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N: The Namesake is the coming of age story about an American named Gogol Gangulli. He is the son of Indian immigrants, who is so bothered by his given name that he decides to change it.
Ax: "I've been thinking a lot about my name. Gogol's fine on my high school diploma. But can you imagine Gogol on a resume or a credit card after that?
-Anything is possible in America. Do as you wish."
N: Pulitzer-Prize winning author Jhumpa Lahiri says she never imagined her novel about immigrant identity as a film. But she knew that Indian-American director Mira Nair could do justice to her story…
Ax: She expressed such passion and such a profound understanding of the story. It was just the ideal situation.
N: Nair's films include Monsoon Wedding and Vanity Fair. She says she wanted to make an intimate portrait of a middle-class immigrant family …To show the palpable sense of loss and displacement that all immigrants faces as they build their lives in a new country…
Ax: The other thing that really propelled me to make this film and absolutely possessed me was grief and loss and losing a parent in a country that is not home.
N: Her characters are suspended between two worlds. The film is rooted in both India and the United States. Her cast includes actors from Hollywood and the Indian film industry.
Ax: This is a nine and a half million-dollar film: two continents, thirty years, eighty actors, aging of all kinds. Big Epic. So one executive joked and said to me that it was a non-Caucasian film on a Caucasian budget.
N: The Namesake is a co-production of Fox Searchlight and the Bombay-based UTV Films, one of the leading production companies in the prolific Indian film industry,
Like the film itself, its main character is also both Indian and American. As Gogol comes of age in New York City, he becomes distant from his family and almost embarrassed by his parent's Indian-ness. He's a lower Manhattan architect and yet when his mother sets him up on a blind date, he grudgingly goes along…
Ax: "I've never done this before - What's that? -Gone out on a blind date engineered by my mom. -It's not a blind date exactly. -No? - We sort of know each other in a way… "
N: The film also allowed Nair to go beyond the novel. She expands the story of Gogol's parents, who come to New York City from Calcutta in the 1970s following an arranged marriage…
Ax: I wanted to make a deeply exquisite adult love story - the story of the parents….
Ax: "Just imagine how much Shah Jahan must have loved Mumtaz to make this for her - Other husbands also love their wives, Ashima. Only we cannot afford to build Taj Mahal."
Ax: And I love that generation, you know where it's about the stillness. It's about how you share a cup of tea on a kitchen table. And how you look at each other and what the history you have gone through together, what that means, rather than the roses, and the diamonds, and the hallmark cards and the "I Love You's" of this culture and also of the young.
This was an ability in this film, to not only to do this Calcutta that I have loved in the 70s, but also the Manhattan of today…both in its music and its fashion…
N: Mira Nair calls the Namesake a flag of South Asian creative power. She says only an Indian filmmaker could have made the film…
Ax: I really believe that if we don't tell our own stories. No one else will tell them.
N: But she says, The Namesake is a universal story …
Ax: Monsoon Wedding and The Namesake very much reflect that phase of life for me of being in family and being in the middle of experiencing even death for the first time.
N: The Namesake opens in limited release in New York and Los Angeles today and opens in additional cities next week.
Bilal Qureshi, Columbia Radio News