Cultural Event #3 - The Namesake

Amid a mass of tangled debris, a hand covered in blood clutches a page from a novel by Nikolai Gogol.  The man holding this page, barely alive, is Ashoke Ganguli, a young Indian student who ends up being one of the sole survivors of a horrible train crash.  Ashoke becomes the father of Gogol Ganguli, the main character in Mira Nair’s film The Namesake.  Gogol struggles with his Indian-American identity throughout the movie, first rejecting his given name “Gogol” for a more Americanized name “Nikol” or Nick.  His parents are both immigrants from Calcutta, living in Queens, New York, and Gogol spends the whole of his youth fighting the Indian traditions that remind him of his parents.  However, after an extremely sudden and traumatizing event in his life, Gogol embraces his Indian side for the first time, finally giving in to his family’s desires. 

I don’t want to give away any of the movie, but I found it to be very moving and beautifully well-done.  There were so many parallels between The Namesake and Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee the novel we have been reading in my Multicultural Literature class.  Gogol and Jasmine both struggle to find their true identities as Indian-Americans.  While Jasmine more or less rejects all of her former traditions from her previous years in India, American-born Gogol learns to embrace the traditions passed down from his parents to form a balance between the Indian past and the American present. 

While the story seems to focus mainly on Gogol, I feel that his mother, Ashima, steals the show. She endures every kind of emotion throughout the film, from the trauma of leaving her hometown of Calcutta to move to New York City with her new husband, to the heartbreak of losing many of the people she loves in the years that follow.  She truly adapts to the American lifestyle without losing the sense of tradition instilled in her from her upbringing in India. 

I would recommend this movie to anyone who enjoys drama, learning about other cultures, and above all, learning about yourself.  One of the most powerful quotes that fully encompass the heart of the film comes from Ashima’s mother minutes before her wedding ceremony:

“Your life is about to change.  Embrace the new.  Don’t forget the old.  And your new life – enjoy it fully.”