A book and its film

Jai Arjun Singh on why Mira Nair's film The Namesake is a very satisfying treatment of the Jhumpa Lahiri novel.

A frequent criticism of book-to-film adaptations is that where the book allows us to participate in the creative process, the movie by its very nature makes everything explicit, closing the door on imagination.

But Mira Nair's film version of Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake is so effective precisely because it gives us specific, well-etched renditions of characters who sometimes came across as nebulous in the novel. In Lahiri's book, an omniscient narrator tells us about the thoughts and feelings of the protagonists, there are very few conversations, and this occasionally has a distancing effect.

In the film on the other hand, Irfan Khan, Tabu and Kal Penn bring an immediacy to the central characters "" Ashoke and Ashima Ganguly, a Bengali couple who settle in the US in the 1970s following an arranged marriage, and their son Gogol, who grows up between two cultures.

This is not to undermine the novel, which has its own strengths and is, at the very least, a pleasant read for a languorous Sunday afternoon. On one level The Namesake is the archetypal story about the immigrant experience, the adjustment problems of the diaspora, and the generation gap between Indian parents and their foreign-born children with "strange accents".

But there's more to it than this limited vision would suggest. Much of its power derives from Lahiri's examination of the relationship between parents and children who are emotionally close to each other but whose lives have had very different cultural signposts.

The refrain "Get out and see the world" is first used in the context of the young Ashoke being encouraged to travel to another country (at a time when it wasn't easy for a middle-class Indian to do so), but it acquires deeper resonance later in the story "" Gogol's attempt to understand his parents' early life and what made them the people they were amounts to a different sort of "getting out and seeing the world".

The idea that children can find affirmation and a sense of self in the spaces that their parents once occupied, even when those spaces don't have a direct connection to their own lives, is movingly explored here.

The book is essentially a series of vignettes: Ashima settles into her new life in an unfamiliar country with her husband; the years rush by, they go on annual trips to India with their children; Gogol (named because of Ashoke's admiration for the Russian writer) has trouble relating to his name and is teased about it in college, but after his father's sudden death he starts feeling closer to his roots; and this eventually leads to his breaking up with his American girlfriend and marrying a Bengali NRI. That's it. There's little here that's obviously suited to a cine-translation.

But Nair's direction is economical and understated, and not a scene in her film feels out of place. Especially noteworthy are the visual cues she employs to shows different cultures knocking awkwardly against each other.

In Ashima's earnest recital of William Wordsworth's Daffodils, a performance intended to impress her potential parents-in-law, we see the use of an iconic English poem in a traditional Indian context.

And when Gogol makes the personal decision to get his head shaved as a mark of respect to his deceased father, there's a striking scene in the barbershop "" a gangsta-rap score plays in the background, reminding us that in the country where Gogol has grown up, the image of a young man getting his head shaved can carry different associations.

There are many such moments scattered throughout this gentle film, which is honest and uncontrived in a way that many feelgood movies aren't. You believe in these characters, their feelings for one another and their personal struggles, and this gives conviction to what could otherwise have been a compendium of NRI cliches. For this, equal credit must be given to Lahiri and Nair.