Abstract

Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake belongs to the Indian Diaspora Literature that explores various issues like identity, multiculturalism, alienation, dislocation, cultural consciousness and so on. The novel is a true reflection of the complex lives of people who have been uprooted from their native land and have made a new life in a foreign country. Herself being a second generation Indian-Americans the author Jhumpa Lahiri delineates the themes of immigration, collision of cultures, crisis of identities, adaptation of cultures, sense of exile that unfold to disclose the dilemma and difficulties of the expatriates in their uprooted lives throughout her Interpreter of Maladies (1999), The Namesake (2003), The Unaccustomed Earth (2010) and The Low Land (2013). The novel The Namesake recounts the story of two generation migrants from India to America and depicts the struggle of their identity crisis. The paper aims to find out this crisis and pangs of Diaspora through the characters portrayed in the novels. It also tries to analyze whether the protagonist Gogol Ganguli who grows up both Indian and American finds and alternative identity in the shrinking global community.