Subrata Kumar Das
I'm working as Assistant Professor of English at C. M. College, Darbhanga (a constituent unit of Lalit Narayan Mithila University, Darbhanga, Bihar, India). I earned my PhD degree from UGC-Centre for the Study of Indian Diasporas, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad. I have worked on Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2003) for my M.Phil. dissertation. At present I’m working as Associate Editor for the Journal of Literary Aesthetics, published by Guru Nanak Khalsa College for Women, Ludhiana, Punjab (online) & National Press Associates (print), New Delhi, India. I have presented many scholarly papers in National and International conferences, seminars & workshops. I have published ten papers on diasporic literature, diasporic cinema and other areas in national and international journals and edited books. My areas of interest lies in literary theories, especially postcolonial literary theories, different areas of Postcolonial Literature-Indian Diasporic Literature; (Diasporic) Film Studies, Popular Culture, Romantic Literature & Translation Studies.
Supervisors: Dr. Ajaya Kumar Sahoo, Dr. Amit Kumar Mishra, and Prof. Tutun Mukherjee
Address: Lalit Narayan Mithila University, Darbhanga, Bihar, India.
Supervisors: Dr. Ajaya Kumar Sahoo, Dr. Amit Kumar Mishra, and Prof. Tutun Mukherjee
Address: Lalit Narayan Mithila University, Darbhanga, Bihar, India.
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Papers by Subrata Kumar Das
Deepa Mehta, the Indo-Canadian filmmaker is such a feminist auteur. Through her “accented cinema(s)” like Fire (1996) and Water (2005), she gives her women characters strong-willed and assertive spirits against patriarchal social practices like child marriage, polygamy, misogyny, ostracism etc. Through these films, she shows some activities like widow-marriage, lesbianism and also gives women characters ‘voices’ against any type of social taboos over them by patriarchal society. Therefore, Mehta, a feminist auteur attempts for emancipation of women’s subaltern status through these films. My paper will explore these areas from Mehta’s Fire and Water.
Key Words: Diasporic Feminist Auteurs, “Accented Cinema”, “Scopophilia”, Resistance, Centre to Margins.
Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance (1995) is narrated almost entirely from the point of views of subaltern and petty-bourgeois characters and hence quintessentially a subaltern novel. These subalterns are Chamaar (cobbler) caste, women in general and Parsi woman in particular. Like any other subaltern novel, it includes subalterns’ struggles, resistance and protests to change their social ‘space’ from ‘periphery’ to ‘centre’ and to create their identity; the cruel atrocities meted out over them (dalits) by the upper caste people; patterns of social pattern: patriarchy, caste hierarchies etc. My paper explores the aforementioned issues.
Some questions may be raised here: How much are diasporas confined in community enclave for their similar ‘ethnic’ belonging? Does the racial victimization force them to confine themselves in community enclave? How is their cultural negotiation with mainstream society getting reduced? What are the recent phenomena that force them to get less access to the host society? How much the host society shows ‘dialogic’ engagement with these diasporic people?
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an Indian diasporic writer living in the United States. In most of her novels, mainly the protagonists attempt to assimilate with the host American society. But their attempts fail to make ‘Dialogic Voices’ in mainstream American society. Therefore, they usually moor in their ethnic enclaves in the host society. This paper will try to find the answers of the aforementioned questions from Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s documentations in her selected novels.
Key Words: Ethnic Enclave/“Imagined Communities”, “Dialogic Voices”, Cultural Encounter, Topical Circumstances.
In this 21st century globalised, multicultural and transnational world, ‘diasporic’ culture is an emerging field. This ‘diasporic’ culture is, to some extent, different from the traditional practice of culture. This culture is hybrid, heterogeneous and a plural one. The ethnic culture gets entangled and entailed with the hegemonic culture of host society. And thus, the ‘residual’ culture of ethnic people in diasporic land is transformed to cope with ‘the changed social conditions’ in host society.
Jhumpa Lahiri is the second generation diasporic writer living in the United States. Her latest novel The Lowland (2013) texturised the theme of cultural assimilation ‘in-between’ spaces. The first generation diaspora in the novel like Subhash Mitra, Gauri Mitra and Narasimhan; the second generation diaspora like Gauri’s daughter Bela; and others adapt the Unites States’ cultural traits: liberal dress code, free and unconventional sex-orientation, lack of familial bonds, and other liberal, independent life styles.
Thus, is diaspora concerned to preserve their ‘home’ culture in ‘foreign’ land? How is cultural disparity shown between the ‘diaspora’ and the ‘host’ people? How much these cultural practices appear as counter-culture to diaspora’s ‘home’ culture? How is Lahiri’s The Lowland successful in exploring these cultural traits? My paper will try to explore the aforementioned areas.
[Key-Words: Culture, ‘in-between’ spaces, diaspora’s culture, counter-culture, Assimilation]"
Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake (2003) deals with the theme of diasporic sensibilities/cultures of a Bengali family living in the USA. Though Lahiri’s text seems a mono-modal text, but at a micro level, there are many stimuli in the text which act as multiple semiotic resources to communicate the meaning of the text to its interpreters. Traits which project Lahiri’s text as multimodal one include pictorial imagery, synaesthetic feelings, invisible physical multimodal text cemetery’s tombstone, some other cinematic techniques like flashback systems, diachronic narrative pattern of the stories and few epiphanic feelings a character experiences like from ‘bolt from the blue’ situations.
Lahiri’s The Namesake has been adapted in visual medium as a film (2007) with the same title by Mira Nair, an Indian born filmmaker living in the US. It is very difficult to recreate the same thing through a visual media, i.e. film as it presents something within a limited and fixed times. Though Nair cut many minor and irrelevant Bengali cultural elements in her film version, but she intensifies the diasporic milieu in film by showing some scenes which are the true hallmarks of universal symbols of mobility and odyssey of dislocation and displacements of the diasporic milieu. In the film version Mira Nair has shown the Bengali diasporic milieus in a much better way even than the source text. Is it possible to render all diasporic (cultural) milieus from a print medium (text) into a visual medium (film)? In this process of translations, how has Bengali diasporic culture been presented in different ways? My paper will try to explore the aforementioned issues.
[Key Words: The Namesake a multimodal medium, Multimodal translation, Loss or Gain (?), Bengali Diasporic Culture]
My paper will try to answer the aforementioned questions. It will be a comparative approach among the original novel and the film. This paper also tries to show the ‘space’ in which Nair’s film occupies in literary ‘polysystem’.
[Keywords: ‘Inter-semiotic’ Translation, Diasporic Culture, Changes in Film, Internationalisation, ‘polysystem’ Theory, Nair’s Ingenuities]
"
Conference Presentations by Subrata Kumar Das
Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake (2003) deals with the theme of diasporic culture of a Bengali family living in the USA. Though Lahiri’s text seems a mono-modal text, but at a micro level, there are many stimuli in the text which act as multiple semiotic resources to communicate the meaning of the text to its interpreters. Traits which project Lahiri’s text as multimodal one include pictorial imagery, synaesthetic feelings, invisible physical multimodal text cemetery’s tombstone, some other cinematic techniques like flashback systems, diachronic narrative pattern of the stories and few epiphanic feelings a character experiences like from ‘bolt from the blue’ situations.
Lahiri’s The Namesake has been adapted in visual medium as a film (2007) with the same title by Mira Nair, an Indian born filmmaker living in the US. It is very difficult to recreate the same thing through a visual media, i.e. film as it presents something within a limited and fixed times. Though Nair cut many minor and irrelevant Bengali cultural elements in her film version, but she intensifies the diasporic milieu in film by showing some scenes which are the true hallmarks of universal symbols of mobility and odyssey of dislocation and displacements of the diasporic milieu. In the film version Mira Nair has shown the Bengali diasporic culture in a much better way even than the source text. Is it possible to render all diasporic (cultural) milieus from a print medium (text) into a visual medium (film)? In this process of translations, how has Bengali diasporic culture been presented in different ways? My paper will try to explore the aforementioned issues.
[Key Words: The Namesake a multimodal medium, Multimodal translation, Loss or Gain (?), Bengali Diasporic Culture]
1. How much are diaspora being confined in community enclave for their “ethnic’ belonging?
2. Is the racial victimization forced them to confine themselves in community enclave?
3. How is their cultural negotiation with mainstream society getting reduced?
4. What are the recent phenomena that force them to get less access in interaction to the host society?
5. How much the engagement/interaction the host society shows with these diasporic people?
Jhumpa Lahiri and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni are the Indian diasporic writers living in the USA. In most of the novels of these writers, mainly the protagonists attempt to interact/mix with the host American society. But their attempts fail to forward them with “Dialogic Voices” in mainstream American society. Therefore, they usually moor in their ethnic enclaves in the host USA. My paper will try to find the answers of the aforementioned questions from Jhumpa Lahiri and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s documentations in their novels.
[Key Words: Ethnic Enclave, “Imagined Communities”, “Dialogic Voices”, Cultural Encounter, Topical Circumstances.]
Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance (1995) is narrated almost entirely from the point of views of subaltern and petty-bourgeois characters and hence quintessentially a subaltern novel. These subalterns are Chamaar (cobbler) caste, women in general and Parsi woman in particular. Like any other subaltern novel, it includes subalterns’ struggles, resistance and protests to change their social ‘space’ from ‘periphery’ to ‘centre’, the cruel atrocities meted out over them (dalits) by the upper caste people, patterns of social pattern: patriarchy, caste hierarchies etc. My paper explores the aforementioned issues.
[Keywords: Subalterns, Resistance, Periphery to Centre, Topical and Real (?) Documentation]
In this 21st century globalised, multicultural and transnational world, ‘diasporic’ culture is an emerging field. This ‘diasporic’ culture is, to some extent, different from the traditional practice of culture. This culture is hybrid, heterogeneous and a plural one. The ethnic culture gets entangled and entailed with the hegemonic culture of host society. And thus, the ‘residual’ culture of ethnic people in diasporic land is transformed to cope with ‘the changed social conditions’ in host society.
Jhumpa Lahiri is the second generation diasporic writer living in the United States. Her latest novel The Lowland (2013) texturised the theme of cultural assimilation ‘in-between’ spaces. The first generation diaspora in the novel like Subhash Mitra, Gauri Mitra and Narasimhan; the second generation diaspora like Gauri’s daughter Bela; and others adapt the Unites States’ cultural traits: liberal dress code, free and unconventional sex-orientation, lack of familial bonds, and other liberal, independent life styles.
Thus, is diaspora concerned to preserve their ‘home’ culture in ‘foreign’ land? How is cultural disparity shown between the ‘diaspora’ and the ‘host’ people? How much these cultural practices appear as counter-culture to diaspora’s ‘home’ culture? How is Lahiri’s The Lowland successful in exploring these cultural traits? My paper will try to explore the aforementioned areas.
[Key-Words: Culture, ‘in-between’ spaces, diaspora’s culture, counter-culture, Assimilation]
"
Contra-acculturation from / at Margin: A Study of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2003)
The history of the idea of culture is a record of our reactions in thought and feeling, to the changed conditions of our common life (emphasis added).
(Raymond Williams in Culture and Society: 285)
Culture…is a source of identity, and a rather combative one… (emphasis added)
(Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism: XIII)
The expatriate builds a cocoon around herself / himself as a refugee from cultural dilemmas and from experienced hostility or unfriendliness in the new country (emphasis added).
(Lois Tyson in Critical Theory Today: 72)
In the present globalised, multicultural world, diasporic literature is an emerging field in literary and socio-cultural studies. In diaspora studies, generally the Third World countries’ ‘ethnic’ people moor in the developed First World countries. These ethnic people’s culture is ‘minority’ culture in host country’s hegemonic culture and other societal ethos. When diaspora face exclusion from hegemonic host culture, they try to negotiate / encounter the host culture for their cultural identity formation. Generally they attempt it making “imagined communities” (Anderson’s term) in diasporic land. These diasporic people, especially the first generation expatriates attempt to restore their ‘ethnic’ cultural practices in host country. Therefore, their voices of resistance are manifested during this contra-acculturation process.
Jhumpa Lahiri’s culture-laden novel The Namesake (2003) projects the first generation expatriate Ashima Ganguli’s displaced, dislocated and deterritorised feelings; feelings of rootlessness, mental trauma, identity crisis, cultural dislocation; marginalised and excluded self in the mainstream American culture; voices of resistance for not assimilating with host cultural ethos and so on. Ashima Ganguli’s son Gogol Ganguli and daughter-in-law Moushumi Mazoomdar, both the second generation immigrants in the novel, also show their resistance for not following the American cultural ethos in few occasions. Though Ashima shows little flexibility to sustain her life in mainstream culture in few occasions, she makes a saga for restoring ethnic culture in her Bengali ‘home’ in US. This paper will attempt to explore all the above mentioned issues.
[Keywords: Diaspora, Ethnicity, Expatriate, ‘imagined Communities’, Contra-acculturation, Margins’ Voices / Resistance]
"
Jhumpa Lahiri, a second generation diasporic writer, living in the USA wrote her first novel, The Namesake (2003) where the question of identity is a ‘leit motif’ in it. Ashima Ganguli, the protagonist of the novel always feels rootlessness, displacement, existential crisis, identity crisis, not only in the USA, but also in her psychic self. Only after the death of her husband Ashoke Ganguli, she knows how to live in an exile country alone. Like her other works, she writes this novel from the male point of view. Gogol Ganguli, the son of Ashima and Ashoke Ganguli(s), who would also be considered as the protagonist of the novel, at first confined in Maxine, his American white girl friend and then in Moushumi, his Bengali wife, gained his identity at last. Here Gogol is no one, but the alter ego of the novelist herself. For both of them, experiencing the fractured psyches in foreign country and at last getting their self-identities is like ‘cocoon’ that springs out from larval state and getting a new identity. Like almost all diasporic writings, this theme/motif is occurred throughout the whole texture of the novel. My paper will explore the aforementioned issues.
"
Deepa Mehta, the Indo-Canadian filmmaker is such a feminist auteur. Through her “accented cinema(s)” like Fire (1996) and Water (2005), she gives her women characters strong-willed and assertive spirits against patriarchal social practices like child marriage, polygamy, misogyny, ostracism etc. Through these films, she shows some activities like widow-marriage, lesbianism and also gives women characters ‘voices’ against any type of social taboos over them by patriarchal society. Therefore, Mehta, a feminist auteur attempts for emancipation of women’s subaltern status through these films. My paper will explore these areas from Mehta’s Fire and Water.
Key Words: Diasporic Feminist Auteurs, “Accented Cinema”, “Scopophilia”, Resistance, Centre to Margins.
Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance (1995) is narrated almost entirely from the point of views of subaltern and petty-bourgeois characters and hence quintessentially a subaltern novel. These subalterns are Chamaar (cobbler) caste, women in general and Parsi woman in particular. Like any other subaltern novel, it includes subalterns’ struggles, resistance and protests to change their social ‘space’ from ‘periphery’ to ‘centre’ and to create their identity; the cruel atrocities meted out over them (dalits) by the upper caste people; patterns of social pattern: patriarchy, caste hierarchies etc. My paper explores the aforementioned issues.
Some questions may be raised here: How much are diasporas confined in community enclave for their similar ‘ethnic’ belonging? Does the racial victimization force them to confine themselves in community enclave? How is their cultural negotiation with mainstream society getting reduced? What are the recent phenomena that force them to get less access to the host society? How much the host society shows ‘dialogic’ engagement with these diasporic people?
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an Indian diasporic writer living in the United States. In most of her novels, mainly the protagonists attempt to assimilate with the host American society. But their attempts fail to make ‘Dialogic Voices’ in mainstream American society. Therefore, they usually moor in their ethnic enclaves in the host society. This paper will try to find the answers of the aforementioned questions from Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s documentations in her selected novels.
Key Words: Ethnic Enclave/“Imagined Communities”, “Dialogic Voices”, Cultural Encounter, Topical Circumstances.
In this 21st century globalised, multicultural and transnational world, ‘diasporic’ culture is an emerging field. This ‘diasporic’ culture is, to some extent, different from the traditional practice of culture. This culture is hybrid, heterogeneous and a plural one. The ethnic culture gets entangled and entailed with the hegemonic culture of host society. And thus, the ‘residual’ culture of ethnic people in diasporic land is transformed to cope with ‘the changed social conditions’ in host society.
Jhumpa Lahiri is the second generation diasporic writer living in the United States. Her latest novel The Lowland (2013) texturised the theme of cultural assimilation ‘in-between’ spaces. The first generation diaspora in the novel like Subhash Mitra, Gauri Mitra and Narasimhan; the second generation diaspora like Gauri’s daughter Bela; and others adapt the Unites States’ cultural traits: liberal dress code, free and unconventional sex-orientation, lack of familial bonds, and other liberal, independent life styles.
Thus, is diaspora concerned to preserve their ‘home’ culture in ‘foreign’ land? How is cultural disparity shown between the ‘diaspora’ and the ‘host’ people? How much these cultural practices appear as counter-culture to diaspora’s ‘home’ culture? How is Lahiri’s The Lowland successful in exploring these cultural traits? My paper will try to explore the aforementioned areas.
[Key-Words: Culture, ‘in-between’ spaces, diaspora’s culture, counter-culture, Assimilation]"
Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake (2003) deals with the theme of diasporic sensibilities/cultures of a Bengali family living in the USA. Though Lahiri’s text seems a mono-modal text, but at a micro level, there are many stimuli in the text which act as multiple semiotic resources to communicate the meaning of the text to its interpreters. Traits which project Lahiri’s text as multimodal one include pictorial imagery, synaesthetic feelings, invisible physical multimodal text cemetery’s tombstone, some other cinematic techniques like flashback systems, diachronic narrative pattern of the stories and few epiphanic feelings a character experiences like from ‘bolt from the blue’ situations.
Lahiri’s The Namesake has been adapted in visual medium as a film (2007) with the same title by Mira Nair, an Indian born filmmaker living in the US. It is very difficult to recreate the same thing through a visual media, i.e. film as it presents something within a limited and fixed times. Though Nair cut many minor and irrelevant Bengali cultural elements in her film version, but she intensifies the diasporic milieu in film by showing some scenes which are the true hallmarks of universal symbols of mobility and odyssey of dislocation and displacements of the diasporic milieu. In the film version Mira Nair has shown the Bengali diasporic milieus in a much better way even than the source text. Is it possible to render all diasporic (cultural) milieus from a print medium (text) into a visual medium (film)? In this process of translations, how has Bengali diasporic culture been presented in different ways? My paper will try to explore the aforementioned issues.
[Key Words: The Namesake a multimodal medium, Multimodal translation, Loss or Gain (?), Bengali Diasporic Culture]
My paper will try to answer the aforementioned questions. It will be a comparative approach among the original novel and the film. This paper also tries to show the ‘space’ in which Nair’s film occupies in literary ‘polysystem’.
[Keywords: ‘Inter-semiotic’ Translation, Diasporic Culture, Changes in Film, Internationalisation, ‘polysystem’ Theory, Nair’s Ingenuities]
"
Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake (2003) deals with the theme of diasporic culture of a Bengali family living in the USA. Though Lahiri’s text seems a mono-modal text, but at a micro level, there are many stimuli in the text which act as multiple semiotic resources to communicate the meaning of the text to its interpreters. Traits which project Lahiri’s text as multimodal one include pictorial imagery, synaesthetic feelings, invisible physical multimodal text cemetery’s tombstone, some other cinematic techniques like flashback systems, diachronic narrative pattern of the stories and few epiphanic feelings a character experiences like from ‘bolt from the blue’ situations.
Lahiri’s The Namesake has been adapted in visual medium as a film (2007) with the same title by Mira Nair, an Indian born filmmaker living in the US. It is very difficult to recreate the same thing through a visual media, i.e. film as it presents something within a limited and fixed times. Though Nair cut many minor and irrelevant Bengali cultural elements in her film version, but she intensifies the diasporic milieu in film by showing some scenes which are the true hallmarks of universal symbols of mobility and odyssey of dislocation and displacements of the diasporic milieu. In the film version Mira Nair has shown the Bengali diasporic culture in a much better way even than the source text. Is it possible to render all diasporic (cultural) milieus from a print medium (text) into a visual medium (film)? In this process of translations, how has Bengali diasporic culture been presented in different ways? My paper will try to explore the aforementioned issues.
[Key Words: The Namesake a multimodal medium, Multimodal translation, Loss or Gain (?), Bengali Diasporic Culture]
1. How much are diaspora being confined in community enclave for their “ethnic’ belonging?
2. Is the racial victimization forced them to confine themselves in community enclave?
3. How is their cultural negotiation with mainstream society getting reduced?
4. What are the recent phenomena that force them to get less access in interaction to the host society?
5. How much the engagement/interaction the host society shows with these diasporic people?
Jhumpa Lahiri and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni are the Indian diasporic writers living in the USA. In most of the novels of these writers, mainly the protagonists attempt to interact/mix with the host American society. But their attempts fail to forward them with “Dialogic Voices” in mainstream American society. Therefore, they usually moor in their ethnic enclaves in the host USA. My paper will try to find the answers of the aforementioned questions from Jhumpa Lahiri and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s documentations in their novels.
[Key Words: Ethnic Enclave, “Imagined Communities”, “Dialogic Voices”, Cultural Encounter, Topical Circumstances.]
Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance (1995) is narrated almost entirely from the point of views of subaltern and petty-bourgeois characters and hence quintessentially a subaltern novel. These subalterns are Chamaar (cobbler) caste, women in general and Parsi woman in particular. Like any other subaltern novel, it includes subalterns’ struggles, resistance and protests to change their social ‘space’ from ‘periphery’ to ‘centre’, the cruel atrocities meted out over them (dalits) by the upper caste people, patterns of social pattern: patriarchy, caste hierarchies etc. My paper explores the aforementioned issues.
[Keywords: Subalterns, Resistance, Periphery to Centre, Topical and Real (?) Documentation]
In this 21st century globalised, multicultural and transnational world, ‘diasporic’ culture is an emerging field. This ‘diasporic’ culture is, to some extent, different from the traditional practice of culture. This culture is hybrid, heterogeneous and a plural one. The ethnic culture gets entangled and entailed with the hegemonic culture of host society. And thus, the ‘residual’ culture of ethnic people in diasporic land is transformed to cope with ‘the changed social conditions’ in host society.
Jhumpa Lahiri is the second generation diasporic writer living in the United States. Her latest novel The Lowland (2013) texturised the theme of cultural assimilation ‘in-between’ spaces. The first generation diaspora in the novel like Subhash Mitra, Gauri Mitra and Narasimhan; the second generation diaspora like Gauri’s daughter Bela; and others adapt the Unites States’ cultural traits: liberal dress code, free and unconventional sex-orientation, lack of familial bonds, and other liberal, independent life styles.
Thus, is diaspora concerned to preserve their ‘home’ culture in ‘foreign’ land? How is cultural disparity shown between the ‘diaspora’ and the ‘host’ people? How much these cultural practices appear as counter-culture to diaspora’s ‘home’ culture? How is Lahiri’s The Lowland successful in exploring these cultural traits? My paper will try to explore the aforementioned areas.
[Key-Words: Culture, ‘in-between’ spaces, diaspora’s culture, counter-culture, Assimilation]
"
Contra-acculturation from / at Margin: A Study of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2003)
The history of the idea of culture is a record of our reactions in thought and feeling, to the changed conditions of our common life (emphasis added).
(Raymond Williams in Culture and Society: 285)
Culture…is a source of identity, and a rather combative one… (emphasis added)
(Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism: XIII)
The expatriate builds a cocoon around herself / himself as a refugee from cultural dilemmas and from experienced hostility or unfriendliness in the new country (emphasis added).
(Lois Tyson in Critical Theory Today: 72)
In the present globalised, multicultural world, diasporic literature is an emerging field in literary and socio-cultural studies. In diaspora studies, generally the Third World countries’ ‘ethnic’ people moor in the developed First World countries. These ethnic people’s culture is ‘minority’ culture in host country’s hegemonic culture and other societal ethos. When diaspora face exclusion from hegemonic host culture, they try to negotiate / encounter the host culture for their cultural identity formation. Generally they attempt it making “imagined communities” (Anderson’s term) in diasporic land. These diasporic people, especially the first generation expatriates attempt to restore their ‘ethnic’ cultural practices in host country. Therefore, their voices of resistance are manifested during this contra-acculturation process.
Jhumpa Lahiri’s culture-laden novel The Namesake (2003) projects the first generation expatriate Ashima Ganguli’s displaced, dislocated and deterritorised feelings; feelings of rootlessness, mental trauma, identity crisis, cultural dislocation; marginalised and excluded self in the mainstream American culture; voices of resistance for not assimilating with host cultural ethos and so on. Ashima Ganguli’s son Gogol Ganguli and daughter-in-law Moushumi Mazoomdar, both the second generation immigrants in the novel, also show their resistance for not following the American cultural ethos in few occasions. Though Ashima shows little flexibility to sustain her life in mainstream culture in few occasions, she makes a saga for restoring ethnic culture in her Bengali ‘home’ in US. This paper will attempt to explore all the above mentioned issues.
[Keywords: Diaspora, Ethnicity, Expatriate, ‘imagined Communities’, Contra-acculturation, Margins’ Voices / Resistance]
"
Jhumpa Lahiri, a second generation diasporic writer, living in the USA wrote her first novel, The Namesake (2003) where the question of identity is a ‘leit motif’ in it. Ashima Ganguli, the protagonist of the novel always feels rootlessness, displacement, existential crisis, identity crisis, not only in the USA, but also in her psychic self. Only after the death of her husband Ashoke Ganguli, she knows how to live in an exile country alone. Like her other works, she writes this novel from the male point of view. Gogol Ganguli, the son of Ashima and Ashoke Ganguli(s), who would also be considered as the protagonist of the novel, at first confined in Maxine, his American white girl friend and then in Moushumi, his Bengali wife, gained his identity at last. Here Gogol is no one, but the alter ego of the novelist herself. For both of them, experiencing the fractured psyches in foreign country and at last getting their self-identities is like ‘cocoon’ that springs out from larval state and getting a new identity. Like almost all diasporic writings, this theme/motif is occurred throughout the whole texture of the novel. My paper will explore the aforementioned issues.
"