Side 3 , Side 2 : The Beatles in Jhumpa Lahiri ’ s The Namesake
GOGOL GANGULI ’ S DIVIDED IDENTITY
In order to understand the references in The Namesake to side 3 of the Beatles ’ White Album and to side 2 of their album Abbey Road , one needs to know the reason behind the main issue for the novel ’ s male namesake , this issue being his conflicted Indian-American identity as embodied in his Russian-derived first name .
Gogol Ganguli spends his life preoccupied with a divided identity that hinges , first , upon having been given a name that does not represent his Indian heritage , about which he is also conflicted ; and , second , upon being born in Cambridge , Massachusetts , and growing up in “ a university town outside Boston ” ( 48 ). It takes many years for his parents , Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli , immigrants from Calcutta ( Lahiri retains this spelling of Kolkata ), to adapt to American customs ; they remain attached to their Indian family and friends , as well as to the Bengali culture whose traditions they keep alive in their new home . Their son Gogol is caught between two cultures , one of which , the Bengali one , he does not fully embrace .
As for the name he does not like : Gogol ’ s parents , having left Calcutta as newlyweds in the 1960s so that Ashoke could study electrical engineering at M . I . T ., wished to give him , upon his birth in 1968 , a “ good ” Bengali name ( as opposed to a private “ pet ” name , a daknam [ 25 ], for family and friends to use ) that his great-grandmother in Calcutta was supposed to choose and announce by letter . That letter never arrives ; the baby is born ; a name is needed for the birth certificate , and so , under pressure , the parents register their baby boy as Gogol Ganguli .
Why name their Indian-American son after the Russian author Nikolai Gogol ? As a young man , Ashoke had been saved from the wreckage of train crash by a single page of “ The
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