For US-based filmmaker Mira Nair, the shooting of "The Namesake" here is an emotional return to her creative roots in a city where she spent over a decade and acquired her cinematic sensibilities through Satyajit Ray and Ritwick Ghatak.

"I am immensely glad to be in Kolkata to shoot for 'The Namesake'. I spent several summers in this city and got my cultural orientation here. I used to stay in a house on Cornfield Road in Ballygunge," Nair told in an interview.

After filming in New York, Nair Sunday started a fortnight-long shoot for "The Namesake", a movie adapted from Pulitzer-winning Jhumpa Lahiri's eponymous debut novel tracing the journey of US-born Gogol who is torn by his Bengali heritage. "I am a big fan of Satyajit Ray and Ritwick Ghatak. I have posters of Ghatak's 1960 film 'Meghe Dhaka Tara' (The Cloud Capped Star) in my room. I learnt a lot from Ghatak," said the director of "Salaam Bombay", "Kamasutra" and "Mississippi Masala".

"I learnt from Ghatak's film for the first time how to capture a tree in a film. There are so many subtle things to learn from Ray and Ghatak," said Nair.

The director has cast in "The Namesake" famous Bengali actress Supriya Devi, who made history with her performance in "Meghe Dhaka Tara", the heart-rending story of a female bread-earner who sacrificed herself at the altar of her family that was uprooted by the partition of India.

"I think I was here from 1968 till 1976. That was a great time. So today I can relate to the character of Gogol's mother Ashima in this film, played by Tabu. After all, this is one city which has not gone phirangi (westernised) fully," said Nair.

"I can capture so many things in Kolkata in my film. My film will have Baul songs (folk music by roving minstrels of rural Bengal), Rabindra sangeet (Tagore songs) and of course the great erudite culture of the Bengalis.

"When I read the book I was just overwhelmed. It is a great love story which captures the modern pulse of South Asians in New York. I am thankful to Jhumpa that she gave me the opportunity to film it," said Nair, whose upcoming projects include Hari Kunzru's "The Impressionist" and a Hollywood adaptation of the Hindi blockbuster "Munnabhai M.B.B.S".

So can "The Namesake" end up in the crowd as yet another crossover film?

Nair said: "I don't think too much about the results of a film. I can say this is a very stylised and modern film and for me this is something I am trying that is new for me. Every movie is a step forward in growing.

"My films reach the global market and 'The Namesake' is a universal story. It is like the story of Satyajit Ray's Apu. The film with a budget of $9.6 million is also very expensive. It is very expensive to shoot in New York."

"The Namesake" is the story of the Ganguly family of Kolkata that moves to New York and tries to blend the new world while retaining their old culture.

While parents Ashoke (Irrfan Khan) and Ashima (Tabu) long for the family and culture that enveloped them in India, their son Gogol (played by Kal Penn of "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle" fame) is torn between finding his own unique identity and his heritage.

"Jhumpa is just ecstatic that her book is being filmed. And she herself plays Jumpamashi (Aunt Jhumpa) in the film," revealed Nair.

"'The Namesake' is the story of the sacrifices our parents made for their children and which we now cannot perhaps think of. It is a deep human way of telling the story of millions of us who left one home for another, who have known what it means to combine old with the new," she said.

Nair and her friend and collaborator Sooni Taraporewala scripted the film, which has as its backdrop the Kolkata of the 1970s and the US of the 1990s.

Nair, who said she had seen and liked most of Rituparno Ghosh's films, begins and ends "The Namesake" with songs, as she has taken the cinematic liberty of transforming Ashima into a fledgling singer.

"But the book is our mantra and though there are condensations, the characters are pretty much from the book," Nair summed up.