Negotiating Tradition and Modernity: Evolving Female Identity in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2003)

Through the divergent paths of two female characters Ashima Bhaduri Ganguli and Moushumi Mazoomdar, this article contends that Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2003) stages a dialectic between inherited Bengali tradition and self-fashioned modernity. The essay places the novel in the context of research on South Asian American writing feminist diaspora theory and transnational food studies. This article argues that Ashima and Moushumi, on the other hand, occupy different kinds of “third space,” (Bhabha Citation1994) in which their existence as diasporic subjects is defined by their daily negotiations of food, fashion, movement, and memory. We do not consider food practices and sartorial practices as two independent systems of symbolism. Expanding upon Hall’s notion of “new ethnicities,” Butler’s “theory of performativity,” and Brah’s concept of “diasporic positionality,” we demonstrate how Ashima’s hybridized domestic practices and Moushumi’s cosmopolitan selfhood challenge the teleological models of assimilation. In-depth close readings of several pivotal scenes such as Moushumi’s Parisian dinner party, Ashima’s spontaneous jhāl mūrī in a Cambridge kitchen and the final breakdown of Moushumi and Gogol’s marriage illustrate how Lahiri encapsulates desire resistance and nostalgia in commonplace material culture.