Chapter 4 Gogol + Nikhil = Nikon? Power, Place, and Photography in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake
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Abstract
This essay offers a media-technological reading of photography in Lahiri’s work, centering broadly on The Namesake (2003). (1) Through the lens of photography, Lahiri re-exposes the power differential between men and women. If trigger-happy males zoom in on female bodies, or any other subject, from behind the viewfinder, they not only assert their traditional agency through a technology of representation; they also reduce women to passive statu(e)s and the object of the male gaze, thus re-inscribing an age-old power dichotomy and bringing it up to date. Similarly, as Lahiri’s Indian immigrants record, with camera in hand, their newfound life in the West, they also return to their country of origin as tourists, where snapshots of oddly-estranged environments give them a sense of (nostalgic) cultural grounding. (2) While ancestral portraits have served numerous cultures as a placeholder for the deceased, the Hindu practice of burning the body, and the subsequent dispersal of the ash, invests photographic verisimilitude with greater significance than in the West. Yet, if photography can be commemorative in a visual sense, words occupy a different value on the spectrum of recall and representation, often filling the gap where images and photographs fail.