1Apart from the fact that both Jhumpa Lahiri and Mira Nair are often described as belonging to the contemporary Indian diaspora as ‘Indian artists living in the USA’, I found it relevant to study the variations, but also the common points between the representations of India as staged in a film and in a novel that works as its source of inspiration. So, far from focusing on the hackneyed issue of the film’s so-called betrayal of the novel, I would like to show how these two artists have found their own way of representing India (among other issues) when seen by emigrated Indians who find themselves caught in-between India and the US, raising those inevitable questions pertaining to their attachment to birthplace, childhood home, cultural heritage, social and historical background. What is more, the way Indian-made cinema—both Bollywood cinema and diasporic cinema—is increasingly invested by Indian diasporic audiences, not to mention film makers and producers, also justifies our interest in a filmic adaptation which is the very embodiment of the cultural and economic importance of the Indian filmic industry— not only in India, but also in places where Indians have emigrated and now stand as potential consumers of cinematographic products that are very likely to be watched in great quantity. One may think of the recent openings of theatres dedicated to Indian cinema in the US, but also of the role of video tapes, DVDs and satellite broadcasting1 which enable first generation and second-generation immigrants2 to see films that question their identity as diasporic Indians. Interestingly, the emergence of a second-generation of immigrants helps reconsider and relocate the status of India in these films, as nostalgia and homecoming are not experienced in the same way by the new generation3 of spectators—nor by the new generation of diasporic film makers4. Along with the Midnight’s Children effect that took place in the field of literature in 1981 (since Salman Rushdie is often described as the path opener of a new generation of Indian diasporic writers), cinema also plays a fundamental part in the way India shapes itself through various artistic modes of diasporic representation5.

2As this article is dedicated to a comparative analysis of a novel and a film, I will first centre on the choice of vantage viewpoints in the two works, showing how far India can be depicted as a place of origin for the characters but also, for the narratives. Thus, from the start, we are made aware of the meta-narrative dimension of the representation of India either in the novel or in the film. I will then concentrate on several moments when India is referred to in both works in order to show that they are reflexive scenes, underlying the artists’ awareness of the fabricated and hybridized India they display. Lastly, I would like to explain how this imaginary India, mainly relying on descriptions of family ties and tensions, but also on cultural markers such as food, religious rituals, famous places and Indian films, is also envisaged as a political and historical India, even though in fairly subterranean and marginal ways.

3What is striking when one starts comparing the main characters’ viewpoints on India is the privileged choice of one generation over the other depending on whether you consider the novel or the film. Indeed, while the novel tends to regard the second-generation Gogol as its protagonist, the filmic adaptation appears to favour the first-generation of Indian immigrants (i.e. Gogol’s parents) whose view of India looms larger in the film than in the novel. Confronting the incipits of the two works proves a relevant demonstration of these distinct choices.

4 In the opening page of the novel, the main focaliser is Ashima, a young Indian woman who has lived in the US for less than a year, just after getting married in India with a young Indian doctoral candidate. Ashoke works in electrical engineering at MIT and, like many Indian bachelors living in the US, he came back home in Kolkata to find a wife that would accept to follow him to New York where he intends to settle for good. When the narrative begins, the reader discovers Ashima in August 1968, as she stands in her kitchen somewhere in a Central Square apartment and is about to deliver her first-born, ‘the namesake’ of the title. Even though the story starts far from India, the first sentence centres on an activity that explicitly links Ashima to her native country:

[…] combining Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts and chopped red onion in a bowl. She adds salt, lemon, thin slices of chilli pepper, wishing there were mustard oil to pour into the mix. Ashima had been consuming this concoction throughout her pregnancy, a humble approximation of the snack sold for pennies on Calcutta sidewalks and on railway platforms throughout India, spilling from newspaper cones. […] Tasting from a cupped palm, she frowns; as usual, there’s something missing. (1)

5Food is used here as a well-known reminder of one’s homeland6. From the outset, the verb ‘combine’ points to the necessity to associate and integrate familiar elements and new elements. Simultaneously, ‘concoction’, which is a medical term, refers to a homemade way of alleviating her melancholy which is illustrated by several markers of everyday frustration and inadequacy (‘approximation’, ‘as usual, there’s something missing’). Conversely, India is represented as an idealised horn of plenty as well as a huge network connecting people. An obvious parallelism is drawn with her own body as a fruitful Indian place which is described as ingesting a mixed kind of food and which is just about to deliver a baby whose birthplace will be the US. The opening text is itself a combination between a present American situation and echoes from Ashima’s Indian past. But the odd use of the present tense in an a posteriori narration stands as a form of resistance to the rules of the English language which is the very material of the narration, providing a way out thanks to this linguistic refusal to completely submit to the omni-presence of the Anglo-American world. Indeed, as the narrative originates from a description of an American scene, it gradually points to Gogol, the American-born Indian, as the protagonist of the novel who is first only connected to India through the mediation of his parents’ memories. Narratively speaking, India appears to be embedded within the US and constantly perceived through such an American prism, as the novel shows again at the end. It closes on Gogol finding shelter in his room, in the American suburban house he lived in with his family, as he contemplates his mother’s return to India and his own decision to stay in the US and to start reading Nicholai Gogol’s collection of short-stories (the one that saved his father from death after going through a train crash in India). Evolving from the mother’s womb to the father’s book, the novel is implicitly defined as a coming-of-age novel, focusing on the second-generation people and their indirect representation of India. At the same time, the regular interventions of parental attitudes evocative of India (the mother’s food at the beginning and the father preparing tea at the end) underlines the necessity to take into account the way the first-generation bears evidence of India’s existence once it is transplanted in an American context, and how their embodiment of India abroad influences the second-generation’s viewpoint.

6The film, on the contrary, elects another option as far as the framing focalisers of the story are concerned. It opens on a scene taking place in India: the spectator is plunged in an Indian train station as the camera follows a man walking through a crowd of passengers and carrying on his head a suitcase which bears the name of the Ganguli family. Obviously, this station stands as a metonymic representation of India as a place of departures (even though, in this case, it is an in-land trip from Howra to Kolkata that Ashoke is undertaking in order to visit his grandfather). Such an impression is reinforced by the next scene which rests mainly on the conversation between Ashoke and a Bengali businessman he meets on the train and who tells him about his two-year stay in Great Britain, his fascination for the country and the necessity for young people ‘to see the world’. This scene also appears in the novel, twelve pages after the beginning of the narrative: as Ashoke is at the Mount Auburn Hospital in the USA, waiting for his first child to be born, he is reminded of the traumatic train accident he survived in 1961, on the day of the trip the films opens with. For Ashoke, in the film as well as in the novel, India is associated to trauma and death, which he tried to escape by emigrating to the US. It is this choice of American rebirth and life, away from a lethal India, that the film puts to the fore as early as the first scene. Indeed, after the train crash, the film follows a chronological timeline from Ashoke’s gradual recovery to his arranged marriage and his return to the US with Ashima. India is thus depicted as an initial day-to-day and physical experience from which Gogol’s father gradually moves away and which leaves its traumatic imprint on the characters and the film structure. There is indeed a lasting influence of these first visual impressions of India as a place where death nearly struck the father. Images of the accident reappear in nightmares and Ashoke’s fear of accidents is rekindled when the whole family spends several months in India and travels by train (the spectator is shown a shot of a suitcase carried on a porter’s head which is very similar to the first shot of the film). Lastly, the way Ashoke was rescued is unveiled to the spectator when Ashoke eventually manages to tell his son about the origin of his name, Gogol. So, in spite of Mira Nair’s choice to use the novel’s title, the film displays a tendency to envisage the second-generation immigrants as framing focalisers of the story and India as the geographical origin and return of her story. However, a difference of perception of India is particularly underlined by the film, which closes on shots of Ashima in India, who has chosen to go back to her native country after her husband’s death and to resume her singing classes. While Ashoke somehow flees India, Ashima longs to return there one day. The last shots are thus a direct echo of the first time she appears in the film as a young woman, playing the sitar and singing. At that moment of parting with the spectator, the film shows its preference for the mother’s destiny instead of the son’s (while the novel appears to make the opposite choice, favouring the son’s destiny). One may first be tempted to say that it leaves the viewer with a traditional image of Indian cultural life7. But I see a more fruitful way of watching these last images as they stage an Indian-American widow belonging to the upper middle-class who has decided to go back to India where she lives a fulfilling life and makes her own choices. But here again, this is definitely the choice of a first-generation immigrant: her still powerful physical and emotional links with her native country lead her ‘back’ — which is no longer the case of second-generation characters in this story. If the film tends to equate India with desh, i.e. the homeland of the first-generation migrants, the novel highlights a harsher resistance on the side of second-generation characters to identify with India as well as to be identified to ABCDs, i.e. ‘American-born confused / conflicted Indians’. Significantly, the film has skipped the scene when Gogol attends a conference about Indian novels written in English and is appalled by a labelling that corners him into a category of people that are barely normal… The sense that he is a genuine insider is underlined by his choice of word to refer to his parents’ native country: ‘He knows that deshi, a generic word for countryman, means Indian, knows that his parents and all their friends refer to India simply as desh. But Gogol never thinks of India as desh. He thinks of it as Americans do, as India.’ (118)

7However nostalgic or defiant these representations of India may be, all of them appear to be mis-representations that are quite aware of their inadequacies, both in the film and in the novel. Indeed, one cannot but be struck by the meta-narrative dimension of a certain number of episodes which underline the hybridized nature of India, whether it be perceived by first-generation or second-generation characters. This time, both Jhumpa Lahiri and Mira Nair appear to be willing to show that a migrant’s representation of India is an ‘imaginary homeland’, as Salman Rushdie would put it:

[…] if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge— which gives rise to profound uncertainties—that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind. (10)

8What is interesting in Salman Rushdie’s perspective is that such a fictional India should not be regarded as a lower and less valuable version of India. Of course, more than 20 years later, as diasporic artists, Jhumpa Lahiri and Mira Nair are all the more aware of this fictionalizing process. But their awareness tends to make them less eager to add up to the demonstration and to favour a more subtle use of explicit and pointed meta-narrative passages. Instead of what would now look like a somewhat ostentatious display of fictionality, it is their own way of ‘finding new angles to enter reality’ (Rushdie 1992: 15).

9 As soon as page 2 in the novel, Ashima’s description is caught between a realistic detail about the way Bengali wives call their husbands and the way Indian cinema would represent it:

Like a kiss or a caress in a Hindi movie, a husband’s name is something intimate and therefore unspoken, cleverly patched over. And so, instead of saying Ashoke’s name, she utters the interrogative that has come to replace it, which translates roughly as ‘Are you listening to me?’ (2)

10The quotation is a meta-narrative comment for an external reader, which informs him/her about the limits of cinematographic representation—for reasons of propriety and censorship in this particular case. But other limits are also pointed out, which have to do with the choice of the writer to use English to tell her story. Right from the start, the reader is reminded that it imposes certain linguistic modes of representation of India while leaving aside untranslatable aspects of the country (‘translates roughly’). The cinematographic mediation of such an impossibility is another way for the narrator to recall the necessity to pile up various images and references, however inadequate and fictional, to try and form an idea of a country and its inhabitants. In the film, the initial train conversation between young Ashoke and the Bengali businessman provides an ironic counterpart of England, which the former emigrant describes as a dreamland now that he is back in India: ‘It was like a dream. Sparkling clean streets, nobody spitting on the road’. The description is all the more ironic as it takes up the well-known clichés about India as a dirty country whereas England would be its opposite (whiteness and cleanliness ‘naturally’ going together according to such a racist conception). But here again, the blurring of viewpoints point to the difficulty to distinguish a real country from a fantasised one. The film itself plays on cinema’s contribution to the fictionalizing of India by shooting the wedding night of Gogol and Moushoumi as a pastiche of a Bollywood song scene. As they find themselves in a luxury American hotel room, the newly-wed ‘sing’, resorting to playback, excessive poutings and elaborate movements of their arms and bodies, mimicking Indian musical films while dressed in white hotel bathrobes instead of the traditional sari and salwaar kamiz they wear during the ceremony to comply to their families’ wish. The idea that traditional clothes are now regarded as mere costumes is made obvious in the novel by the narrator’s minute description of their clothes and the way they gradually replace their wedding attire by more Western clothes before eventually turning up naked in their hotel room (222-223 & 226). The fictitious nature of the second-generation’s submission to Indian traditions is also hinted at thanks to the quick succession of the two scenes (ceremony and wedding night), recalling countless films staging Indian marriages as mere shows hiding other ‘realities’.8 This is made perfectly clear by Mira Nair who has introduced more explicit bed scenes before the wedding ceremony, informing the viewer that her mock Bollywood scene is not inserted here for the sake of modesty—but to illustrate diasporic double-dealing. So, even though I have stated that the film tends to privilege the first-generation’s view of India over the second generation’s, such reflexive scenes show that Mira Nair does not refrain from qualifying the parents’ framing presence by similar counterpoints.

11This is particularly true of the way Gogol’s first genuine encounter with his parents’ motherland stands as a climactic moment in both the novel and the film. Indeed, if Gogol has spent a few months in India when visiting relatives during holidays, he appears to actually see the place for the first time as he leaves high school. Contrary to his parents, who may feel outsiders in the American society, he is the one feeling at a loss to cope with his desire to be an insider in the US and his odd sensation that he is an outsider in India. His position towards India may be regarded as symmetrical to that of his parents towards the US, with the addition of a slight disturbance on Gogol’s side since he is aware that hardly a generation separates him from India9. The outsider / insider’s ambivalent attitudes are very often staged through references to the characters’ gazes as they visit their Indian relatives. Only one visit is actually shown in the filmic adaptation, which corresponds to Gogol’s revelation that he wants to major in architecture at the university. In both the novel and the film, the emphasis is laid on Gogol’s viewpoint as a veil which appears to be lifted before his eyes: ‘Gogol is accustomed to the scenery, yet he still stares.’ (82) The number of verbs and phrases referring to sight set into relief his new and unexpected attraction for an Indian environment he has been blind to for so long. When he is at last confronted to the Taj Mahal, the novel insists on Gogol’s failure to comprehend the monument through observation and sketching (85), so that he is compelled to go back to his tourist guidebook, which plunges him into the history of Mughal architecture and emperors. Here again, the tension between external and internal viewpoints is highlighted by this oscillation between first-hand experience and the necessary mediation through an American book telling Gogol about Indian history.

12Conversely, the film chooses to turn the scene into a more explicitly epiphanic moment: outside shots of the Taj Mahal (including the most widely-circulated frontal view of the place) are gradually replaced by inside shots and close-ups on architectural details and Muslim ornamentation which obviously grow on Gogol’s mind. The spectator is thus left under the impression that a form of balance is reached between the young man’s external gaze and his momentarily integrated gaze. The emotional and spiritual dimension conveyed by the scene contrasts sharply with previous episodes focusing on his first days in Delhi, as he tries to escape the family visits he is being imposed by his parents. At one stage, the film shows him as the ‘odd man out’, jogging in the busy streets of Kolkata as he is used to in the US. The scene is all the more humorous since he is ran after by a puffing servant his grandmother has ordered to follow Gogol in case he got lost. A second street scene ironically stages his ambivalent attitudes towards Indian mores as we see him running by the side of the rickshaw that carries his mother and sister because he refuses to enter a master-slave relationship with the rickshaw wallah, who runs to earn his living, and not to keep his body fit.

13The building of such an intertwined and composite image of India on the part of the second generation characters is well illustrated in the way Ashoke and Ashima transmit classical Indian culture to their children in the US. The narrative refers to the Apu trilogy, Kathakali dance performances and sitar recitals the Gangulis regularly attend with other families, intermingling those various references with the Anglo-Saxon names of the American places where they are shown (the ‘Orson Welles’ or the ‘Memorial Hall’, 65) and which serve as essential intermediaries to the first-generation’s cultural background. Similarly, Bengali lessons about Indian history are carried out thanks to ‘handouts written in English’ (66) or to ‘hand-sewn primers brought back by their teacher from Calcutta’ (66) which trigger degrading associations with the American way of using toilet paper (‘printed, Gogol can’t help noticing, on paper that resembles the folded toilet paper he uses at school’ (66). Here again, by concluding the enumeration on the superimposition of intellectual matters and low bodily functions, the narrator favours the still negative viewpoint of young Gogol, while Mira Nair’s vision of a palimpsest India is much less derogatory and more harmoniously construed. From the opening credits, the blending of Indian culture into Western culture is visually displayed as the actors’ names change from Bengali calligraphy to Roman letters, standing out on a scarlet background Mira Nair devised by borrowing from the American painter Mark Rothko’s and British painter Francis Bacon’s respective techniques.10 Then, throughout the film, numerous shots of bridges, trains, metros, airports (framed by windows as if they were photographs) are meant to reveal some of the common points shared by India and the US, simultaneously connecting the two spaces and enhancing the distance that still separates them. In the end, India is irrevocably entangled with the US—no longer a preserved starting-point and definitely a place of transition. As Mira Nair declared:

The state of being an immigrant is living between worlds […]. You look outside your window and one day, instead of the Hudson River, you see the Ganges. I wanted the film to have this see-saw between cultures, a seamless see-saw. I literally grew up in this way, walking the streets of New York and the streets of Calcutta.11

14This mental merging between two geographical / visual spaces is, of course, much more easily rendered in the film than in the novel. Similarly, code-switching is only alluded to in the novel while the film’s auditory dimension leaves more room for scenes resting on these shifts from one language to another.

15Yet, although the narrative is steeped in the English language, several references to moments when the protagonists speak in Bengali bring back to the reader’s mind the omnipresence of this Indian trace, however subdued in the novel. Quite strikingly, it reproduces the parents’ awareness that their children are growing more American than they shall ever be (‘their children sound just like Americans’, 65). It also turns out to stand for the completion of the English lessons Ashima used to give to young Indians when she lived in Lokata: ‘helping them to memorize Tennyson and Wordsworth, to pronounce words like sign and cough’ (7). We may also assume that it stands for the fulfilment of Gogol Ganguli’s onomastic fate, caught as he is between a Russian heritage and the anglicized version of his real surname, Gangopadhyay (67). More regularly, the film plays with the auditory mixing of cues in English and Bengali, of American English spoken with a Bengali accent and of Indian American children speaking with a perfect American accent—not to mention the funny scene when the Ganguli first meets the adolescent Moumouschi, who arrives straight from Great Britain with her stiff upper-lip British accent. The film also has the ability to superimpose speaking and shots of written pages, giving birth to a slightly perplexing shooting of Ashima writing in Bengali to her family while her voice over reads the letter in English. This device is somehow reduplicated during the closing credits which are written in Roman letters only and which play a song by Susheela Raman, whose parents were Tamil who emigrated to Great Britain and then to Australia. Her career as a singer who decided to go to India to specialize in Indian classical music with Shruti Sadolikar, one of the greatest living Hindustani vocalists, and who later worked with musicians from various countries12 appears to epitomize the migrant ideal displayed in the film—that of a fruitful crosspollination of various cultures—and to fulfil Rushdie’s once provocative declaration that ‘English is an Indian literary language’ (65).

16Now, in spite of the highly integrative cultural dimension of the novel and the film, I would like to avoid falling into the trap of relishing what may look like ‘mere’ delightful cosmopolitan massala works of fiction, while ignoring the historical background of the story the two artists interestingly locate in two different timelines. Even though the representations of India that stand most prominently in both works are representations of India as a family place mainly characterised by emotional links, or as a locus staging the fictionalization of a country that some Indians have chosen to leave, a more political vision of India also emerges on various occasions.

17What is indeed very striking when comparing the novel and the film is the choice of two different historical moments for the setting of a similar story. The first chapter of the novel opens with the date ‘1968’ while the film introduces Ashima in the context of 1977, so that the historical setting has obviously been an object of thought on the part of the two artists. Both stories actually begin a few years before, with Ashoke’s train accident and his subsequent departure for the US. So one may start by wondering about the causes of his emigration to the American continent ‘instead of’ the former colonial centre, i.e. Great Britain, before turning to the ten-year gap that separates the novel from the film and confronting it to the respective dates of publication and release of both the novel and the film.

18The preference for the US may be seen as a direct consequence of Great Britain’s increasing immigration control in the 1960s, as initiated by the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrant Act.13 Exploiting the economic and social crises of the time, the Conservatives and National Front managed to impose their agenda regarding the ‘necessity’ of greater immigration control. 1968 stands as climax in the virulence of political speeches against Commonwealth black immigrants, with Enoch Powell’s notorious demand that Kenyan Asians be submitted to stricter immigration laws after the Kenyan Government decreed that British citizens of Asian descent could live and work in Kenya on a temporary basis only. The 1968 Commonwealth Immigrant Act thus stated that admission to Great Britain depended on whether immigrants ‘or at least one of [their] parents or grandparents [were] born in the United Kingdom’. Conversely, the US emigration policy became more favourable to Asian immigrants, with the 1965 Act which reformed the discriminatory quota laws of 1924 and admitted Asians in large numbers, with an explicit preference given to skilled workers and professionals14. In Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, when Ashoke Ganguli first meets Ashima in 1966, he is ‘earning a Ph.D. in Boston, researching in the field of fiber optics’ (9). No doubt he is quite representative of the social class of Indians that were welcome on American soil by the mid-1960s. Simultaneously, Great Britain, which had so dazzled Ashoke’s Bengali fellow traveller before the train crash, started to impose restrictions on the Asian immigration of the 1950s. Ashoke’s decision to favour the US against Great Britain participates in this reorientation of Indian immigrants’ destination, which resulted in this Indian brain-drain towards the US15. If there is no explicit emphasis laid on that context (neither in the novel nor in the film), Ashoke’s successful career in the engineering department at MIT, his family’s comfortable material situation and Gogol’s own academic success are proof enough that he is a member of the growing Indian diaspora which was most courted by the USA in the 1960s.

19The novel actually refers to their gatherings during the weekend and points to the professional homogeneity of this diasporic upper middle-class: ‘teachers, researchers, doctors, engineers’ (38)— a social marker in line with the immigration that was prevalent in the period. Referring to the conversations that went between them, the narrative hints at political debates about ‘the CPIM versus the Congress party’ (38) and ironically notes that ‘for hours they argue about the politics of America, a country in which none of them is eligible for vote’ (38). This concern for politics is more frequently mentioned in the novel than in the film—through other references to both American and Indian histories. All of them are quickly alluded to, with no didactic comments whatsoever on the narrator’s part, as if it were a way of showing that Indian diasporic people are no less familiar with Western social and moral issues (when the narrator refers to the stickers on their neighbours’ car: ‘Question authority! Give a damn! Ban the bra! Peace! ’, 31), than with prominent contemporary events such as the civil rights movement and the protests against the Vietnam war (the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy). At the same time, these Indian immigrants are intent on transmitting their Indian national history to children who are raised on American soil by sending them to Bengali classes where they are taught about ‘the revolutionary exploits of Subhas Chandra Bose’ (66). Beyond their interest for present history, the memory of the fight for India’s independence stands as a permanent background of their day-to-day life. The intricacy between individual and collective life is quite tellingly illustrated in the opening description of the white obstetrician that is about to help Ashima deliver her baby as the narrator depicts him as ‘gauntly handsome in a Lord Mountbatten sort of way’ (2). If it is an ambivalent vision on the eve of a new life, it also subtly connects this novel to Midnight’s Children. Indeed, Jhumpa Lahiri appears to locate her novel in the lineage of what is now construed as the origin of ‘the Indian novel in English’ since Salman Rushdie’s story is rooted in the association between the birth of his hero Saleem Sinai and the birth of the Indian democracy, which is put under the protection of the tutelary figure of Nehru. In Lahiri’s terms, it is the ghost-like figure of the former colonizer who materializes at the moment when the mother and her baby are going to be parted and set free from each other, as if this Anglo-Indian history had left a deeper impression than the more recent ‘Indian’ history.

20As to the film, it appears to privilege several allusions to past and contemporary Indian history—which may be regarded as another proof of Mira Nair’s preference for the viewpoints of the first-generation characters. From the start, the ten-year shift introduced by Nair in the story is motivated by an Indian context. The first time the spectator sees Ashima, she returns from a music class and walks through a crowd of demonstrators with the information ‘Calcutta, 1977’ appearing at the bottom of the screen and posters reading ‘down with fascism’. Paradoxically, while Ashima is shown as ignoring the political demands that engage people from lower classes, the film maker decides to set the story in the context of a politically loaded period of India’s history: after the Congress Party had been defeated by the Janata rainbow coalition during the general elections of March 1977 and after the arrest of Indira Gandhi whose family was accused of nepotism and political malpractise. More specifically, throughout the 1970s, the town of Kolkata became the centre of Naxalite protests, which regained some intensity when the main leaders were set free after 1977 (i.e. after Indira Gandhi’s eviction from power). Much later in the film, as Gogol is putting away his room before his mother’s return to India, we see him gazing at a black and white picture of Chandra Bose which he had pinned up above his desk when he still lived at his parents’. Taking up a reference which is made by the novel itself, Mira Nair sets into relief historical moments and characters that Indian people will be very familiar with, while Western people will tend to hardly notice these two more strictly ‘national’ references. However, those references to history blend in the setting and appear to have no specific relevance on their lives.

21 These last remarks bring us back to the initial question about the kind of India those two diasporic artists, consciously or not, project of their parents’ homeland, especially as they live in a post-9/11 American world which is torn between its desire to keep on welcoming selected immigrants and its suspicion about ‘internal enemies’. Is it an India that these immigrants have left for good and where they only go back to so as to visit their families, to be buried or to discover Indian cultural places like many other American travellers? So that India would only be a place of nostalgia, of final retreat or of tourist consummation. Or is it an India that is gradually superseded by American images? So that the former motherland would be turned into a series of photographic shots grafted onto the American urban landscape, i.e. into a fantasized and quasi-exotic India (especially for second-generation characters). Or, more discreetly, is it an India that is a country to be reckoned with, historically, economically and politically speaking? So that the obvious display of a predominantly Hindu India (through its religious rituals, food customs and dressing codes) would be a way to show a seemingly successful and friendly India as opposed to a less familiar, more frightening India which would be a Muslim India, for instance16. Even though it presupposes that readers and viewers know nothing about the threat embodied by Hindu nationalism in India17, such a construct of a non-violent India is slightly undermined by more pointed references, either to the rebellious leader of the Indian National Army, Chandra Bose (as opposed to Gandhi, for instance) or to examples of popular anger in Kolkata. The novel also hints at Indian social and political unrest when the narrator says that the train crash may have been the result of sabotage, because of the fishplates and bolts which were found near the main track (19). So, beneath the surface of harmless family stories, darker allusions qualify the portrait of hard-working and integrating diasporic Indians who have to cope with the same problems as upper middle-class Americans (getting promoted, getting married, getting a divorce). One can of course argue that all such hints are strictly associated to the past (either the 1960s or the 1970s) and to India, while the contemporary US remains untouched by these references, but the fact that, in 2002, Mira Nair took part in a collective cinematographic project about the representation of September 11^th places The Namesake in an intra-textual network that cannot be ignored18. Thus, the superimpositions at work both in the film and the novel may well go beyond the only aesthetic or mental associations of places and family events by channelling back to the US ‘Indian’ issues, such as terrorism, religious fundamentalism and resistances to Anglo-Saxon imperialism. As Desai states when contemplating the meaning of the word ‘diaspora’ she deals with in her book, ‘diaspora provides a critique not only of the concept of home but also of origins and the role they play in conceptualisations of nation, race and identity. Hence, in this project, diaspora functions as a postnational critique of the nation and nationalism that is strongly associated with a critique of the concept-metaphor of home and origin.’19 It is obvious that such a displacement involves a reconsideration of the so-called ‘host nation’, which goes through metamorphoses that are no less real, or imaginary, that the ‘native nation’.