The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri: The Accident of Inheritance

In The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri narrates the tortuous route from childhood to early adulthood of Gogol Ganguli, a U.S.-born descendant of Indian immigrants whose name bears the stigmas of a Bengali practice of nomenclature overridden by American law. Through Gogol’s predicament, Lahiri points to the paradoxes of identity construction for those among second-generation “desis” who have confused filial and affiliative bonds with their present and their past. By approaching The Namesake along the general axis of filiation and affiliation developped by Said, I wish to show how Lahiri uses Gogol’s derailed af/filiations to investigate the stock theme of cultural hybridity while proposing a new understanding of the circuitous logic of inheritance and the obliqueness of identity