People loved it so much that The Namesakewas adapted into a film starring Kal Penn in 2006. (No big deal.) The stories tackled similar themes to those in The Namesake, which she published in 2003 to instant success and acclaim. Lahiri gained widespread notice when her first book, a collection of short stories called The Interpreter of Maladies, won her the Pulitzer Prize in 2000. In many ways, his odd name is the door through which Lahiri ushers us into the world of the Indian immigrant experience. He sees his name as both the cause and the symbol of the way he feels as an Indian-American, caught between the Bengali heritage of his parents and the American culture he lives in. Growing up, Gogol absolutely despises it. His father is a fan of the nineteenth-century Russian writer Nikolai Gogol, and slaps that name on a birth certificate for lack of a better one when his son is born. Gogol is a troubled kid, and the main thing that irks him is his rather wacky name. Her fictional counterpart is Gogol Ganguli, who comes of age over the course of the novel and comes to terms with his complicated, multicultural identity. That exploration is based in part on her own experiences growing up in America as the child of Indian immigrants. In The Namesake, Lahiri explores this tug between the two worlds – the Indian world and the American one.
But it could just as easily apply to Ashima and Ashoke, the Bengali couple who travels to the United States and raises a family in Lahiri's first novel, The Namesake. That's our oh-so wise author, Jhumpa Lahiri talking about how her parents felt as Indian immigrants in the United States. They are always hovering, literally straddling two worlds" ( source). "Each boat wants to pull them in a separate direction, and my parents are always torn between the two. "The way my parents explain it to me is that they have spent their immigrant lives feeling as if they are on a river with a foot in two different boats," she relates.
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