Like Ray’s globe-trotter Manomohan Mitra (in “Agontuk” or “The Stranger”)1, the Bengali has never been a “KupoMonduk”. The Bengali migration has not just been across the barbed wires separating the two Bengals, but has often carried him across the oceans, to new continents and cultures. Jhumpa Lahiri is a product of that “Wanderlust”. More than any other writer of her time, Jhumpa has emerged as a spokesperson of her generation, one that has been born and brought up outside Bengal, spent their lives far away from the sights and sounds of this land. It is a life lived in a myriad of fragmented cultural identities. The middle class Bengali values of home, the All-American values at school and the big wide world, the Indian identity at Diwali, all combine, collide, embrace and sometimes repel each other in this strange whirlwind of immigrant existence. We have met this generation, often looked at them with the curiosity of a stranger, but have never quite been able to fathom the complexities and confusions that surround their lives.
It is a generation, often misunderstood, by Bengalis at home, and at large, by the Indian community, which alludes to the word “A.B.C.D” with deriding connotations. But such casual, offhand criticisms do little in understanding the complex dynamics of the American born Bengali generation. The one dimensional clichés that have existed in Bollywood (and very recently in Tollywood too) in the name of “crossover cinema” have only worked in order to enhance these widely believed stereotypes, but have failed to give us a more nuanced look at this generation. Jhumpa, on the other hand, tells the tales of more ordinary people, multihued characters who are far away from the cartoonish caricatures of pop culture. In the “Namesake”, Moushumi Majumder (often described as a character close to Jhumpa’s own self) does not try to balance Bollywood and ballet, nor is she given to the stereotype of the Western Bengali fawning over “Baul”. Moushumi is intelligent, self assured, reads French feminist theory, and carries herself in her own friend’s circle without the burdens of expressing her Indianness.
বা ঙা ল না মা 
