake.” Mapping Migrations:
Perspectives on Diasporic Fiction (ed.Charu Sharma. New Delhi: Books Plus, 2006): 47-
63. Print.