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ASHIMA

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Subhashis Jishu Kundu
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27 views1 page

ASHIMA

Uploaded by

Subhashis Jishu Kundu
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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ASHIMA

In The Namesake, Lahiri’s experiences of growing up as a child of immigrants resemble that of her
protagonist, Gogol Ganguly. In the Namesake, she reflects Indian Diaspora and creates a narrative that reveals the
thought of cultural difference and identity. Names play an essential role for people to identify themselves and help to
communicate with each other. As identity becomes the core issue. Indian custom follows different kinds of customs
and ceremonies of naming a born baby. Namesake deals with the clash of cultures. Pet names are sometimes silly and
meaningless. The Namesake reflects the struggle of Gogol Ganguli that goes through identity crises with his strange
name. The novel moves around the community and couple of Bengali origin in the USA migrated for several reasons.
They are the first and their children are second generation south Asian immigrants.
Gogol's mother Ashima is the heart of the story. While the other characters don't show a lot of emotion,
Ashima is the one who feels. So it's through her that we can really come to understand the feelings of alienation,
culture shock, and homesickness that many immigrants feel.
Old-School Ashima: At the start of the novel, Gogol's mother Ashima is the most culturally conservative member of
the family. She misses her life back in Calcutta terribly and has trouble settling in to her new American life. The
narrator tells us, " On more than one occasion [Ashoke] has come home from the university to find her morose, in bed,
rereading her parents' letters." See, unlike Ashoke, who is attending graduate school, Ashima is isolated in Cambridge,
with no friends of her own. In Calcutta, she would have had the company of siblings, parents, cousins, grandparents,
aunts, and uncles, but now they're thousands of miles away.
In Cambridge, Ashima is surrounded by strangers, and she doesn't quite feel that she fits in. There are new
customs to learn, new ways of doing things. Combine that with the grief of leaving your family, home, and loved ones
behind, and you've got a serious case of the blues:
“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. It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been ordinary
life, only to discover that that previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding.”
Her position as an immigrant gives Ashima a unique perspective that her children can't share. They don't
know what it's like to leave their home, because America is their home. Unfortunately, the fact that she shares this
experience only with her husband a bit of a rift between her and her children:
“Having been deprived of the company of her own parents upon moving to America, her children's independence,
their need to keep their distance from her, is something she will never understand.”
As the years go by, Ashima is the glue that keeps the family together. And when her children leave the nest
and adopt aspects of the American lifestyle, it must be hard to watch. She and Sonia clash when Sonia hits high school
and has a budding social life. She dislike's Gogol's choices in women – Maxine in particular – because they know
nothing of Bengali traditions.
“It's a lonely life, what with her children growing up and her family back home growing old. In many ways, the one
thing Ashima can count on is her husband Ashoke, and their steadfast love, which is "an utterly private, uncelebrated
thing."
Unfortunately, this makes Ashoke's death all the more tragic, and Ashima mourns his death deeply. We've
come to expect deep, intense feelings from Ashima, but these are particularly moving:
“Ashima feels lonely suddenly, horribly, permanently alone, and briefly, turned away from the mirror, she sobs for her
husband. She feels overwhelmed by the thought of the move she is about to make, to the city that was once home and
is now in its own way foreign.”
A New Ashima: By this point we know that Ashima has plans to move back to India, but we're surprised to find out
that she now thinks of Calcutta as foreign. It used to be home. So what has changed in Ashima to bring about this
change of heart?
It seems our homesick Ashima has grown accustomed to life in the states. She has accepted her daughter's
non-Bengali fiancé, and she understands why Gogol divorced Moushumi, and she gets along with her children better
in general. She has even managed to make a few American friends, through her job at the library.
She is no longer completely Bengali, but she hasn't become an American either, and it seems like she is at
peace with that. Frankly, that's a fitting end to her character, because her name means "she who is limitless, without
borders", Ashima has reached a point where she really has transcended boundaries, and in the world of The
Namesake, that is no small feat.

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