TEXT TO SCREEN: AN ADAPTATION OF JHUMPA LAHIRI’S THE NAMESAKE
INTRODUCTION
“It’s what my world is,
and I’ve always been aware of my parents came from Calcutta. I have found
myself sort of caught between the worlds of left behind and still clung to, and
also the world that surrounded me at school and everywhere else, as soon as I
set foot out of the door”(Pbs,2008)
These words give a
clear cut perception about Jhumpa Lahiri, the famous diasporic writer. Through
these words, she expresses her own dilemma of name in an interview with Jeffrey
Brown. Mrs. Lahiri, born as the name Nilanjana Sudeshna, belongs to the second
generation of an Indian family abroad. She still retains her links with India,
as it is proved in the form of her critically acclaimed novel The Namesake. She
mainly focuses on the human condition of the Indian diaspora in the USA, which
in turn reflects her own predicament. She is indeed the storyteller who weaves
the lace of love, identity, crisis, lies and faults in a matured way. Her
characters experience several dilemmatic situations in life. She is not only a
writer but the weaver of dreams, the fabricator of emotions and therefore her
each and every novel becomes an outlet for her emotions.
The Namesake is her maiden voyage into the novel genre.
Published in 2003, it is a striving endeavour to graph the lives of a family of
immigrants in America. The novel is set against the backdrop of the 1970s and
the 1980s when the Indian migration to the West, especially the United States,
was rampant due to the effects of mushrooming globalization. The two
generations of the immigrant Indian family is represented by Ashima Ganguli, a
young Bengali wife who accompanies her husband Ashoke Ganguli to America,
and her son Gogol Ganguli and Sonia Ganguli who are born in the United States.
As the Gangulis live through the later part of the twentieth century, their
struggle becomes at once individual and social. Throughout the novel, Lahiri
repeatedly focuses on the clash between Indian culture and American one,
especially in the case of second generation immigrants. A contrast is brought
about between the Indian culture with the background of a rich heritage
received from the past and the present American life. The characters are
portrayed as trapped between the two distinctive countries with varied cultures
that would never reconcile. According to David Kipen, The Namesake is “a novel
about an immigrant family’s imperfect assimilation into America”(M1). Though
Ashima and Ashoke strive hard to sink with America, the good old memories of
their mother country holds them aback. On the other hand, their children, Gogol
and Sonia, has more love towards the country and culture that acts as a foster
mother, and Calcutta seems to be more disgusting to them. The condition is bit
more complicated in the case of Gogol who is a perfect ABCD (American Born
Confused Desi).He loves to be called as an American rather than an
American-born-Indian, but forced to try to follow Indian culture in America
just because of his parents. Apart from this, the most serious problem that he
faces is regarding his name. “He hates that his name is both absurd and
obscure, that it has nothing to do with who he is, that it is neither Indian
nor American but of all things Russian”( Lahiri 76). He feels that his own namesake is the weirdest
one in the whole world and the thought of it irritates him. Again Gogol’s
namesake complicates the problem of his rootlessness. Lahiri portrays this as
Gogol’s thought in the novel:
Not only does Gogol Ganguli
have a pet name turned good name, but a last name turned first name. And so it
occurs to him that no one he knows in the world, in Russia or India or America
or anywhere, shares his name. Not even the source of his namesake” (78)
Gogol was
initially given as a pet name, after his father’s wish. Lahiri uses the term
‘Daknam’ for pet name and he was given a good name as Nikhil when he was sent
to school. When the child failed to respond to his good name, the school
authorities decided to change his name to Gogol, the name that he believes to
be his weirdest namesake. Gogol’s name becomes the factor that distorts his personality into a
confused state and his mind into an ambiguous anonymity. Gogol changes his name to
Nikhil, changing altogether from Gogol Ganguli.
He wonders if this is how it
feels for an obese person to become thin, for a prisoner to walk free. “I’m
Nikhil,” he wants to tell the people who are walking their dogs, pushing
children in their strollers, throwing bread to the ducks. (Lahiri 102)
He moves to
the new college where no one is aware of his old name and this provides him
with a new vibe to move on. He is seldom reminded of his old name, but,
whenever he visits his parents or calls them, he becomes the old Gogol, the
name he detested. Ironically, the sense of alienation does not cease to occur
even after changing the name. Perhaps, he is more confused with his dual
identity as ‘Gogol’ for the family and ‘Nikhil’ for the outer world. The new
name comes with its own dilemma and conflicts. With it he feels that he stands
nowhere:
There is only one
complication: he doesn’t feel like Nikhil. Not yet….At times he still feels his
old name, painfully and without warning, the way his front tooth had unbearably
throbbed in recent weeks after a filling, threatening for an instant to sever
from his gums when he drank coffee, or iced water, and once he was riding in an
elevator.( Lahiri
105)
Later
Gogol moves on to understand the real intention of his father in giving
him the weirdest namesake, not only being his love and worship for his
favourite author but also as a tribute to that author whose book that saved him
from a deadly and dreadful accident. Ashoke had a “Tryst with Death”
(Lahiri 19) in a claustrophobic experience in a train accident in India between
Ghatshila and Dhalbumgarh stations during his travel from Calcutta to
Jamshedpur in his early twenties. Since he was awake, reading The Short
Stories of Nikolai Gogol in the late hour of the night, he fortunately
saved his life from the train accident by drawing the attention of the
rescuers. This convinced him that the author of the book was a lucky name, the
savior of his life. Instead of thanking God Ashoke thanked Gogol for his second
birth. Thus, he preferred the author’s surname for his son’s name. On knowing
this, Gogol feels painful at heart for changing his name which was given to him
with much love by his father. His sentiments reach its zenith when he loses his
father lately after knowing about this incident. Again a transformation is
clearly visible in his character, trying to become the old Gogol, with love and
care for his family, wishing to adapt to his current situations.
The
Namesake explores the nuances involved
with being caught between two conflicting cultures with highly distinct
religious, social, and ideological differences. It was actually a novella
published in The New Yorker and was later expanded to the novel form.
The novel was
adapted into the movie form by the well-known and distinguished director, Mira
Nair. Nair was very much influenced by the stunning story in The Namesake.
She read the novel that she herself calls to be ‘a tale of loss’ when she was
mourning for the death of her next of kin whom she lost in a foreign country.
She was able to identify the pain of loss as experienced by the central
character of the novel, Gogol Ganguli, when he accidentally losses his father.
This made her to drop her activities and venture out to do this film.
The adaptation
of The Namesake is not merely an attempt at expressing the ideas in a
different medium, but rather a re-interpretation and ideological radicalization
of the original text cast in terms of the social, economic and psychological
realities of the Post-Modern World. Jhumpa Lahiri sensitively portrays the
individual trials and tribulations of being a part of the larger ethnic group
authentically translated into the visual, perceptual and presentational medium
of the film. Robert Stam, the precise accent of authority in the film and
literature field, has co-determined the current Post-Modern discourse to
address the mediatic nexus that exists between the two medium.
Mira Nair had
already been established as a successful director of the diasporic cinema much
before she had even thought about The Namesake, which was released in
2007. She made her debut through the full length narrative film Salaam Bombay
as early as 1988, which portrays the kids’ struggle for survival on the streets
of Bombay. She gained experience through the previous picturisation of Mississippi
Masala (1991), about an Indian family moving from Uganda to the Southern U.S. to run a
motel; Monsoon Wedding (2001), a comedy drama focused on a chaotic
Punjabi arranged marriage in New Delhi; Vanity Fair (2004) an adaptation
of William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel and a historical epic Kama Sutra: A
Tale of Love, set in the 16th century
India.
Mira Nair has
successfully employed her clear expertise with theatrical traditions and
innovative exercise of conventional filmic codes, assembling the translation of
multicultural heterogeneity of the novel The Namesake into film a
success. Her hard work is mirrored well in in the movie so that one can
perceive rationality, coherence and comprehensive sense of direction in every
facet, from the music to the cinematography employed.
The
Namesake was released in the United States
on March 9, 2007, following screenings at film festivals in Toronto and New
York. The screenplay was done by Sooni Taraporevala who had been a sympathetic
collaborator to Nair in her other movies too. The cinematography of the movie
owes appreciation to Frederick Elmes. With a running time of about 122 minutes,
the movie is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned) as it has mild sexual
situations. The soundtrack has a mixture of varied music- Indian, Anglo-Indian
and French, composed by Nitin Sawhney,(influenced by Ravi Shankar's music for
Pather Panchali) which adds to the fact that the movie is a mosaic of different
facets. The film was greatly appreciated by the American critics and it
appeared on several critics’ top ten lists of the best films of 2007. It had
won Golden Aphrodite Award for Mira Nair in the Love is Folly International
Film Festival held in Bulgaria and was nominated for several other awards.
Mira Nair
successfully translates the indistinguishable interpretation of heterogeneity
she experienced while reading and comprehending The Namesake. Mira left
India at an age of nineteen, while Gogol was born in New York like Jhumpa. Mira
says, “I am different from Gogol; I went to a classroom where everyone looked
like me whereas, Gogol was the only brown kid in the sea of the white kids and
therefore had war going in his heart.” (9)
Mira Nair came
from a place where her roots are very strong, from where she could take to the
air. On the other hand, Jhumpa Lahiri retains strong ties with her parents’
homeland as well as with the United States and England, even though she was
born to the second generation of Indian immigrants in the United States. But
growing up with ties to all the three countries Lahiri has lived with a sense
of homelessness and an inability to belong to any of these countries. At a
press conference in Calcutta in January 2001, Lahiri further described her
rootlessness and failure of belonging as, “No country is my motherland. I
always find myself in exile whichever country I travel to, that’s why I was
tempted to write something about those living their lives in exile.”
This idea of
exile runs consistently throughout The Namesake. Because of their
diasporic existence, both Nair and Lahiri were able to comprehend and portray
the trauma of diasporic existence of the characters in their respective medium.
The Namesake is not merely a story of immigration and diaspora but a
mosaic of different facets like marginality, alienation, nostalgia and identity
crisis.
Mira Nair’s ‘Tribute to her Motherland’
Mira Nair has
taken into account human lives and relationships in her movies. The Namesake,
too, portrays the intricacies in human relationships. It can be considered as
the most remarkable film of Mira Nair. The film had a warm reception all across
the globe, especially from the people of Indian Diaspora. Indian people have
now practically reached to all the countries of the world. They peacefully try
to assimilate themselves in the foreign societies. They constantly remember
their motherland and culture. The mindset and feelings of each one of the
Indian immigrants abroad is vividly picturised in The Namesake. It is
the universal story of every Indians living abroad, longing for the good old
days in their past. It is the longing of Mira Nair herself, her love and
tribute to her motherland.
Adaptation as an interpretation
The debate on
cinematic adaptations of literary works was for many years dominated by the
questions of fidelity to the source and by the tendency to prioritize the
literary originals over their film versions. Adaptations were seen by most
critics as inferior to the adapted texts, as “minor”, “subsidiary”,
“derivative” or “secondary” products, missing the spirit, vigour and symbolic
richness of the original texts. The major fallacy noticed in adaptations is the
impoverishment of the book’s contents due to omission of the essential facts or
the inability of the film makers in deciphering the deeper meaning contained in
the book. Another major fault with adaptation is that it narrows down the open
ended characters, objects or landscapes, created by the book and reconstructed
in the reader’s imagination, to concrete and definite images. Such adaptations
usually spoil the beauty of the text and it could be easily understood that such
visualizations would destroy much of the subtleties dealt within the text.
Adaptations
are now being analysed as products of artistic creativity caught up in the
ongoing whirl of intertextual transformation, or texts generating
other texts in an endless process or recycling, transformation, and
transmutation with no clear point of origin. When an adaptation is compared
with the literary work it is based on, the stress is on the ways the film
creator move within the field of intertextual connections and how they employ
the means of expression offered by the filmic art to convey meanings.
An adaptation
is seen as interpretation, a specific and original vision of the literary text,
and even if it remains fragmentary, it is worthwhile because it embeds the book
in a network of creative activities and interpersonal communication. An
adaptation as interpretation does not have to catch all the nuances of the
book’s complexity, but it has to remain as a work of art, an independent,
coherent and convincing creation with its own subtleties of meanings. In other
words, it has to remain faithful to the internal logic created by the new
vision of the adapted work.
In order to
consider a film as a good adaptation, the most essential fact to be noted is
that it has to come into terms with what is known as the ‘spirit’ of the text
and it should take into account all layers of the text’s complexity. The
Namesake, as an adaptation has absolute fidelity to the source text. Even
though it is not an exact transmutation of the text, paying attention to the
minor details and subtleties, it remains as a complete and independent work of
art within itself. The next chapter deals with the novel and the movie in
detail throwing light upon the similarities and discrepancies between the novel
and the movie.
VOYAGE FROM TEXT TO SCREEN
Michael
Hastings, well- known screenwriter once said in an interview, “Film is visual
brevity.... If the novel is a poem, the film is a telegram."
As the title
of this thesis, this chapter is dedicated to the study of the long voyage of The
Namesake from text to screen-an in-depth analysis of the novel as well as
the movie. Novel is defined as a long narrative in prose and here, it is
treated as the ‘text’. Film is also yet another form of narrative, which
combines the theatrical as well as the dramatic elements and is represented as
the ‘screen’. The novel and the film are works on fiction, and hence, are
considered as complementary to one another. However, both are independent
forms. Hence, the adaptation of the novel to the movie is a multidisciplinary
process.
The Text- The Namesake
The Week
observes, “The Namesake hits many familiar themes; the uneasy status of
the immigrant, the tension between India and the United States and between
family tradition and individual freedom, a coming-of-age novel”
The
Namesake is an evocative story of the
struggles and hardships of a Bengali couple who immigrate to the United States
to form a life outside of everything they are accustomed to. The story opens in
the year 1968, portraying Ashima Ganguli as a pregnant woman, struggling
through language and cultural barriers as well as her own fears as she delivers
her first child alone. She tries to adjust herself with the life and food
habits of the alien land, even during her pregnancy.
Ashima
Bhaduri, a student in a degree class in Calcutta becomes Ashima Ganguli after
her betrothal to Ashoke Ganguli of Alipore. Ashoke shifts home to Boston for
pursuing his Ph.D. in fiber optics. Benedict Anderson states that family has
always been the “domain of disinterested love and solidarity” (131) and this is
true in the case of Ashima and Ashoke. Ashima’s immigrant experience, the clash
of cultures in the United States, and her non- acceptance by the American
society are the main concerns of the novelist in the projection of this Bengali
couple and their American- born children. Ashima feels upset and homesick,
spatially and emotionally dislocated from her ancestral home. “Home”, according
to Avatar Brah is “a mythic place of desire” (192) in an immigrant’s
imagination and “all diasporas are differentiated, heterogeneous, contested
spaces, even as they are implicated in the construction of a common ‘we’”.
Ashima tends
to regard the past with nostalgia and the present American experience as an
alienating one. She is always nostalgic of her home and spends her leisure in
reading Bengali poems, stories and articles. After eighteen months’ life in
Cambridge, she is admitted to Mount Auburn Hospital, Cambridge for her first
delivery, and “her motherhood in a foreign land” (Lahiri 6). She feels restless
being the only Indian in the hospital with the three other American women in an
adjoining room. Ashima “is terrified to raise a child in a country where she is
related to no one, where she knows so little, where life seems so tentative and
spare”( Lahiri 6). She realizes that Americans prefer their privacy to public
declarations of affection. Eight thousand miles away in Cambridge, she is
always nostalgic of her relatives in India. The delivery is successful, and the
new parents are prepared to take their son home when they learn they cannot
leave the hospital before giving their son a legal name. According to the
traditional naming process in their families, Ashima’s grandmother is expected
to give a name to her great grandchild. Eventhough the couple is far away from
their homeland, they firmly withhold their tradition and culture. They wait for
the grandmother’s letter containing the name for her great grandson, but it
never arrives, and as it is the time to get discharged from the hospital, they
decide to use a pet name in the certificates. It is the Bengali custom to grant
two names to every single person-pet name or “daknam, literally, the name by
which one is called, by friends, family and other intimates, at home and in
other private, unguarded moments”( Lahiri 25-26); and a good name, “bhalonam”( Lahiri 26),
paired with every pet name, “for identification in the outside world”(Lahiri
26). Ashoke suggests the name of Gogol, in honor of the famous Russian author
Nikolai Gogol, to be the baby's pet name, and they use this name on the birth
certificate. As a young man, Ashoke survived a train derailment with many
fatalities. He had been reading a short story collection by Gogol just before
the accident, and lying in the rubble of the accident he clutched a single page
of the story The Overcoat in his hand. With many broken bones and no
strength to move or call out, dropping the crumpled page is the only thing
Ashoke can do to get the attention of medics looking for survivors. The moment
when Ashoke decides to give the name Gogol to his son is being portrayed by Lahiri
as:
The door shuts, which is
when, with a slight quiver of recognition, as if he’d known it all along, the
perfect pet name for his son occurs to Ashoke. He remembers the page crumpled
tightly in his fingers, the sudden shock of the lantern’s glare in his eyes.
But for the first time he thinks of that moment not with terror, but with
gratitude.(28)
The newborn is brought home by
his parents, where he is welcomed by their landlords who live upstairs, Alan
and Judy Montgomery and their daughters Amber and Clover. After Gogol’s birth,
Ashima says to Ashoke,” I’m saying I don’t want to raise Gogol alone in this
country. It’s not right. I want to go back” (Lahiri 33). Had the delivery taken
place in Calcutta, she would have had her baby at home, surrounded by family.
When Ashoke realizes her agony, he himself feels guilty for bringing Ashima
into an alien country. Ashima suffers from a sleep deprivation in the silent
house with a newborn Gogol in the absence of Ashoke, and visits the supermarket
of Cambridge where all Americans are perfect strangers to her. At home, she is
disappointed for not receiving mails from Calcutta, and often recalls her
paralyzed grandmother. Ashima and Ashoke hold a rice ceremony for Gogol when he
is six months old. All their Bengali friends come over and they host a little
party in which Gogol is fed his first solid food. He is also offered some dirt,
a dollar bill, and a ballpoint pen; whichever item he reaches for is meant to
indicate his profession. He'll either be a landowner, a businessman, or a
scholar. However, he does not reach for any of the items.
After six
weeks’ trip to homeland due to the tragic death of Ashima’s father caused by a
heart attack, the family returns to Boston. Ashoke has been hired as an
Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at the university; they migrate
to a university town outside Boston, a historic district with colonial
architecture. For Ashima, this migration is drastic and distressing. Her
reaction is very poignant. She feels:
…being a foreigner, Ashima is
beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy- a perpetual wait, a
constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an ongoing
responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been ordinary life, only to
discover that the previous life has vanished, replaced by something more
complicated and demanding. Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes
is something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers, the same
combination of pity and respect.(Lahiri 49-50)
Equally problematic, if not
more, although in a different frame, are the dilemmas confronted by
Gogol, so named by his father in the likeness of the first name of the Russian
fictionist, Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol(1809-1852). On entering kindergarten,
Gogol was told by his parents that his good name would be Nikhil and not Gogol,
but the little one failed to respond to his new name and the school authorities
intervene on his behalf, sending him home with a note pinned to his shirt
stating that he would be called Gogol at school, as was his preference. He has
all along been uncomfortable with this name; and although presented a copy of
the Stories of Nikolai Gogol by his father on his fourteenth birthday, he has
never opened that book over a number of years. He changes his name, legally an
officially, and chooses to call himself Nikhil; but he later learns the reason
why his father had named him Gogol. Ashoke, before marriage, was reading
Gogol’s The Overcoat while travelling in Howrah-Ranchi Express to visit
his grandparents when he met with a serious train accident. He was saved, most
probably because one of the rescuers noticed the fluttering pages of the book
and then saw part of his arm sticking out through the window, the crumbled
pages of the book clutched in his fist. With this knowledge, towards the end of
the narrative we find the maturing Gogol reading the story The Overcoat
by this Great Russian master story teller, probably with the image of his
father flitting in and out of the pages. The identity crisis, as far as Gogol’s
name is concerned, assumes somber hues when he contemplates, ”Without people in
the world to call him Gogol , no matter how long he himself lives, Gogol
Ganguli will, once and for all, vanish from the lips of loved ones, and so
cease to exist”(Lahiri 289).
Gogol’s
growing awareness of his tangled and confusing identity is simultaneously
enhanced by the disconcertingly contrasted and contradictory experiences in his
personal and private life. He has had, before he married, affairs with several
American girls, notably Ruth and Maxine: and finds it curious, if not a
deprivation, that love began for his parents with or rather after their wedding
day. He takes seriously the warning of his parents that marriages of Bengali
boys and American girls end up in divorce. He develops an affair with a very
attractive and socially aggressive girl named Maxine. Gogol gradually becomes a
member of her family, helping with the cooking and shopping. Maxine's parents
appear to have accepted him as a son. When Maxine's parents leave the city for
the summer, they invite Maxine and Gogol to join them for a couple of weeks.
They stay in the mountains in New Hampshire, where Maxine's grandparents live.
Gogol
introduces Maxine to his parents. They behave diffidently to her. Shortly after
this meeting, Gogol's father dies of a heart attack while teaching a semester
in Ohio. He travels to Ohio to gather his father's belongings and his father's
ashes. Gogol’s metamorphosis is triggered by the death of Ashoke. Earlier he
was living an American life; now he thinks as an Indian and understands the
values of his family. He slowly withdraws from Maxine as he tries to sort out
his emotions. When Maxine asks him “to get away from all this (Gogol’s family
situation)”, he replies “I don’t want to get away” (182). Gogol breaks off the
relationship and begins to spend more time with his mother and sister, Sonia.
No doubt in taking such a step, Gogol experiences the pain of losing his love.
Ashima
encourages Gogol to call and develop a relationship with Moushumi Mazoomdar,
the daughter of one of her friends. She has had the unfortunate experience of
having planned a wedding only to have her intended groom, Graham, change his
mind at the last minute. Gogol is reluctant to meet Moushumi because she is
Bengali. But he meets her anyway, to please his mother. Finally, he marries
Moushumi which nonetheless meets the same fate as his other relationships, as
Gogol discovers her affair with Dimitri.
Moushumi’s
marriage with Gogol is a kind of substitution or compromise; he is a physical
substitute of Graham whom Moushumi was supposed to marry. Gogol realizes his
substitute role in the life of Moushumi when he spends more and more time among
her friends. Their relationship continues only till Moushumi encounters her
first love. Her return to her first love terminates her relationship with Gogol
and deeply shatters him for he never expected it from an Indian woman.
Moushumi’s suffering is subjective and is the outcome of the kind of person she
is. True to her name- Moushumi is the name of a season which is subject to
change- she is variable and changing in nature. Same weather does not last
forever, and like monsoon she comes in the life of Gogol and leaves his life
helter-skelter. Like the several past loves of Gogol, she also experiences love
for three men- Graham, Gogol and Dimitri, and in the face of her longing for
the first love the strength of her marital bond seems to be too brittle.
Moushumi’s revelation of her affair to Gogol in a train shocks and torments
him:
“He felt the chill of her
secrecy, numbing him, like a poison spreading quickly through his veins. He’d
felt this way on only one other occasion, the night he had sat in the car with
his father and learned the reason for his name. That night he had experienced
the same bewilderment, was sickened in the same way. But he felt none of the
tenderness that he had felt for his father, only the anger, the humiliation of
having been deceived” (Lahiri 282)
Gogol assumes
that second generation migrants have little difficulty in adapting to the host
culture, but he himself is referred to by the American sociologist- panelist as
“ABCD”, that is, “American -Born Confused Desi”: and the fact that he is not an
American but an Indian American darkens the shadows of marginality and
alienation over his being. After he had fallen in love with Maxine he hoped to
marry her, but she, with encouragement from her mother, gets engaged to another
man. In marrying Moushumi, he fulfills “a collective deep-seated desire-because
they’re both Bengali” (Lahiri 224): but she continues her affairs and sexual
escapades as before which fill him with a sense of shame and failure. In sum,
although Gogol does not belong to the older (first) generation of Bengali Americans,
he stays way behind to fit in the accepted and prevalent norms and practices of
Western Culture. Lahiri herself explains her aim in portraying Gogol’s
character as broken and fragmented in The Namesake, “I just wanted to write
something focusing on the experiences of Bengali- American kid”(Das 127).
Indeed, she has minutely captured how this character is trapped in cultural
dilemma. The identity crisis and what Homi.K.Bhabha calls(1), the feeling of
“in-betweenness” and belonging “nowhere” is experienced by Gogol who straddles
two cultures and suffers from the loss of roots and social dislocation.
Tejinder Kaur rightly observes:
Gogol(Nikhil), though having
passed through many emotional setbacks because of his ‘bicultural’ identity, is
shown to be feeling dejected, distressed, displaced and lonely in the end not
knowing what to do after the thwarting of his dreams, his father’s death, his
wife’s desertion and his mother’s impending departure to India, but his desire
to settle a home, have a family and a son and rise professionally in other
countries hint at his quest for the new “route” which will dawn on him after
his reflections in the company of the stories by his namesake, Nikolai Gogol-
gifted to him by his father(41-42)
Displacement
and marginality in Sonia’s case, however, trigger a relatively much less sense
of alienation and nostalgia. She seems to gradually assimilate the bits and
pieces of American culture, and adapts herself to ‘American common sense’
without much of hiccups and setbacks. She lives on her own in San Francisco,
works for an environmental agency and studies for her LSAT. But when she hear
the news of sad demise of her father due to massive heart attack, she flies
back from San Francisco to be with her mother. She stays with her mother and
works as a paralegal, hoping to apply to law schools nearby. It is Sonia who
takes care of her widowed mother. Compared to Ruth and Maxine, Sonia is of
different cast. Unlike Moushumi, she doesn’t seem to have several sexual
relationships. Like her own mother, she has a sense of duty. Like the
traditional Indian woman Sonia marries her boyfriend- a half Chinese boy, Ben
and is happy in their shared world.
In the melting
pot of The Namesake what stands out is the premature and tragic death of
Ashoke Ganguli due to a massive heart attack in Cleveland. He had received a
prestigious grant and planned to spend nine months at the University of Ohio,
leaving Ashima behind in Massachusetts. In his absence Ashima takes a job at
the library just to while away the time; more so because as she watches her
‘children’s independence’ growing from more to more, she feels she has given
birth to vagabonds. She is understandably shocked beyond words to receive the
news of her husband’s sudden death. Everything changes, especially with her, at
this unexpected news: “for the first time in her life, Ashima has no desire to
escape to Calcutta”(Lahiri 183). The flat at Pemberton Road is sold and Ashima
decides to spend six months in the States and six months in India. “It is
solitary, somewhat premature version of the future she and her husband had
planned when he was alive” (Lahiri 275). True to her name, Ashima will now be
without borders, a resident of everywhere and nowhere. Her ideal world is
shattered to pieces: ”Ashima feels lonely suddenly, horribly, permanently
alone” (Lahiri 278) and sobs for her husband. She missed her life in India for
thirty- three years and now she will miss the country in which she had loved
her husband. She decides to move away desperately after the last celebration of
Christmas together with her children.
After the
death of her husband, Ashima decides to spend six months of the year in the
U.S.A. and six in India. In spite of her feeling of displacement, marginality,
and a crisis of identity, this move is directed towards finding new ways of
adaptation in a new country. Again, after divorce, Moushumi goes to live with
Dimitri and plans to leave for Paris” immersing herself in a third language,
third culture” (Lahiri 214). This, in an extended sense, reveals the emergence
of the multicultural and global identity of the second generation Indian
immigrants. In this maiden novel, as observed by Aruti Nayar(2003), Lahiri
“brings alive the multiple selves constructed painstakingly to make sense of the
unknown world( the U.S.A.) that is as much a land of opportunities as it is of
conflict and confusion.”(Das 129).
At the end of
the novel, Gogol opens the book and begins to read the story The Overcoat
which had been read by his father at the time of the train crash.
The Today
Newspaper rightly notes “The Namesake is more than a book about a name;
it is about finding an identity in a country that will treat you as an alien
even if you were born there. But more than that, it’s about rediscovering your
roots, and the accidents of the universe that caused you to be. And that’s
something all of us can identify with” (qtd. in the Indian Subcontinent Edn.
2004)
The Screen- The Namesake
The film also
portrays the shift between India and the U.S. the movie opens with the train
accident of Ashoke Ganguli in his twenties. Unlike the novel that interposes
between the past and the present, the movie depicts a straight line evolution
of events in the life of Ashoke and Ashima, their first meeting, marriage,
children, and the trauma of their diasporic life abroad, Ashoke’s death and
finally, Ashima’s return to her native place. The film has fifty six characters
in total, the lead roles being acted by Irrfan Khan, Tabu and Kal Penn.
Film Production
The film was
produced under the UTV Motion Pictures and Mirabai Films. Mira Nair is the
director as well as the producer. The screenplay was written by Sooni Taraporevala, and
cinematography by Frederick Elmes.
The film
requires traditional Indian as well as modern American costumes for the two
generations portrayed in it. This responsibility was carefully handed by Arjun
Bhasin. The famous musicians Nithin Sawhney and Linda Cohen accomplished the
task of using a mixture of the Indian classical music along with the western
tinge. The film also contains the famous old Hindi song ‘Ye Mera Divanapan Hai’
composed by Shankar Jaikishan.
The film is
also noted for the visual description of high quality. The visit of the family
to Taj Mahal, allured by the mesmerizing beauty of the monument, and their
conversation with each other at Agra is one of the most beautiful and
unforgettable scenes in the movie, providing us with emotions of nostalgia. The
skillful use of flashback technique by Mira Nair is quite evident from the
train accident scene and the memory of Gogol’s childhood scene at the beach:
Ashoke: Aray Baba, the
camera! It is in the car. All this with no picture, huh? You just have to
remember it then, huh? Will you remember this day Gogol?
Gogol: How
long do I have to remember it?
Ashoke: (laughing) Remember
it always. Remember that you and I made this journey and went together to a
place where there was nowhere left to go.”( The Namesake, 2007)
Appreciation for the Movie from Around the
World
The novel was
a grand success not only in India and America but all around the world. The
film adaptation further added to its popularity and made it much more famous.
The film was produced in four different languages, namely, English, Bengali,
Hindi, and French. Along with many awards and nominations, the film won the
prestigious International Film Festival Award of Bulgaria.
Nikhat Kazmi
reviews the film in the entertainment supplement of The Times of India,
March 24, 2007:
India is an idea that lives
in the heart and the mind, rather than a land- locked territory; and India is a
style of upbringing and attitude that transcends territory. Great performances,
an iridescent canvas and a topical theme: The Namesake is Mira Nair’s tribute
to her janmabhumi.
Comparative Approach to the novel and the
film
The novel as
well as the film describes the struggles and hardships of the Indian people
immigrated to the United States. Ashima and Ashoke migrate to America for the
purpose of Ashoke’s research and job and raise their two children Gogol and
Sonia. Gogol struggles with and hates his awkward name, later knowing the
reason behind it from his father. Very soon, Ashoke dies of a severe heart
attack. Thus, the novel as well as the film adaptation becomes a geographical
as well as a psychological journey of two generations.
The
Namesake-novel and film are realistic and
are capable enough to concentrate any person’s attention especially those who
have lived long away from their native places. In fact, it is not the very
story of the difficulties of the Indian immigrants but it is the universal saga
of modern life.
Cinematic
considerations must be made when a novel is to be successfully adapted to the
film. Novel is a lingual medium while film is a visual one. Film provides an
abundance of details to the spectators through major changes of light,
inflections of colour, music camera, physical expressions and so on. The reader
has a far more control over the novel than the viewer does on film.
The novel and
the film are different in terms of the structures, perception and the
narrative. Hence, no one can really judge the relevance of the novel or film.
It may be necessary to deviate from the original story while transforming
novels into films. Film adaptation of The Namesake, too has certain
digressions from the novel. Such discrepancies are better to be treated as the
creative elements in the film, which in fact, are the contributions of the film
director, rather than making hues and cries over the question of fidelity.
Discrepancies in the Adaptation
There are
certain major as well as minor discrepancies found in the adaptation of The
Namesake. The novel begins with Ashima Ganguli, in the verge of her first
pregnancy, standing in her kitchen, trying to make a humble approximation of an
Indian snack sold in the streets of Calcutta. Eventhough Gogol is not
physically present in this scene; the novel begins with him, as a baby inside
his mother’s womb. It also ends with him: “But for now his mother is
distracted, laughing at a story a friend is telling her, unaware of her son’s
absence. For now, he starts to read” (Lahiri 291).Thus, the novel becomes the
story of Gogol, and his interactions and associations with other characters. On
the other hand, the movie is the story of Ashima and Ashoke-the metamorphosis
of Ashima Bhaduri to Ashima Ganguli, later to a mother, and finally, a widow.
As Mira Nair says in an interview with Jhumpa Lahiri, “I wanted it to be a love
story between Ashoke and Ashima just as much as it was….”.Of course, the novel
can more rightly be said as a portrayal of Ashoke’s love for Ashima and vice
versa. The sensuous love, on the other hand, is portrayed through the various
sexual escapades of Gogol and Moushumi.
Yet another
digression to be noted is the difference in the time span mentioned in the
novel and the movie. In the opening chapter of the novel, the year is mentioned
as 1968. Apart from this Ashoke’s accident is detailed with the date. The
narration begins as, “One day, in the earliest hours of October 20, 1961, this
nearly happened” (Lahiri 13). The movie opens with Ashoke journey to his
grandfather, followed by the train mishap. Later on, when Ashoke reveals the
real reason behind giving Gogol his name, he says that the accident happened in
the year 1974(The Namesake 2007). Thus, it happens in the movie about 13
years ahead from the novel.
In the novel,
Ashima’s family comprises of her father, mother and younger brother Rana.
Apart from them, Ashima has a sister as her next of kin in the movie,
with the name Rini. Rini appears as a little girl during Ashima’s marriage and
later on, as a grown up lady, when Ashima and Ashoke visits Calcutta during
Ashoke’s sabbatical.
After marriage,
Ashima was taken to Boston, where her husband was “earning a Ph.D…, researching
in the field of fiber optics” (Lahiri 9).But the movie is mostly centered in
and around New York, where, in the movie, she flew to after her marriage.
Contrastingly, the events in the novel are concentrated in Cambridge, Boston,
New York, Yale, Ohio and some parts of India.
In the novel,
Gogol, as a newborn, is visited by some of his parents’ friends, namely, Dr.
Gupta; and the young couple- Maya and Dilip Nandi. Such an event doesn’t occur
in the movie. The newborn Gogol was taken to a three storey apartment of the
Mongomerys- Alan and Judy, who were their landlords. A contrast is brought
about with the life and lifestyle of the two families, Indian and American, in
the novel. The movie fails to represent these characters too.
Gogol’s
annaprasan, rice ceremony, the first formal ceremony that centers around the
consumption of solid food, is explained with great importance in the novel.
Instead of that, Sonia’s annaprasan is filmed in the movie.
In the novel,
Gogol is sent to kindergarten before Sonia’s birth. Ashima, who is pregnant for
the second time, feels it difficult to carry out her household duties with ease
as before. Ashoke takes hold of the responsibilities, which, as a child, failed
to satisfy Gogol. His difficulties as a five year old child, without his
mother’s proper care are penned down by Lahiri:
“Though his father remembers
to mix up the rice and curry for Gogol beforehand, he doesn’t bother to shape
it into individual balls the way his mother does, lining them around his plate
like the numbers on a clockface….without his mother at the table, he does not
feel like eating. He keeps wishing, every evening, that she would emerge from
the bedroom and sit between him and his father, filling the air with her sari
and cardigan smell. He grows bored of eating the same thing day after day, and
one evening he discreetly pushes the remaining food to the side”.( Lahiri 55)
In the movie,
Sonia is born before Gogol is being sent to school. Sonia, as a baby, first
appears on the screen in the beachside scene, a recurrent scene of nostalgia in
the movie. Ashima’s father dies of heart failure during Gogol’s childhood.Nair,
thus, has rearranged certain scenes in the novel in course of her adaptation.
The Short
Stories of Nikolai Gogol, the landmark
book was gifted to Gogol on the occasion of his fourteenth birthday in the
novel. But in the movie, he gets it on his graduation day.
As per the
novel, after the death of Ashima’s father, the news of more deaths startles the
family through telephone calls and letters. The novel says about this as,
“Within a decade abroad, they are both orphaned; Ashoke’s parents both dead
from cancer, Ashima’s mother from kidney disease” (Lahiri 63). But, in the
movie, we find Ashima’s mother still alive and kicky, when the family visits
Calcutta during Ashoke’s sabbatical.
Certain
characters like Kim, Ruth and Bridget, with whom Gogol had erotic
relationships, and his friends at Yale University, Jonathan and Brandon are
completely omitted from the movie. Among them, Ruth is the most important as
she was the first woman with whom Gogol had a serious kind of affair. Maxine
comes to his life as a solace to the deep wound left by Ruth. Gogol meets
Maxine at a party hosted by Russell. Lahiri portrays this as,” Beside Russell
is a woman Gogol can’t stop looking at. She is kneeling on the floor at
Russell’s side, spreading a generous amount of brie on a cracker, paying no
attention to what Russell is doing” (128). But Maxine makes a hasty entry into
the plot of the movie, just after Gogol has changed his name to Nikhil. She is
introduced to the spectators through her own birthday party, to which Gogol was
attending to.
According to
the novel, Gogol comes to know the unfortunate accident that had occurred to
his father, which later became the reason for his own name, before meeting
Maxine. Gogol was on his way back home, from Yale, and Ashoke says about all
that has happened, that which remained as a deep scar in his mind. But in the
movie, Ashoke reveals it to him when they both go out to buy desserts for their
guest, Maxine.
The novel
describes premarital relations of Moushumi with Dimitri Desjardins. The film
has omitted the important character of Dimitri and has instead given us the
character Pierre.
The novel ends
with an event when we find Gogol reading The Short Stories of Nikolai Gogol.
The film ends with an important scene when we find Ashima practicing Indian
classical music at Calcutta.
Cinematic
narrativity becomes the focal point in the study of adaptation of The
Namesake. From the semiotic perspective, the film The Namesake as an
art can be compared to its counterpart novel – in terms of the different sign
systems it could not narrate and vice versa. From the discrepancies noted down,
it becomes easy to prove that the movie is not at all a facsimile duplication
of the novel, but it in turn has the novel as the skeletal system. Nair, with
her own creativity, has given flesh and blood to that skeleton and transfigured
it into the film.
·
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