The Namesake (2006, USA/Indian)

While enjoying his American girlfriend’s summer home in upstate New York, Gogol Ganguli (Kal Penn) says to her, “This place is amazing. My parents never felt the need to get this far away from things.” Perhaps more than any other single line in Mira Nair’s The Namesake, this statement sums up the generational gap between Gogol and his parents. What he and his sister fail to understand is that America is the furthest of far, half a world away from the India where his mother and father grew up.

Nair’s adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s book is better than I’d hoped it would be. Despite needing to excise nearly half of the source material in order to make a coherent two-hour film, Nair deftly dips in and out of the lives of the Gangulis, first focusing on Gogol’s mother, Ashima (an excellent Tabu) as she enters into an arranged marriage with Ashoke (Irfan Khan) and travels to New York City to live all alone with her husband. As Gogol grows up, the focus shifts to his experiences as an American of Indian decent. The power of this story lies in this shift between generations – we first see Ashima’s vision of America, and then her cultural heritage is reflected back through Gogol’s rebelliousness.

The Namesake is certainly intended for American audiences – it lacks some of the hybridity of visual style that some of her previous work, such as Monsoon Wedding, Kama Sutra, and Vanity Fair, possessed, and the narrative is more of a straightforward family drama. However, the text is rich enough to embody hybridity in another way. Lahiri’s story is a good embodiment of the continual Indian tension between the past and the present, and there is perhaps no better director to film it than Nair, whose entire career can be said to rest on playing out this tension in different scenarios. Some of her usual problems arise here – the elder Indian generation is occasionally played for laughs, the socio-economic status of the family is firmly upper-middle class, and Nair continues to use visual cues that sexualize some female characters in uncomfortable ways (Moushumi’s character suffers the most by the cuts made from book to screen). All this aside, The Namesake is generally a very good film, an absorbing meditation on living between two very different cultures.