The World Makes a Circle

“We were all born from The Overcoat. One day you will realize this …”

A crucial book, a crucial juncture and a crucial thought – all these sum up the birth of Mira Nair’s The Namesake. Why do I say Mira Nair’s and not Jhumpa Lahiri’s?

First then to clarify the hypotheses, so that the article makes sense right from the start and does not have to look for cover under anyone else’s ‘overcoat’, thereby perhaps adding an uncanny magical realistic aura around the entire Namesake phenomena.

I have not read the book. Have actually, but even that was loaned from someone else’s library and the recurring thought of returning it to its place of origin always kept a non-existent rush to reach the last page. And even this opportunity that I had to wrestle with the book came to me long time back; thus there remains a kind of scriptural amalgamation that refrains me from laying any claim to the novel. Thus I brand this article completely as an artistic representation by Mira Nair.

I saw the movie with rapt attention. I noticed the nuances that she managed to smuggle into the contours of each frame. I am a Bengali and therefore I regaled at the very ethnicity and imagery that she had attached to even the minutest of details. The accent of the lead actors Tabu and Irrfan Khan (both non-Bengalis) is worth a commendation right at the very onset. Every inscription is noticeable and worth an applause. The Namesake is an example of magical movie making, a concept that drags you into its duration and keeps you secluded from your contemporary reality. Very few movies have the power to do this and The Namesake belongs to this very elite class.

I have spoken about my source of information and have also accounted for the director’s abilities to make magic on the celluloid. Now I come to issues that deviate from the trend that made me begin my thesis. Though primary focus on the events in the film would generate from the namesake of the film, the whim to name his son after his favorite author, Nikolai Gogol, I have chosen a different perspective to gauge the reels by.

A motif that reverberates through the film is Ghosh’s (the passenger at the beginning on the accidental train, played by a charismatic Jogonath Guha) words – “Grab your pillow and blanket and set out to see the world.” That coupled with Gogol’s The Overcoat provides a view of the fact that the ‘view of the world’ could mean different aspects to different individuals.

The film begins with Ghosh asking Ashok the object of his enquiry, the book he was reading and he answers, “The Overcoat by Gogol.” Couple this with what Ashok tells Gogol later … “We were all born out of The Overcoat.” There is a double emphasis generated here out of the word “born”. Gogol’s Overcoat is the point from where the movie begins as also the story of Ashok’s life. Ashok was earlier a student at Kolkata, who would make occasional trips to his uncle at Jamshedpur or as he mentioned, “I had been to Delhi once.” Ghosh gives him a new outlook, the advice to move out and see the whole world. The train goes and rams on to another vehicle on the track, thereby killing mostly everybody. However, these final words of Ghosh also get rammed into Ashok’s head and it is there that he takes the decision to go ahead and move to a settlement outside the confines of his own country’s national borders.

So as we can see, this is the point where the movie begins, it is born and then again, from The Overcoat. Thus there is some realism attached to Ashok’s words when he tells his son that they have all been born out of The Overcoat. And does the signification end there?

No. There is something else that is also attached to this feeling. The point of origin of the movie coincides with the point of origin of Ashok’s life. It is at that juncture, lying at his house in a crippled state that he realizes the focus of Ghosh’s words of conquering the world. Bursting inside his memory, these words are all that gave him the impetus to move out of his national confines and settle abroad. So in another aspect of the word ‘born’, we see Ashok being re-born, again out of The Overcoat. Ashok’s life has a unique attachment to Ghosh’s instruction. All his life he has lived in this focus. And this is signified even in his death, dying in a far off place in America, far away from all his family members who incidentally are born with him in America. The motif of moving along places never seems to end and the only possible end that can be achieved is through death.

And then we come to Gogol, the son. Completely within the folds of an American heritage and culture, Gogol feels a sense of alienation towards India, towards Kolkata. He feels completely out of place in a land where it id dangerous to go out to jog on the roads, or even to inhumanly drive a rickshaw puller by an extra person’s weight. However, an artist by profession, bordering towards architecture, Gogol in India, witnesses the beauty and splendor of the Taj Mahal. It is looking at a structure with awe and admiration that he had never seen before, something that actually belongs to him, but is yet so far away. It is a rather crippled existence, but the intensity of its actualization is far away from Gogol’s realms.

And towards the end, Gogol recounts what his father had told him when he took him to the edge of the sea. Due to the lack of a camera, he asked Gogol to remember it by realizing that they had gone to a place from where they could go no further. And that pseudo hypocritical statement, a harmless paradox, firms Gogol’s mind much later, when he realizes in the New York underground that maybe he should move towards India, to “see the world”.

It is at this moment that Lahiri (I cannot comment on the storyline, but the literary aspect of the same has to be attributed to the author and not to the filmmaker) stumbles the viewers and readers upon a post colonial influx that boils down to a West fixation. There is, as Ghosh points out, a kind of “dream” that draws Indians towards the West, somewhere where people do not spit on the roads, where everything is kept clean and tidy, on the verge of making it a very idyllic setting. Yet there is a lot more to it than just “opportunities” for the youth (which the very reason why Ashok wants Gogol to be brought up in America). Even the mysticism that is generally attributed to the East can stand as a marching order for people from the West, both foreigners and Indians who had long back migrated to the West and their families. This is why we see Ashok take Gogol to the edge of the sea and then tell him “remember that we came to a place from where we could go no further”. He was trying to justify to himself that he can seen the world. He was trying to tell himself that he had seen it all. He had indeed taken in all that Ghosh had told him but obviously he never did really believe in it. And he never wanted his son to believe in it, though it remained such an inextricable part of him.

The Namesake deals primarily with the thought of exploring the other and thereby being complete in vision. The difference remains also in the very realms of difference that actually defines the two hemispheres. The west enthralls the Easterners for its development in modern times, while the East draws people from the West because of its development in ancient times. And thereby they complete the world; because the world is round and as you start from one end, you come back to where you begun from. Thus we can see that The Namesake remains a post-colonial book, a post-colonial West centric phenomenon and a brilliant movie.