Cultural Norms In The Namesake

The pages of The Namesake drift across decades effortlessly, and suck the reader into the daily lives of two generations: the immigrants: Ashoke and Ashima, and their children: Gogol and Sonia. Naturally, it is also a chronicle of all their romantic relationships. As we witness their lives unfold before our eyes, we see love go right, and quite often, wrong.
This allows for an analysis of the finer details of their personalities, their backgrounds, and how they affect their endeavors in the new world, which is, America.

To speak of the immigrants first, Ashoke and Ashima’s romance is one whose initiation has no place for individual choice. It is a classic arranged marriage, determined by cultural norms of India, such as astrological consultation and socio-economic matching. It is a predetermined path, but with a stroke of luck they seem to be instantly attracted to each other. There is an unspoken cultural norm in the country that values a parent-child relationship as having greater significance than that of a husband and wife. Hence, their relationship is seen as an arrangement to set up a family life. While such traditional Bengali marriages lead to the couple being geographically and socially obligated to their parents and extended family, this couple finds a chance to be alone together due to their journey to America.
Ashima is a resilient and optimistic, sticking firmly to traditional gender roles. Their relationship grows due to their mutual dependency in a new land, his benevolence and her warmth. It is a relationship where affection is implied but never shown. She never even speaks his name, even later in the novel, after his death. In Lahiri’s own words: