ABSTRACT
The chapter explores how Indian American woman characters (both first and second generations) in Lahiri’s The Namesake transform their diasporic house spaces, negotiating the interface between lived and imagined territories, homeland and host land. These woman characters design interiors of a house, archive family letters and photographs, generate culinary citizenship and individualize Indian rituals to remodel the ecology of their pre-existing house space according to their individual perspectives of social and cultural belongings in the diasporic space. These spaces are private, and therefore concealed, but if closely examined may provide deep understanding of the notion(s) of Indian American woman citizenship and complex identity formations in the host land. The chapter analyses diasporic house space of Ashima (a first-generation Indian American immigrant) and Moushumi, her daughter-in-law (a second-generation Indo-British American immigrant), in order to understand their different notion of transnational belongings. Interestingly, goods/commodities acquired in Ashima’s Pemberton house and the way they are acquired signify Ashima’s nature of participation in the cultural and economic interface between homeland and host land. Moushumi, on the other hand, balances racial patriarchal territorial cultural and personal schisms through spatial arrangements in her diasporic houses wherein she performs her everyday work and amusement, intellect and emotion, break-ups and patch-ups, indifference, and compassion.
