What's in a name?
AJIT DUARA
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In Mira Nair's adaptation of The Namesake, a documentary element intrudes into the fiction.
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An oft-repeated immigrant experience: "The Namesake" represents Mira Nair's global Indian village world.
"NOW I see," said the old woman, "that it is plainly fate. And since such is the case, it will be better to name him after his father. His father's name was Akakiy, so let his son's be Akakiy too." In this manner he became Akakiy Akakievitch. They christened the child, whereat he wept and made a grimace, as though he foresaw that he was to be a titular councillor."
Trite echoes
These lines from the The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol are echoed in a trite sort of way by Jhumpa Lahiri's silly protagonist, Gogol Ganguli. In The Namesake, she writes about his embarrassment about being given such a name while sitting in English class at a suburban American High School: "Warmth spreads from the back of Gogol's neck to his cheeks and his ears. Each time the name is uttered, he quietly winces."
What is his problem? No doubt Gogol is an uncommon name but it is a damn sight less embarrassing than Elvis Ganguli or Wolfgang Amadeus Ganguli. As a matter of fact Gogol is quite a cute name. A friend of mine has named his son Ozu, and another Akira, after a couple of Japanese film directors. Nobody laughs at them.
One may not have mentioned this earlier because we tend to take literary and cinematic high priestesses rather seriously in this country. Clearly, the plot of The Namesake, book and film, hinges on a name, rotates on it, revolves around it.
"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet" you might say about Gogol. But he is so shy of his name — so shamed at being the namesake of a neurotic Russian — he changes it to Nikhil. His father, Ashoke Ganguli, for some unfathomable reason, doesn't tell his son why he has called him Gogol. So Nikhil carries on his merry way, new name and new babes, right through college and architecture school until he is suddenly told the real significance of his name — Dad's life was saved because he was reading a volume of the short stories of Nikolai Gogol when the train he was travelling in from Kolkata to Jamshedpur suddenly derailed.
Then Nikhil starts feeling terrible because, to his father, the name Gogol signified the new lease of life he had received after his accident. He named his son Gogol as an act of faith and not just as an obsessive-compulsive fan of a severely depressed Russian writer. This is the crux of the plot in The Namesake. The rest of the novel and film is delicately revealed ethnography — details of upper caste Bengali customs in Kolkata vis-à-vis their painstaking adaptations, and amusing variations on the same, in the Bengali American community in suburban U.S.
No emotional response
The significance of `Gogol' just does not work in The Namesake; it does not move you to emotional response, as the author intends it to. It becomes instead a plot device to open up the oft-repeated Indian immigrant experience, the longing for that idea called `home' and the conflict between economic `success' in a foreign country and a lingering sense of `failure' at having left one's roots behind. It is like living in a surreal, sort of virtual world, where births and deaths of friends and family are little blips on a map of the other side of the planet. The loneliness of this generation that left Kolkata in the 1960s for the "Life Magazine land" called America is well described.
But the sadness described so eloquently is that of Ashoke Ganguli and his wife, Ashima. Gogol knows little of Kolkata and cares even less. His world is completely different. And here is the second problem in the book and film. Whose story is The Namesake? If it is the father's story then it is the immigrant story — a man who, in his own words, lives all his adult life in a country not his own. If it is Gogol's story, then we wait till Ashoke dies and Gogol, as the second lead, takes over the text. And it is this second, overlapping story, which is the last quarter of the tale.
Unfortunately, it is also the less arresting of the two and has all the elements of what is rather crudely called the American-born `desi' syndrome; Gogol falling in love with a white Anglo Saxon protestant girl called Maxine, breaking the relationship abruptly for no apparent reason, entering into a new one with a Bengali `desi', discovering that she is faithless, moving back home with his mother.
Just a prop
Then finally, as if to justify the title of the book, finding an old copy of The short stories of Nikolai Gogol, gifted to him by his father and inscribed in his hand: "For Gogol Ganguli: the man who gave you his name, from the man who gave you your name". The name loses all emotional resonance and becomes a prop, not even mise-en-scene. And because director Mira Nair has adapted the novel literally, cross cutting between Kolkata and Cambridge, Mass., a documentary element intrudes into the fiction.
We enter Nair's global Indian village world — travelling to Agra to see the Taj, Gogol's decision to become an architect the moment he sees it, jokes about `ancient air-conditioning' in Kolkata (the punkha), the `desi' kids calling their parents `guys', et al.
Indeed if ethnic authenticity were the criteria for filming "The Namesake", then excellent Bengali actors, and there are plenty of them, could have been cast. Irfan Khan and Tabu are good performers but they are not Bengalis and you can tell. It is like David Lean casting Alec Guiness as Prof. Godbole in "Passage to India", possibly for a wider audience, and ending up losing an essential E. M. Forster's character.
Best moments
The finest moments in "The Namesake" are the scenes of Ashoke Ganguli bringing his bride Ashima to America, to his crummy little apartment, and letting her make the adjustments.
It reminds you of Ray's "Apu Sansar", when Apu brings his `accidental' bride to his little cubicle overlooking the railway tracks. The same sadness when she looks out of the window and sees nothing but a foreign land. This is now her husband; this is now her life. And miraculously, she ends up happily married.
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