"Family" in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake: A Gendered Perspective

Résumé (en anglais)

The concept of family is deeply associated with South Asian cultural ethos. Yet, with the arrival of the British in Bengal in the later decades of the eighteenth century the concept of the family began to change. The new class of the Bengali élite began to be influenced by the Victorian moral principles and feudal patriarchy notions of family and womanhood. Governed by the sense of "high" morality, these elite men vouched for a kind of woman who could provide them with marital bliss and a good family life. Jhumpa Lahiri, I argue, constructs a perfect middle-class woman called Ashima in her acclaimed novel 'The Namesake' (2003) to comment upon the manner in which Bengal reforms and subsequent nationalist phase have shaped a class of Bengali women that remains ingrained to the idea of marriage and domesticity.