Blog Par #8

    In her novel, The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri uses the main character’s pet name Gogol and his good name Nikhil as coming of age story to display the complexities with identities through his need to feel American and his Indian roots.  For Gogol’s father, Ashoke, naming his son Gogol represents the birth of a new life, a new beginning, and a way to connect the events of his past with an uncertain future.  Ashoke views Gogol’s birth as “the second miracle of his life, after the one of surviving the train crash” (24).  The naming of his son allows Ashoke a second birth in his life, an opportunity to connect with the happiness he feels towards his life in America.  His son therefore becomes a mix of the old and new way of life, embodying the loss of his life in India and the migration into their American identity.    Gogol, a Russian name, prevents Gogol from developing an identity because he feels the name does not connect him to his American or Indian roots, giving him a feeling of inbetweenness.  Lahiri describes Gogol’s need to feel a connection with American culture Gogol’s field trip to the cemetery, “looking for their own names, a handful triumphant when they are able to claim a grave they are related to…Gogol is old enough to know there is no Ganguli here” (69). Upon bringing his etchings of the gravestones home, Gogol’s mother cannot identify with his need to keep the drawings, to reassure himself that parents besides his own name their children with unique names that make them stand out from the rest of the world.  Gogol’s name represents, for his family independence and a tie to their culture; they believe his name to represent their family through the importance of representing of loss and beginning. His name represents a uniqueness that Gogol does not want; he wants an American identity, an identity that does not entice people to comment on his background. The death of Gogol and the emergence of Nikhil forces a mental separation between the lives of his parents and his own.  Nikhil embodies everything that is not Indian and a way for him to develop a new persona.  The name Nikhil gives Gogol the ability to separate himself from a world he feels apart from and enter into a life of acceptance and relevance to American society.  A name for Gogol, a child of an immigrant, represents identity and belonging to two different cultures




.http://blog.jammuredefine.in/double-face-of-congress-exposed-again/#sthash.Dh0h6M3C.dpb
The above photo and url link refers to the Women's Reservation Bill members of Indian society are attempting to pass for women who do not want to comply with the traditional marriage conventions.  This bill enables women to marry out of their race and provides freedom for women who do not want to comply with their families wishes and obligations as a female.

Jhumpa Lahiri begins her novel, The Namesake, from the perspective of Gogol’s mother, Ashima.  Lahiri focuses on the alienation Ashima feels giving birth in a foreign country among strangers, with a husband whose habits she is still learning.  American parents allow their children to choose their own spouses, an independence unfamiliar to traditional Indian families.  Reading this novel provides one with a glimpse of the obedience children give their parents and it is through this obedience that their futures are shaped around arranged marriages. 

            Lahiri does not delve deeply into the issues of subservience and duties children show towards their parents, I am specifically interested in the subservience from the female perspective.  Lahiri’s description of Ashima’s marriage and the description given concerning the birth of Ashima’s son led me to question the stifling customs that give women no choices in their own lives, except for what their parents choose for them.  Ashima, like most Indian women, go to school and sometimes university, to bide their time until their family finds a husband for them.  While at school, women broaden their minds and gain some knowledge pertaining to independence and get to explore their own desires.  After completing their education, or during, women forget the dreams and desires and marry the man approved by their parents.  Through the ‘courting’ process, girls’ parents market their daughters by highlighting qualities that will make their daughters exceptional wives, never once considering their brains. Characters like Ashima do not question the arrangements or their parents choices, viewing marriage as a duty  to the family, “it had been after tutoring one day that Ashima’s mother had met her at the door, told her to go straight to the bedroom and prepare herself; a man was waiting to see her” (Lahiri 6). Ashima dutifully obeys and this obedience takes her across an ocean, away from her family, so that her union brings status and pride to her family.  Not marrying in Indian culture brings shame upon the family’s name and if a daughter refuses to marry her noncompliance reflects negatively on the parents as an inability to control their children. 

            Reading texts relating to women’s rights and marital expectations in Indian society frustrates Western readers, largely because our independence and freedoms begin immediately after birth.  Authors like Jhumpa Lahiri and Anne Cherian relate the problems of tradition through their female characters relinquishing their rights to their family by following the marriage arrangement.  Their characters relate their fears and frustrations with the pressures women face in regards to marrying and complying with families desires.  Anne Cherian describes the process of marriage for a woman as a bartering process: “[g]irls were like cows, their pedigrees discussed openly and parts checked out” (Cherian 40).  Reading this defines the role of the Indian woman, a slave. Not only is she a slave to the culture, but her family, her sisters, and her educators.  There is no escape for women, if they toe the line their family rejects them and Indian women have not been educated to survive in the world on their own.  They are bred under the notion of dependence on male figures; they learn from their fathers and then must succumb to the rule of another man, her husband.  Anne Cherian’s novel, A Good Indian Wife, discusses the pressures women face from the family to procure a husband and women’s inability to assert her independence within her household and society.  The main character, Leila, finds herself unwed and well past the expiration date of a fruitful marrying age, issuing concerns from her family that her inability to wed as failure as parents.  Like most humans, Leila has her own desires that she wishes could play out, but the need to fulfill her parents’ wishes overshadow her wants.  Each page you want Leila to walk out and assert her own feelings to her parents, but Cherian continues her betrothal process so that readers understand the isolation women feel within their families and country.  Amma, Leila’s mother, reveals her feelings of shame to Leila, “‘You know how I have suffered all these years? So any people asking why for you are not married’” (Cherian 39).