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What Is Gogol's Acceptance Of An Indian American Culture

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consider it as another country. They celebrate Hallow in or Christmas but because of their children. Their food on such occasions is all the time Indian. But the second generations like Gogol and Sonia are affected psychologically. Gogol’s acceptance of his Indian-American identity is reflected in his gradual acceptance of his name and its history. The reason is that from the moment of their birth, they were brought up in the settled country and they consider it as their home country and wanted to follow its culture and tradition as their own. The Namesake describes the cultural dislocation in detail. When Gogol mentions his stay in a room for three months, it upsets Ashima. When Gogol and Sonia reduce their visits to their parents, Ashima suffers a lot: “Having been deprived of the company of her own parents upon moving to America, her children’s independence, their need to keep their distance …show more content…

They are not happy about the way their parents live. It leads to several kinds of misunderstandings between both generations. Edward Said rightly describes the concept of cultures as something distinctive, representative of an exclusive to a certain group or nation in Culture and Imperialism (1993) so as to understand the basic problem with such terms. In The Namesake Ashima celebrates all the Hindu festivals and at the same time Western festivals for the sake of her children. It shows the mingling of both the cultures. Ashima and Ashoke are not bothered about Gogol’s relationship with the White girls. However, when it comes to marriage, Ashima wishes her son to be married off to a Bengali girl. Said writes: Culture is a concept that includes a refining and elevating element, each society’s reservoir of the best that has been known and thought, as Mathew Arnold put it in the 1860’s Arnold believed that culture palliates it does not altogether neutralizes,

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