NAMESAKE

Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

[Name of the Institute]

Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

Introduction

Jhumpa Lahiri is an Indian who was born in London in 1967. Her family emigrated from India before her birth. She belonged to a family where everyone had their career in the educational field. Her father was a librarian, and her mother was a teacher in Rhode Island, where she grew up. As her family had a strong educational background, she took her Bachelors and masters degree in English Literature from Barnard College. After her M.A degree in English Literature, she did PhD in Renaissance Studies from the Boston University. After her marriage, she shifted to New York and started her career from there. Namesake was her second book, which was published in year 2000, and was first published in New York Times bestseller list. It got awarded as the best seller book in the same year, which is 2000. She started writing this book when Jhumpa Lahiri exploded, and her short career showed a smashing success to her. Her writing seemed very mesmerizing to the audience, which engaged them in waiting for her series of books. The unique thing about her books was that she always wrote about the cross-culturalism. This means that she talked about the collaboration of two different cultures, and the feeling that these people get by doing so. As she is an Indian, but she grew up in London, and after married, she moved to United States of America, this gave her experience of different cultures.

Namesake

Initially namesake got published as a concise book, but later it was expanded in a form of a novel. It has the racial theme, and has many emotional aspects related to the racial theme. As the story starts, a young bride named Ashima Ganguli was about to give birth to her first child. Her husband named Ashoke, was the student of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Lahiri, 2004). While she was in hospital, she thought about her home city Calcutta, as she would have delivered her baby in home, surrounded by women and all the usual things will be simultaneously going on. She had to face the reality which is her delivering the baby in United States of America. She faced the problem with language and cultural difference in America, as she grew up in the Indian culture. Finally, she delivered a baby boy, who is very healthy and they prepared to take him home. Soon they realized that unless they name their baby, they cannot leave the hospital. They have to give their son a valid name, so that they can take him home and celebrate their feelings of their first child. In the Indian culture, it is the tradition that the eldest member of the family names the child who just came in the world (Kiraly, 2005). Thus, the grandmother of Ashima wrote the name on a paper and mails it to them. Unfortunately, the paper never delivered; thus, Ashoke gave suggested the name Gogol for their ...