The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri; Harper Collins; Price: Rs.395; 291 pp

The Namesake is Jhumpa Lahiri’s first novel after her Pulitzer Prize winning debut, Interpreter of Maladies: Stories of Bengal, Boston, and Beyond. Like many other writers of the South Asian diaspora, in the book under review, Lahiri’s central theme is the immigrant experience as she continues to explore the conflicts of displacement, dispossession and assimilation across transatlantic borders through the story of the Gangulis, a Bengali couple from Calcutta. But there’s a unique twist to this novel that is partly hinted at in the title of the book — The Namesake â€” which obscurely foregrounds the psychological allegory of names and in particular the name of the Gangulis’ son Gogol, intriguingly christened after the 19th century Russian novelist Nikolai Gogol.

The novel swings back and forth between its two narratives — that of the bi-cultural experience of India- America, and the metaphorical narrative conveyed through the character of Gogol Ganguli — although Gogol himself inhabits both narratives simultaneously. There is also a story behind his unusual name, a story that ingeniously serves as a convenient device by which the narrator can repeatedly flash back to an incident from the past that provided the inspiration for the name.

Gogol’s parents, Ashima and Ashoke, move from Calcutta to Cambridge, Massachussetts where Ashoke is working on his Ph D in electrical engineering at MIT. We learn that Ashoke, remote and taciturn by nature, is the survivor of a train accident several years earlier, and memories of the accident continue to haunt him. The repeated flashbacks to the event are tinged with a memory: that he was reading a book of short stories by Nikolai Gogol at the time. He was reading The Overcoat when the accident happened.

When his son is born, Ashoke (rather narcissistically) names him after the Russian author, to keep the memory of his own past alive through the mnemonic while he himself is far away from home. He thus ‘copes’ with physical displacement from his homeland and native culture while simultaneously attempting to forge a bond with his son, based on a past of which the latter knows nothing. An uneasy relationship develops between them: the father awkwardly aware that his son doesn’t really know him, and the son unhappy with his name.

Ashima and Ashoke, products of an arranged marriage, and acutely conscious of being different from the largely Ivy-league-educated elite academics they live among, do not find it easy to shed their Indian identities in America. After the birth of her son, Ashima reflects that “being a foreigner… is a sort of life-long pregnancy, 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 previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding.” We learn that Ashima, unlike her American friends, rarely refers to her husband by his first name; that names, in and of themselves, are of very little consequence in a traditional Indian family.

While the Gangulis are still adjusting to their bi-cultural life in Massachussetts, Gogol struggles with the growth pains of a second-generation Indian American, besides having to cope with his unusual name and his parents’ inability to break away from their origins. Like most Americans, he leaves home for University (Yale) because he finds his parents and their life in Cambridge suffocating. He has relationships without their knowledge. He lives a life of isolation and alienation because he doesn’t share his parents’ past and their connection with India.

While in the throes of an identity crisis, he decides to change his name to Nikhil. This is a pivotal moment in the novel. Nikhil is unarguably and inescapably Indian while Gogol Ganguli is only an absurd fantasy.

There are many powerful passages rich in interiority and psychological complexity, which distinguish Lahiri’s prose style as she portrays the emotional distance between father and son, which Ashoke attempts to bridge with a book of short stories by Nikolai Gogol, a recurring motif in the novel. That father and son have little to hold them together other than the Russian author, further underscores the haunting theme of disbelonging in the novel.

Nikhil/ Gogol continues to explore the unexpected turns in his bi-cultural world. He majors in architecture at Yale, where he meets his first girlfriend Ruth. Predictably, their relationship ends after Ruth decides to go to Britain for graduate studies. Nikhil then leaves New Haven for New York, where he meets the attractive Maxine Ratcliff, an assistant editor for a publisher of art books. Nikhil falls in love with Maxine and moves in with her family, but both sides are blind to the many evasions of reality that the relationship requires of them. Maxine’s parents live in an upper-class world that is far away from Nikhil’s own immigrant upbringing.

Suddenly, Ashoke dies in Cleveland where he is working on a research project. And equally suddenly, Nikhil’s relationship with Maxine ends.

It’s a depressing moment. Nikhil takes refuge at home for a while, until he meets Moushumi Mazoomdar, a childhood friend who is a Ph D student at NYU. He becomes Gogol Ganguli again, and seems to be returning to an identity that is more familiar to him and he is more comfortable with because it is what he has known all his life, even if partly at least, as a foreigner. They become lovers and marry. But Moushumi too has a complicated past that she doesn’t fully own up to. Soon after their marriage, she has an affair with a German student she used to know. When Nikhil finds out, they get divorced. It’s a tragic ending, but, the author gives us reason to believe, not an entirely unexpected one.

Adultery, casual sex, exotic careers, elite lifestyles and exclusive education — this is the decadence of America in the 1990s. While the novel is brilliantly conceived, it tends to get a little jam-packed with event and plot. The plot could have been pared down and simplified, and the author could have developed her Indian characters in greater depth. Emotions tend to get lost in the author’s obsession with language, which is a pity because the emotional backdrop is particularly powerful and resonant. For a first novel, it’s certainly a promising beginning.Meenakshi Venkat  

Commercialisation perspectives

Universities in the Marketplace by Derek Bok; Princeton University Press; Price: Rs.1,210; 233 pp

In a nation in which a societal consensus on any issue is rare if not impossible, prevention of commercialisation of education is a subject on which there is almost total unanimity. Politicians are against it, socio-economic pundits and the influential middle class oppose it; and inevitably so does the poor majority for obvious reasons. Even that repository of wisdom, the Supreme Court of India is dead against it. In its path-breaking 11-judge verdict reinforcing the right of minorities and all citizens to “establish and administer” education institutions of their choice in the landmark TMA Pai Foundation Case (SOL 599 (2002)), the apex court took pains to reiterate that the right to self-administration should not result in the commercialisation of education and that education institutions are entitled to make only “reasonable surpluses” to improve and upgrade their institutions.

Of course each of these societal constituencies has its own reasons for opposing commercialisation of education — especially higher education, which is heavily subsidised and tuition fees have remained almost static for half a century. Politicians like to preserve this status quo for fear of upsetting the electorate. Likewise the great Indian middle class whose prime stimulus is a slew of unmerited subsidies, is loath to pay for higher education, never mind if the nation’s once respected university and tertiary education system is going to the dogs, which it is. And with the tenured faculties of universities and colleges having proved themselves comprehensively business illiterate and therefore unable to raise worthwhile resources by way of consultancy or research activities, the problem of India’s cash-starved and crumbling institutions of higher education is inadequate commercialisation, the nostrums of the Supreme Court notwithstanding.

On the other hand in the mecca of higher education, the United States of America in whose wonderful and well-equipped colleges and universities every Indian student is willing to pay an arm and a leg to enroll, the problem is just the opposite. There is a real danger of excessive commercialisation and manifestation of the unacceptable face of capitalism.

But unlike our homegrown socialists who believe that despite higher education being a private good (unlike elementary education which is a public good) it should be wholly subsidised, Dr. Derek Bok professor of the Hauser Center for Non-Profit Organisations at Harvard University concedes that if they are to survive, universities should become financially independent.

Therefore the commercialisation of education which bothers Bok is the increasing propensity of college and varsity managements in the US to “sell the work of universities for a profit”, i.e to derive commercial advantage from teaching, research and other campus activities. “Established corporations and entrepreneurs alike see a huge and growing market for advanced education powered by the burgeoning demands of a corporate sector struggling to adapt to an ever more complicated, technologically driven environment. Looking further, they find the world of higher education dominated by large, self-satisfied universities: inefficient, resistant to change and overly indulgent toward pampered professors who seem largely unaccountable to the students they supposedly serve,” says Bok. Such institutions of higher education are sitting ducks for corporates intent upon getting their brands endorsed by reputable universities and/or impacting them upon students as America’s major pharmaceutical companies have done with conspicuous success.

Given the enterprise and ingenuity of American industry which can insinuate itself within academia and dilute or bias the quality of education delivered, it is important for America’s colleges and universities to resist the commercialisation of education in terms of accepting classroom, canteen and in-stadia advertising and suspect research projects, argues the author. Or even if for good causes corporate sponsorship and endorsement is accepted, it should be after due care and responsibility so the purity of the academic and scholastic experience of students is not compromised.

On the other hand right now the objective of Indian academia is — or should be — the commercialisation of education. Indeed unless like the IITs and IIMs, India’s institutions of higher education learn the art of swelling their income streams from commercialising some of their activities in an era when government funding of higher education is progressively reducing, they are likely to experience great trouble.

Therefore though interesting from the point of view of learning how to resist excessive commercialisation of higher education, this scholarly and well-argued book is likely to be of limited utility to the dons of Indian academia, unless to reinforce existing do-nothing prejudices and business illiteracy.

Raju Chandrashekhar