Moments

I read Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake about a year-and-half ago, during winter break in NYC. Looooovvved it.
Dying of excitement and anticipation for the movie version. Here's Kal Penn's blog about the shooting of the upcoming film, directed by Mira Nair.

I've always had mixed feelings about Lahiri's writing. 'Interpreter of Maladies' may have won a Pulitzer, but I always felt that at least part of the book was not sincere. The stories set in India (the 'Buri ma' story for instance) seemed to have been drawn on traditional hand-me-down stereotypes of the country, and reinforcing them seemed to be pandering to the orientalist instincts so typical of western critics.

However, this book was different. Maybe it was the time period, I'd already been in the US for 4 years when I read it, maybe that made a difference. But Lahiri takes the traditional immigrant and 2nd-generation experience and transforms into a epic saga across generations. What drew me into the book was not its literary merits (though they must exist, if it was so effective!), but the feeling that it was simply infused with sincerity. She seems to be writing 'from the heart'. The conflicts across generations and cultures was captured effectively and with empathy for every character.

At the risk of appearing prudish, I must say I'm a bit sceptical and annoyed by a lot of 2nd-generation art which expresses the ABCD experience by drawing a big black line between ABCD and FOB characters ('American-Desi', 'Where's the Party Yaar?' etc). While I do enjoy the humour to a greater extent than most, I just don't understand the (universal?) tendency of a social minority to stand up for themselves by bashing another less empowered minority!

But the Namesake was different, all its main characters (Nikhil Gogol Ganguly, his parents) were fully developed characters instead of being reduced to caricature. The traumatic immigrant experience of grasping at cultural straws of family, festivals, friends while being swept away by torrents of surrounding alien culture is depicted well; the 2nd-generation experience of cultural schizophrenia between home and the world is of course, the central theme of the book.

I have heard criticism of the book on the counts that it depicts the central protagonist's parents in stereotypical fashion, as clueless immigrants who are insensitive to cultural transformations around them, as well as the diverse needs of their children. It is unfortunate but true, it is a monumental task to adjust to a different culture, and an incomprehensible one to be a parent after that, and not too many parents possess the skills and understanding to handle the job. But I usually tend to absolve 2nd-generation authors from the responsibility of depicing the immigrant experience accurately, after all, they have their own internal culture war to fight.

In a recent insight, I feel that another reason that I (and many of my fellow graduate student friends) fell in love with the book was the trivial-looking fact that the protagonist, Nikhil is male. A surprising fraction of western readers, even highly educated ones, hold somewhat anachronistic stereotypes of Indian society, treating all Indian women as victims and all Indian men as perpetrators of violence and gross injustice. The western media definitely shares a large portion of the culpability for these. It has been all too easy for Indian authors, especially women, to play to those stereotypes with yet another conflicted, abused woman lead, which the enlightened western reader loves to sympathize with and reward with literary laurels. I find it courageous of Lahiri to have avoided that path, perhaps forsaking yet another award.

Well, the most important thing was that there were big chunks of the book I read and took a gasp and told myself, 'OMG, this is ME!' What bigger compliment can a book hope for?