Jhumpa Lahiri’s exceedingly indulgent book on the Bengali immigrant community in the US is now a film, with less syrup and much less talk on ‘identity’. In the book there’s no escaping it. The heroine hangs up a Murshidabad silk sari before delivery. She reads from Desh magazine before labour. A visit to her home in Calcutta has the entire family’s feet pressed into Bata shoes. If it’s biscuits it’s Marie, if it’s body powder, it’s Cuticura. Why tell us things we know? The contrast between bhalo naam (good name) and dak naam (pet name) has of course pride of place with Gogol, the son–his father named him after his favourite Russian author, Nikolai Gogol; and the boy doesn’t like it–working himself up into knots over nothing and a name, and passing it off as existential crisis.

“The Namesake”, the film, made from The Namesake, the book, is in that sense a model of understatement. It opens in Calcutta in the 70s with Ashima (Tabu) meeting Ashoke (Irrfan) in their living room, respective parents in tow, with each family congratulating each other for being on the same cultural wavelength. Ashima stands up and recites the ‘Daffodils’ and lo! it’s the in-laws’ favourite poem as well. As a one-off reference to cultural peculiarities, it is cute and populist–trust Mira Nair to pick it out–though Tabu as 25-year-old Ashima is too much to take. Luckily enough, Mira Nair, whom few can fault on craft and cinematic aesthetics, does not keep her 25 for long. 

The main setting is the U.S., where Ashima and Ashoke grow into maturity, have a family and settle somewhat reluctantly into American life. Their circle of friends is resolutely Bengali; their food and dress is so as well. Kantha sari, shankha and bindi in the book and, to a lesser extent, in the film, are identity markers and show the extent to which the Bengali will be Indian in America. Why are surfaces so intrinsic to the building of identity in mainstream Bollywood films? Is there then too much of a difference between Karan Johar’s evocation of immigrant Punjabis in New York? Mira Nair, a Johar fan, points out a few. Her characters don’t stay in mansions or drive Rolls Royces; they push their laundry carts in the snow. 

Mira Nair’s film, it has to be said, glances at stereotypes. The screenplay has sucked sentiment out of the book and kept it out of the picture. It reaches for the universal and does well with a parent-and-son theme in a foreign land. High marks to long-time Mira associate Sooni Taraporevala and to the director for keeping the drama of Ashoke’s accident, and the reason for his son’s naming after the Russian author, right at the beginning. Kal Penn as Gogol plays the youth caught between two heritages. He is competent in his portrayal of this-generation ‘coolness.’ As his father, Irrfan, a superb actor in any circumstance and setting, is reined in; he’s a diffident, shy and a more substantial Ashoke Ganguli than the one we find in the book. He shares maximum screen space with Tabu, his wife in the film. Theirs is really a different love story than the kind we are used to from mainstream Bollywood, so there are no songs.