REFLECTION OF IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE IN JHUMPA LAHIRI’S ’THE NAMESAKE’

ABSTRACT

This paper makes a modest attempt to analyse the various issues faced by the immigrants as portrayed in Lahiri’s novel first novel The Namesake. The story of the novel is set in United States, Calcutta hovers in the background. . It is out of her experiences of the bizarre identity crisis on the part of those who have remained as immigrants and those who were traumatized by homelessness, that the contents of the novel The Namesake were derived. Jhumpa Lahiri admits that as the novel conveys the experiences of alienation of the migrants from their roots, it is to some extent autobiographical. The novel shows how the immigrants face cultural dilemmas in the foreign system Lahiri shows that the immigrants in their enthusiasm to stick to their own cultural beliefs and customs gradually imbibe the cultural ways of the host country too. Their own children groomed to be “bilingual” and “bicultural” face cultural dilemmas and displacement more. This paper throws light on how Lahiri uses Gogol’s name to show the duality of immigrant experience and thus explain what Hall meant by diaspora experience when he said that, “diaspora experience is defined by …the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity, by a conception of ’identity’ which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity.” It focuses on the lives of immigrants and their inner and external conflicts in an alien land. By highlighting issues like cultural dilemma, quest of identity, multiculturalism and universal aspects of human existence, Diasporic Literature occupies an important status in the literary field. 

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