August in ‘Great’ Britain: a tribute to The Namesake

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The writer is a Doctoral Candidate in Politics at the University of Exeter, where she is a recipient of the fully-funded SSIS PTA Studentship. She holds a Master’s in International Security from the University of Warwick, where she received the PAIS MA Scholarship and a Bachelor’s in Political Science from the Forman Christian College University (FCCU) – Lahore. Prior to commencing her Ph.D., she worked as an Erasmus+ funded researcher at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF) in Germany. She currently teaches politics at the University of Exeter. 

This article contains sensitive language which is not intended to hurt or offend any race or ethnicity.

“Nothing is locked, not the main house, or the cabin that he and Maxine sleep in. Anyone could walk in. He thinks of the alarm system now installed in his parents’ house, wonders why they cannot relax about their physical surroundings in the same way… Yet he cannot picture his family occupying a house like this, playing board games on rainy afternoons, watching shooting stars at night, all their relatives gathered neatly on a small strip of sand. It is an impulse his parents have never felt, this need to be so far from things. They would have felt lonely in this setting, remarking that they were the only Indians. They would not want to go hiking, as he and Maxine and Gerald and Lydia do almost every day, up the rocky mountain trails, to watch the sun set over the valley. They would not care to cook with the fresh basil that grows rampant in Gerald’s garden or to spend a whole day boiling blueberries for jam. His mother would not put on a bathing suit or swim. He feels no nostalgia for the vacations he’s spent with his family, and he realizes now that they were never really true vacations at all. Instead they were overwhelming, disorienting expeditions, either going to Calcutta, or sightseeing in places they did not belong to and intended never to see again. Some summers there had been road trips with one or two Bengali families, in rented vans, going to Toronto or Atlanta or Chicago, places where they had other Bengali friends. The fathers would be huddled at the front, taking turns at the wheel, consulting maps highlighted by AAA. All the children would sit in the back with plastic tubs of aloo dum and cold flattened luchis wrapped in foil, fried the day before, which they would stop in state parks to eat on picnic tables. They had stayed in motels, slept whole families to a single room, swum in pools that could be seen from the road.”

Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

“On a sticky august evening two weeks before her due date, Ashima Ganguli stands in the kitchen of a Central Square apartment, combining Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts and chopped red onion in a bowl. She adds salt, lemon juice, thin slices of green chili pepper, wishing there were mustard oil to pour into the mix.” 

Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

I watched The Namesake in three different phases of my life. The first time was rather passively when I was a child as it played in the background on the lounge television at my home in Lahore. I was more interested in Cartoon Network and Disney then. 

The second time I watched it with intent but lacked the maturity, as a teenager, to understand the depth of what was being emulated so artistically by Tabu and marhoom (late) Irrfan Khan, two Indian actors I love. I was preparing to eagerly leave my home for a better, more liberated life in my American Dream in Texas. 

The third time was when my American Dream became a British Dream and I found myself in this island where the food was as bland as the weather, the colour of people’s trench coats and their timetabled life. With two merit scholarships, one for my master’s and another for my Ph.D., I ended up gaining the said freedom and exposure I had sought as a rebellious (for a teenager), Pakistani woman who grew up in a patriarchal environment – but I felt at odds with myself and my newfound surroundings. The third time watching the movie in my twenties, I realised that The Namesake, through Ashima and Gogol Ganguli’s characters, had manifested exactly the kind of estrangement and alienation I felt while freely living out my ambitions in the Western world. 

I often read that Pakistan and India are post-colonial states in Political Science texts but over time, I have started to see what that has meant for me and how my teenage rebellion has metamorphosed into something very different from the run-of-the-mill liberal feminism style of preaching, hyper-individualism and letting-go-of-the-indigenous kind of Westernisation, something they often cloak under the term “assimilation”. 

One could learn to flirt in (and with) French but why is it that we can’t understand the Pakistani next to us who may speak in Sindhi, Balochi, Pashto or Shina?

The status quo in Pakistan conflates a cultural upbringing with religious dogmatism. To top that concoction of Pakistaniyat is globalisation, America’s baby. Hence, the initial idea of one’s identity could be, say, praying, fasting, repenting, a foreign degree and a good English vocabulary where patriotism has multiple synonyms. One could learn to flirt in (and with) French but why is it that we can’t understand the Pakistani next to us who may speak in Sindhi, Balochi, Pashto or Shina? We go to the overpriced Christmas markets in London and the factory-like expos in Dubai but why is it that some of us have never been to a majlis or imambargagh in Muharram or a Mass at a local church in Pakistan? Why is it that 9/11 weighs more heavily on us than Abbas Town or Joseph Colony do? 

I discovered during my language classes last year that one of the Persian civilisation’s most treasured pieces of poetry and literature is the Shahnameh (the Book of Kings) by Abul-Qasem Ferdowsi Tusi. Having previously admired Achilles’s handsome looks and male grandiosity, I was thrown by how when in one of the stories Princess Rudabeh of Kabul “let’s down her hair from a high window, her suitor Zal is unable to bear the thought of using it as a substitute rope.” 

The Shahnameh is longer than The Iliad, which, for critics, isn’t a marked sign of advancement – it needs to be ‘deeper in meaning’. If I were to argue that it is, they would say both are equally special as if Western and Eastern literatures are siblings; no they are not. 

This book carries in it the soil of 11th-Century South And Central Asia, within and beyond ancient Persia at a time when Persian as a language was at threat of extinction. As per a (foreign) source, “In the poem’s mythical and early legendary sections, Iran is in what is now northern Khorasan, and reaches as far north as present-day Bokhara and Samarkand … and it reaches as far east as the Helmand province in Afghanistan.” 

Studying Persian, even at a beginner level, was a powerful experience because it came with the gift of tehzeeb (refinement), sakafat (culture) and adai’gi (conduct and grace), something that I personally would miss if I were wearing a beret and a checkered skirt, basking in the glow of the Eiffel Tower with a croissant in my hand. This is not to say that Paris is not charming, but when you live in the West, you are preferred for your taste in the latter and not the former. France at the moment has openly shown its preferential treatment against Muslim clothes of modesty – something this supposedly ‘secular’ nation would easily overlook with the Pope’s or a nun’s coverings – and yes these comparisons need to be made (respectfully, of course). 

The more empty one hypothetically felt as a Pakistani and Muslim who grew up in the so-called ‘Third World’, the easier it would be for Great Britain to homogenise one.

This is where estrangement and othering, first within my country’s struggle to foster a ‘legitimate’ culture in the face of Anglicisation, globalisation and religious monopolisation, and second and more importantly, in the UK’s recently violent refusal to accept my desi-ness, happens. The more empty one hypothetically felt as a Pakistani and Muslim who grew up in the so-called ‘Third World’, the easier it would be for Great Britain to homogenise one. I feel this even though I can understand 5-6 South Asian languages, research continuously on my region and would in my heart and practice, choose a sari over a dress, Bollywood over Hollywood, religion over humanism and Karachi ki Biryani over a Sunday roast. 

Perhaps these slightly more pronounced tastes would bother a white supremacist/nationalist. But how many everyday (implying that they cannot be racist or acutely ignorant for some reason) white people would accept me in my native shalwar kameez, with the ‘t’ in water that I still accentuate, and the smell of my incredibly spicy and delicious desi food? To an extent, they still like me because I don’t create a ‘hassle’ going to a pub with them, saris are sexy and ‘exotic’ (this is where it is seen as okay to appropriate our fashion, sensuality and traumas alike), I don’t always get up and leave their company when they sometimes make the most racially and religiously stupid comments all the while trying to sound woke and I sometimes ignore (out of frustration) when they sound like a NATO warlord mispronouncing my country’s name and talking about it. The name that they can pronounce easily is Osama. 

But even for me, pointing out these everyday observations is tricky. If I say that I have personally felt these things, I would be seen as biased and vengeful, taking out my frustration at the kinder kind of white people because ‘Not All White People’, hah! If I say that it is a second-hand experience or a general observation then it won’t be specific enough to pinpoint what exactly made me feel like an alien and a complete outsider in this country, which once colonised mine. So, I do what a good Pakistani girl does in similar situations where she is being denied the right to feel the systemic and structural discrimination around her; I write a column! 

So, I do what a good Pakistani girl does in similar situations where she is being denied the right to feel the systemic and structural discrimination around her; I write a column! 

Louis Mountbatten, the Last colonial Viceroy of India, once said something that perhaps symbolises the prevalent attitude within the English masses today (even though they don’t openly admit it sometimes): he wanted to leave India as a place that would have brown bodies with white souls. This is excruciatingly evident and ‘scientifically’ proven in Post-Colonial Theory, also known as ‘the academic literature of the colonised’. 

Since this is a larger issue at hand and not an outlier experience, it is not fair to put the burden on the victim, often an immigrant or a foreigner on a visa, to just fight back against an entire ecosystem that thrives on racial discrimination. Instead, we should keep (un)intentionally resisting through our practices like our superstitions that others find ‘silly’, eating food with our bare hands and smelling like it later, dancing to Kathak or Bharatnatyam when others are learning ballet, and not letting chicken tikka masala gain legitimacy (the last one is a joke). 

We must try to be ourselves because as Frantz Fanon, author of Black Skins, White Masks, says: 

“In effect, what happens is this: As I begin to recognise that the Negro is the symbol of sin, I catch myself hating the Negro. But then I recognise that I am a Negro. There are two ways out of this conflict. Either I ask others to pay no attention to my skin, or else I want them to be aware of it. I try to find value for what is bad-since I have unthinkingly conceded that the black man is the colour of evil. In order to terminate this neurotic situation, in which I am compelled to choose an unhealthy, conflictual solution, fed on fantasies, hostile, inhuman in short, I have only one solution: to rise above this absurd drama that others have staged round me, to reject the two terms that are equally unacceptable, and, through one human being, to reach out for the universal.”

South Asian identities, and here too I refuse to self-homogenise and pretend like we are a monolith for anyone’s convenience, is our ‘universal’ and we should not make it anything less than that just to blend in. Like sexism, culture shock in most cases does not happen both ways, as many would think. In Great Britain, it is happening to a very specific community – even someone like Rishi Sunak is exempt from it despite coming from a coloured heritage. It targets those who are not ashamed, more aware and practising their identity. Self-preservation and kindness towards one’s personhood, as flawed as it may be, is part of the answer. 

This is the other part; there is something to be said about how being an ally has become so performative, so futile today. It does not help to call it ‘bad’ or ‘concerning’. Have the decency, if you will, to call it out the same way you would call out 9/11, the Peshawar attacks or the Mumbai attacks. If you cannot do that, then I am sorry to burst your bubble but you are not an ally to me, even if you come from a ‘different’ background. Instead of giving us your disquietudes on the topic, ask us with the kind of sorrow, guilt and self-doubt that Muslims in New York (and beyond) imbibed in their attitudes after 9/11, how we would like to define and cope with it. And please don’t be proud of not being a supporter of white supremacy; you are not doing a favour to anyone but yourself. 

As a Muslim, Pakistani woman, a Pakistani feminist (I coined this type of feminism for my guest lecture in the Department of Politics at the University of Exeter after finding every other kind too Western-centric)and as a researcher, I define it as Islamaphobia and terrorism. If you want to go beyond performative allyship, you should too. 

As post-colonial peoples, we are encouraged to know and embody too much about the West; it is time that they should know more about us too.

“Though no longer pregnant, she continues, at times, to mix Rice Krispies and peanuts and onions in a bowl. For being a foreigner Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy — a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been an ordinary life, only to discover that previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding. Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect.

Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake