His Names’ Sake Anonymous College

The Namesake is a contemporary novel by the author Jhumpa Lahiri published in 2003. Bearing qualities of domestic fiction and bildungsroman, the novel serves as a conjunction of Bengali values, culture and people with the ‘melting pot’ of America in the late twentieth century. The protagonist, being the second generation of parents who settled in America for better prospects, finds himself without origins in this place he grows up to call home. He is obsessed with this idea of belonging to a family with history so much so that he cannot mask his surprise when he finds that he does come from a rooted lineage, in Calcutta, the place that her parents call home, on seeing there are many people who share his surname in Bengal in the telephone directory. Through his journey exceptionally, the meandering conundrum of belonging is seen most clearly: being born on the process of a pending real name, he starts to get by with a pet name, a name meant for unofficial purposes, to be called within domestic environment only that turns to be a real one. He grows to be fond of before attending to school which is the same place where he grows to hate it. It is as a result of this naming and belonging struggle that the protagonist breaks away...