Love And Loss On Two Continents

All immigrants have felt these conflicting emotions, but few have been able to articulate their feelings of loss and longing and neither have their American born children really understood what their parents have sacrificed and for what.

The Namesake, a film by Mira Nair, who first came to the United States as a student and now calls three continents home explores that theme. It is based on the novel of the same name by Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri, herself the child of immigrants, who grew up in London and Kingstown, Rhode Island  This evocative film will hit home for many viewers and bring the poignancy and pathos of people caught between cultures and continents.

The film is about an American family – not the blonde, blue-eyed variety, but one which has come from half way across the world, leaving loved ones behind. Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli, immigrants from Calcutta, are trying to find their footing in a baffling new world. Their children, Gogol and Sonali, born in America, struggle to find their own identity and balance their two worlds. The Namesake chronicles the heartbreak and struggle of becoming American, the sacrifices one generation makes for the success of the next.

First and second generation Indian Americans will find many linkages to the Ganguli family – in fact, it’s a case of reel and real life colliding. Ashoke and Ashima, played by Irfan Khan and Tabu, have had an arranged marriage and hardly know each other and their relationship slowly grows and strengthens. When a child is born, Ashoke names him Gogol after the famous Russian author for a very deep reason, but the name is certainly not an easy one for an American teenager to bear, burdened as he is with his Bengali identity and cumbersome culture. Gogol (Kal Penn) rejects the name Gogol for Nikhil, which of course becomes Nick, dates a rich American girl (Jacinda Barrett) and tries to create a world of his own, which often shuts out his parents.

Jhumpa Lahiri, growing up as a child of immigrants, faced many of these conflicts in her own Bengali household. In fact, she even exchanged her own given name in favor of her pet name, Jhumpa. She was born Nilanjana Sudeshna in 1967. 

“It was always a question of allegiance, of choice. I wanted to please my parents and meet their expectations,” she says. “I also wanted to meet the expectations of my American peers, and the expectations I put on myself to fit into American society. My parents were fearful and suspicious of America and American culture when I was growing up. Maintaining ties to India, and preserving Indian traditions in America, meant a lot to them. They’re more at home now, but it’s always an issue, and they will always feel like, and be treated as, foreigners here.”

She adds, “Now that I’m an adult I understand and sympathize more with my parents’ predicament. But when I was a child it was harder for me to understand their views. At times I felt that their expectations for me were in direct opposition to the reality of the world we lived in.”

Mira Nair on the set of The Namesake

Things like dating, living on one’s own, having close friendships with Americans, and selecting careers of one’s own choice have been the cause of tension in Indian American homes. Lahiri says something, which many who grew up in the 70’s and 80’s in America will be able to identify with: “As a young child, I felt that that the Indian part of me was unacknowledged and therefore somehow negated, by my American environment, and vice versa. I felt that I led two very separate lives. ”

Mira Nair read Lahiri’s novel as she was flying to India for a traumatic task – her much loved mother-in-law had just passed away. This is one nightmare scenario for most immigrants away from home. In the book, Ashima loses her father in minutes in that sudden, feared phone call across continents and Nair read with a shock of recognition. She says, “When I read Jhumpa’s book it was like I had just met a person who completely understood my grief, who knew the cocoon I was in and everything I was experiencing.”

Tabu, Kal Penn and Jacinda Barrett in The Namesake

For Kal Penn, a second generation Indian American actor who has grown up in New Jersey, the possibility that he could become an actor in America had dawned when he saw Nair’s Mississippi Masala in the local mall when he was just 8 years old and saw brown people like himself on the screen. Interestingly enough, Penn too changed his name like Gogol, though not for the same reasons. He saw Americanizing his given name, Kalpen Mody, as a way of breaking into mainstream cinema. He has not changed his name officially though and in keeping with the spirit of the movie, he asked Mira Nair to give him two credits — Kal Penn as Gogol and Kalpen Mody as Nikhil!

As Nair says, “It’s a role very close to Kal’s heart, because he also sees it as being about his family and where he comes from. There was a genuine sense right from the start that he owned the role and he took it very, very seriously.”

Penn would agree for he says, “One of the things I really like about this story is that it dispels the myth that being a young American looks a particular way or has a particular tradition. I think it brings us back to the core idea of the American experience – which are all these beautiful shared stories of people coming here from all around the world full of hope and promise.”

One of the most powerful scenes in the movie is when he shaves his head in keeping with cultural traditions after his father dies. “It’s a really emotional moment in Gogol’s life so we knew it wouldn’t work with just a bald cap,” says Kal. “That’s why I decided I would really shave my head. In the end, the scene was far more emotionally challenging than physically challenging. Hair grows back, but what Gogol is experiencing will stay with him forever.”

Besides a sterling performance by Kal Penn as the conflicted Gogol who finally realizes the value of his own culture, there are superb performances from Tabu and Irfan Khan. Tabu has the challenge of transforming from a young bride to a mature woman who has gone through all the vicissitudes of life, including the death of her husband in an alien land.

“She is so truly Indian at heart that I really identified with her,” says Tabu. “I’m not an immigrant, but I’ve always wondered how people make these incredible transitions and departures, moving to a new country where everything is so different, where family, marriage, all the institutions have different rules. You have to create an entirely different reality for yourself, which is a very difficult thing to do and quite interesting to imagine. Ashima is a very Indian woman but she must find a way to create a family in the United States without losing herself.”

Director Mira Nair and Tabu on the set of The Namesake

In the film another major character is the stunning Moushimi, the Bengali American that Gogol marries. This role is played by Zuleika Robinson, whose real life also relates to the movie. Robinson is of Indian, English, Burmese and Iranian heritage, and has grown up in several countries.

In the film Nair mixes and swirls two major metropolises, Calcutta and New York, as many immigrants must in their daily, truncated lives juxtaposed on two continents. Says Nair, “I also wanted to capture visually the dizzying feeling of being an immigrant where you might physically be in one particular space yet you feel like you are someplace else in your soul.”

So how have Indian Americans reacted to this film and have they seen their own lives hreflected in its prisms?

Little India talked to Rohit and Chhavi Bhargava, a young couple in Vienna , Va. Rohit works in marketing with a major firm and also runs a marketing blog while Chhavi is an elementary school teacher who’s taking time out to stay home with their two year old son, Rohan. Rohit, who was born in Kanpur, was only one year old when the family left for Washington DC, where his father got a job with the World Bank. Now his father is nearing retirement after almost 32 years there. Chhavi, who is from New Delhi, migrated to Canada when she was just 6 years old with her mother and older brother.

“It was very easy to relate to the story,” says Chhavi. “The haldi stained saris, my pet-name ‘Mini,’ given by my grandfather and only used by close friends and family, the dreadful letters written from India informing my mom that her parents had passed away, the look on my mother’s face when her American daughter-in-law calls her by her first name, old faded photographs of family standing in front of the Taj Mahal, the list goes on and on!”

Many immigrants will connect to the scenes shot in India as the Ganguli family travels back to Calcutta. Says Rohit: “I smiled during the part of the film where the kids travel to India for the first time with their parents, as some places were oddly familiar. I used to have long hair, and everywhere I went in India on that trip, people assumed I was a Bollywood actor. The moment when the son hrefused to ride in the rickshaw and jogged alongside was so perfectly ‘American teen,’ great moment in the film.”

Chhavi says that there are many parts of the film she could personally relate to since she had traveled alone to India for the first time as a young woman.  “Just as The Namesake is about self-discovery and selflessness, it was only after coming back from India did I understand more about myself, and finally felt like I understood the kinds of hardships and struggles my mother had to face when moving abroad,” she says. “The movie showed the sacrifices our parents’ generation had to make when moving abroad.”
 
She adds, “I have to admit that the movie definitely made me regret every time I told my mother I was going to call and didn’t bother to pick up the phone, and every time I told her I couldn’t visit her, because I would rather be doing something else with someone else’s family. In fact after seeing the movie, both of us called our mothers! I guarantee anyone in my generation who sees this movie will do the same.”

In the film Ashima decides to return home, leaving her adult son and daughter who are settled in America. What choices are immigrant parents making as they age?

Kal Penn, Irrfan Khan, Sahira Nair and Tabu in The Namesake

Says Rohit, “In our family, no one has really decided to go back to India yet. But perhaps this could happen at some point in the future.” Chhavi says that this had been discussed many times in her family as her mother wants to move back to India.
 
“She is in her late 70’s now, and since most of our family has moved to Canada already, there really isn’t any close family in India that could take care of her,” she says. Yet she recalls how potent a force India still is in her mother’s life. “Rohit and I recently came back from a trip to India this past December, and we sent our pictures to my mom in Canada, over email. She called me the next day, telling me it took her all night to go through all the pictures, as she wanted to stare at every image as they brought back so many memories. In her heart, I believe she would much rather live in India.”

For Reema Bakarania, an undergraduate at University of Miami, in Miami, Florida, the film also struck home. “I’ve read The Namesake and the movie was a great depiction of the book. It really resonated with me. I think it all depends on how you’ve been brought up and if you respect how your parents and the generations before you have benefited you. In my generation, I think it can really help kids to see how they need to respect older people in our culture.” 

The Ganguli family’s mourning rituals brought back disquieting memories of her own loss: when her grandmother had passed away in Lathi in Gujarat, their family in America was devastated. She says, “It’s episodes like that which make you realize the importance of people in your life.” While her father traveled back to Gujarat where the entire extended family lives, her mother conducted the mourning rituals and prayers in their home in Tampa. For Bakarania, the sadness is in not really getting to connect to her grandparents due to the distances and language barriers.

Perhaps what is most telling about the film is its universality. “I think that this film has a wonderful story that anyone in my generation with parents who left another country to come to America can relate to,” says Rohit Bhargava. “I was thinking about the film afterwards and unlike some others, I didn’t see it as uniquely Indian. The experience of the characters could translate to many other cultures. There were several elements that were different, because my family is not Bengali – but the story was not necessarily about them being Indian, just about a family leaving their home to make a new one, and how families stay together.”