In The
Namesake, Lahiri enriches the themes that made her collection an international
bestseller: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of
assimilation, and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations. Here
again Lahiri displays her deft touch for the perfect detail — the fleeting
moment, the turn of phrase — that opens whole worlds of emotion.
The Namesake
takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through
their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of their arranged
wedding, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle together in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
An engineer by training, Ashoke adapts far less warily than his wife, who
resists all things American and pines for her family. When their son is born,
the task of naming him betrays the vexed results of bringing old ways to the
new world. Named for a Russian writer by his Indian parents in memory of a
catastrophe years before, Gogol Ganguli knows only that he suffers the burden
of his heritage as well as his odd, antic name.
Lahiri
brings great empathy to Gogol as he stumbles along the first-generation path,
strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs.
With penetrating insight, she reveals not only the defining power of the names
and expectations bestowed upon us by our parents, but also the means by which
we slowly, sometimes painfully, come to define ourselves.
A movie was created on the basis of this novel; where,
Promotional poster
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Directed by
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Produced by
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Mira Nair
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Kal
Penn as Nikhil "Gogol" Ganguli
Soham Chatterjee as
child Gogol aged 4 years
Tabu as Ashima
Ganguli
Irrfan
Khan as Ashoke Ganguli
Sahira Nair as
Sonia Ganguli
Jacinda Barrett as
Maxine Ratcliffe
Sebastian Roché as
Chris
Linus
Roache as Mr Lawson (Gogol's teacher)
Zuleikha Robinson as
Moushumi Majumdar
Ruma Guha Thakurta as
Ashoke's mother
Sabyasachi Chakrabarty as
Ashima's father
Supriya
Devi as Ashima's grandmother
Jagannath Guha as
Ghosh
Sukanya as
Rini
Tanushree Shankar as
Ashima's mother
Tamal Roy Choudhury as
Ashoke's father
Jhumpa Lahiri as Jhumpa Mashi
Jhumpa Lahiri
Nilanjana Sudeshna "Jhumpa" Lahiri was born in London and brought up in South Kingstown, Rhode Island. Brought up in America by a mother who wanted to raise her children to be Indian, she learned about her Bengali heritage from an early age.
Lahiri graduated from South Kingstown High School and later received her B.A. in English literature from Barnard College in 1989. She then received multiple degrees from Boston University: an M.A. in English, an M.A. in Creative Writing, an M.A. in Comparative Literature and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies. She took up a fellowship at Provincetown's Fine Arts Work Center, which lasted for the next two years (1997-1998).
In 2001, she married Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, a journalist who was then Deputy Editor of TIME Latin America Lahiri currently lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children. She has been a Vice President of the PEN American Center since 2005.
Lahiri taught creative writing at Boston University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Much of her short fiction concerns the lives of Indian-Americans, particularly Bengalis.
She received the following awards, among others:
1999 - PEN/Hemingway Award (Best Fiction Debut of the Year) for Interpreter of Maladies;
2000 - The New Yorker's Best Debut of the Year for Interpreter of Maladies;
2000 - Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her debut Interpreter of Maladies.