CHAPTER IV

SOCIAL REALISM IN KIRAN DESAI’S

THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS

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4.1 INTRODUCTION – NOVELIST & NOVEL:

Literature has a unique function in shaping and teaching society at large.

Literary fictions are portrayals of the thinking patterns and social norms prevalent in

the society. They are treasure-trove of human experience. Literary fictions are the

food for thought and tonic for imagination and creativity. A writer of Indian English

fiction, Kiran Desai is one of the immigrant writers who have chosen materials for

their art from contemporary Indian socio-cultural situations.

As Kiran Desai is the writer of ‘second generation’ of diaspora, she has the

first-hand experience of cultural differences. She indulges with the questions

regarding rootlessness, alienation, nostalgia, search for self, identity crisis etc. She

tries to find out solutions for these questions. Kiran Desai succeeds in exhibiting the

feeling of her characters who are caught between two cultures – Eastern and Western.

They are trapped by the ambivalance that surrounds global, local and post-colonial

politics. It is because the promise of opportunities is invariably conditioned by issues

of class and ethnicity.

Kiran Desai is a vibrant author with innate artistic flairs. She has created a

discrete place for herself in the constellation of Indian woman novelists in English.

She is the daughter of the renowned fictionist Anita Desai. Both have explored in the

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Indian English novels the concerns like socio-political, moral, racial, emigrational,

psycho-analytical and essential man-human-relationships in the post-independence

era. With the very publication of her novel Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998),

Kiran Desai has been globally applauded to be one of the finest novelists in the trends.

Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss is a second novel by Kiran Desai. It

was published in 2006. It won a number of awards including the Man Booker Prize

for that year, the National Book Critics Fiction Award in 2007 and the 2006 Vodafone

Crossword Book award. In both of her novels, she has portrayed beautiful scenes of

nature and landscapes. Desai’s second novel The Inheritance of Loss, as mentioned by

both Salman Rushdie and Rohinton Mistry, secured her place with the enormously

acclaimed contemporary Indian authors who explore life and society in India and

across the globe. As a result, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard gains in

overwhelming popularity in the reflected glory of The Inheritance of Loss.

The Inheritance of Loss is described as a radiant, funny and moving family

saga . . . described by reviewers as “the best, sweetest, most delightful novel.”

(relibrary.com/Online) There are various families involved, but there was a little that

was sweet or delightful about marital rape, racism and street massacres. Desai uses

rich, mannered, even cute and ludic language to delineate a bleak universe. One of the

most powerful threads in the narrative is a tale of domestic abuse. A standard of

kitchen-sink stories and almost certainly one of Muriel Gray’s personal female issues

resonates with the larger international issues, including the exploitative relationship

Britain exercised over a subservient India. The narrator points out this implication,

describing the couple’s mutually destructive union:

They had tapped into a limitless bitterness carrying them beyond the
parameters of what any individual is normally capable of feeling . . .
Experienced rage with enough muscle in it for entire nations coupled in
hate. (2006: 173)

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 The novel is rife with the sort of messy common details that disgust the

judge. The two teenage lovers, Gyan and Sai, would have melted into each other like

“pats of butter”.(129) The judge has been powdering his face before he forces himself

on his wife. He is described as “Ghoulishly sugared in sweet candy pigment”. (169)

Food comes up a lot in the narrative: “dumplings, chutney, dahl, beef-burgers, the

blood-beaded on the surface”. (136) Returning from a trip out, Sai throws up:

. . . a mordant bile rose up in her throat, frizzling her system, burning her
mouth, corroding her teeth – she could feel them turn to chalk as they
were attacked by a resurgence of the chilli chicken. (125)

The main characters are the two Indian youths: Sai and Biju. Sai is an

anglicized, independent-minded teenager living with her cranky grandfather. Biju is

the son of Sai’s cook who has made it to America and works exploited and illegal in

New York. Sai’s grandfather, usually referred to as the judge, is a dislikeable retired

member of the judiciary, and the husband in the abusive marriage. A critic Sara-

Duana Meyer opines:

Surely there is a lot of Desai’s own experience of moving and living in

between several worlds and histories in her second novel that addresses
themes like the colonial past of India, the legacy of class and more recent
history of separatism, but also migration, economic inequality,
hybridization and the question of the nation-state. (2013: 175)

The very opening sentence of the novel is significant from the natural points

of view of this analysis. It introduces an evocative natural setting – the colour of dusk

that permeates whole days. The mist moves “like a water creature across the great

flunks of mountains”. (1) The grand peaks of Kanchenjunga are briefly visible above

the mist, “gathering the last of the light”. (1) This establishes the centrality of the

landscape in the story. The novel opens and ends with insurgency. In the opening

chapter, the judge’s house is besieged and a hunting rifle and plundered. The Chapter

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fifty-two ends with Biju robbed by Gorkha mercenaries and chased by dogs in the

jungle. About the partition of India and the emergency of Pakistan, Desai reacts:

“First heart attack to our country . . . that has never been healed.” (129)

Like the first novel of Desai, this novel The Inheritance of Loss too begins

with a description of nature. Cho Oyu, far away from the rustle and bustle of mundane

world, owing to neglect and apathy, serves as a gothic backdrop against which all the

major characters are presented: the judge Jemubhai Patel, Sai, Cook, Gyan, and their

affectionate pet Mutt. The peaceful, calm and beautiful nature surrounding the people

living in a remote mountainous region at the beginning of the novel is suggestive of

an ecological equilibrium. There is a harmony between man and nature. There is a

harmony between man, nature and society where we live.

The novel The Inheritance of Loss deals with the quest for individual

identity. It is the struggle for the search of one’s root in a world. In this world, the

concept of home has undergone a significant change during the post-globalization era.

The novel consists of fifty three chapters. It includes the anxieties and tension of the

people living in two different worlds. It travels beyond the boundaries of continents,

maps. It intricates the ethno-racial relationship between people who have come from

different cultural, multicultural, historical, religious and social background.

The Inheritance of Loss portrays the Anglicized Indian culture. It depicts the

lives of a few Indians with fractured Indian identities. Desai bears witness to the

sufferings of the poor and the powerless by holding up an unflinching mirror to their

lives. This novel covers countries like Britain, US, India. It also covers the past and

the present. It also covers the social, religious, linguistic and ethnic diversity. The

novel is set in India. It shows the master craftsmanship of Desai in portraying a wide

range of characters. As Pankaj Mishra states: “A retired judge, his granddaughter, her

tutor, the cook, his son and myriad supporting characters have a lively apprehension

of different cultures.” (2009: 4)

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4.2 SETTING & NARRATIVE STYLE IN THE NOVEL:

The novel covers a wide variety – different countries, the past and the

present, and the social, religious and ethnic diversity. In it, she has analyzed several

current issues of modern civilization. This novel illustrates the clash of two absolute

cultures and its consequences. It is set between two main places: Kalimpong, India

and New York city. Setting of this novel – Kalimpong is situated at foothills of north-

eastern Himalaya. It gives a picturesque description of nature surrounding the

beautiful snow covered Kalimpong with ecocritical concern in juxtaposition with the

cross-cultural issues. These issues affect two main characters Biju and Jemubhai

Patel. It shows that Kiran Desai is a lover of nature. It reveals her deep concern of

environment.

At the same time, the scene shifts repeatedly to the contemporaneous United

States and to flashbacks to other places and times. Apart from these setting, the reader

is introduced to innumerable countries and peoples, particular in The Inheritance of

Loss. Here Kiran Desai gives vivid descriptions of multicultural societies from the

whole world. Furthermore, the character of Gyan in this novel introduces the reader to

some of the history of Nepal. Parallely, the storyline shifts to the life of Biju, the son

of Sai’s grandfather’s cook. He belongs to the ‘lower class system’. He faces

difficulty to adapt to the new foreign environment. He works along with the other

illegal immigrants who spend much of their time in finding fault with the authorities

and oscillating from one ill-paid job to another job.

Although Anita is mentioned only once in the novel, in the dedication (“To

my mother with so much love” – Preface), she played no small part in the lengthy

creation of The Inheritance of Loss. Prosaically, large chunks of it were written in

Anita’s house overlooking the Hudson river at Cold Spring in upstate New York, and

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on five or six long writing trips to Mexico that mother and daughter made together.

The younger Desai has also inherited if not a style – her voice is very much her own –

then at least a technique of writing from Anita. Most profoundly, some of the core

themes running through the book – immigration, dislocation, isolation – draw on

episodes in Kiran’s life that were experienced with and alongside her mother, and also

crop up in Anita’s novels.

An ambitious writer with a far-reaching scope, Kiran Desai offers an

interpretation of the globalized world which stands out among her contemporaries as

complex and sensitive. She artfully unravels the personal and political strands that

have brought her characters to their dismal present, and journeys with ease through

Gujarat, New York and Britain. We learn that when the judge left home to study at

Cambridge University in 1939, he developed a lasting disdain for his Indian heritage,

“he grew stranger to himself than he was to those around him, found his own skin

odd-colored, his own accent peculiar.” (128) His self-loathing propels him on a path

of unending misery and loneliness. Once back in India, he banishes his wife because

of her un-English ways. This contrast situation shows the conflict between two

different social, cultural and religious manners and different social milieu.

The story cuts away and we are ‘all the way in America’. High uptown, we

find the cook’s son, Biju, trying to evade the immigration authorities by flitting

between a succession of grubby kitchen jobs. Here we are in the high-rise capital of

the world. Yet in the Manhatten basements, we might just as well be back in

Kalimpong. The task of weaving the two seemingly disparate but ultimately mirror-

image worlds together in one novel is what kept Kiran Desai in her hermitage for so

long. She says she found it a difficult book to write. It just grew and grew until it

became, in her words, a monster spiralling out of control.

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 Finally, she realized she had to stop writing and start cutting and pulling it

together, otherwise there would be no end. At last, she finds herself back in the open,

beginning what she calls a slow process of recovery. For the past year, she has been

living in Park Slope, Brooklyn, neighbourhood that must have the highest density of

writers in the world – Paul Auster and Siri Husvedt, Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole

Krauss, Rich Moody, Jonathan Lethem. Now she has added one more illustrious

literary name to the list: her own. She says with a wry smile: “The first book took four

years to write, the next eight, so I guess the third will take 16. Then it will soon be

time to retire.” (www.buzzle.com)

Kiran Desai has beautifully personified nature. People learnt to adjust with

environmental problems. It was difficult to communicate with each other. Jhora

overflowed its bank and carried the bridge downstream. Gorkhas were expressing

their discontent through strikes and procession but it could not become successful.

There was museum in Darjeeling. Sai and Gyan visited it where they saw socks of

Tenzing and his other things. For Gyan, Tenzing was a real hero. In this novel,

landscape is dominant character where a significant interaction occurs between author

and place, characters and place.

4.3 MAJOR ISSUES & THEMES IN THE NOVEL:

Kiran Desai is the product of multiculturalism and postcolonialism. She is an

immigrant, well-read, well-bred, whose rootlessness itself has become a kind of

shelter, a form of society. It is this, her own inheritance and the disinheritance that has

come with globalization, of which Kiran Desai sings so purely in The Inheritance of

Loss. It is at once a novel of class and economic disparity, a young girl’s fanciful

love-story. It is a commentary on postcolonial India with its fading anglophiles, their

crumbling edifices and their dwindling power in the face of a modernizing nation’s

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disaffected population. History is another postcolonial issue which is presented

through a group of ethnic Nepalese insurgents in this novel.

There is the reflection of the globalization and its discontents in the novel

The Inheritance of Loss. We also come across an enchanting enigma of Kiran Desai’s

stylistic nuances in it. The novel has full representation of India. It has anatomized the

immigrant lives. There is the portrayal of the individuals who are in search of the lost

identity. There is also the representation of the love, loss and longing in it.

The diasporic subjects like memory and nostalgia have been studied in it.

Thus, this novel can be considered as a parable on the predicament of Third World

Immigrants. There are deviating ambit and uprooted sensibilities in it. The novel

captures the dichotomy and duality in the lives caught in the contrarious interaction

between East and West. Jorge Luis Borges’ poem Boast of Quietness is used as an

epigraph for the novel. This speaks of those who are going back and forth between

cultures and homeland as characters in the novel. Kiran Desai has inherited both the

experience and the way of writing from her mother Anita Desai.

This novel is true representation of post-colonial period and multicultural

aspects in true sense. It is neither about Kalimpong nor the Gorkhaland agitation. It is

simply about ‘loss’, the most well-known perspectives of post-colonial period. Sense

of place is also immerging problem of multicultural society in which people feel

frustrated and insecure in different cultures and face a lot of problem while adjusting

with different cultures.

Kiran Desai is affected by the literary influences to explore the postcolonial

chaos and despair. Early in the novel, she sets two Anglophilia Indian women to

discussing A Beng in the River. It is Naipaul’s powerfully bleak novel about

traditional African’s encounter with the modern world. Desai deals with realism. This

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realism paints a grim portrait of colonialism, post-colonialism and migration. She

portrays migration as a universal, multifaceted experience, rescuing if from the

clutches of myth and fetishism. Desai’s novel talks about the serious consequences of

colonialism and depicts the Anglicized Indian culture in a splendid way.

Today with rapid development of economy, though living level is gradually

raised the natural environment around us, is becoming worse. The problems of global

warming, ozone depletion, acid rain, the resource crisis of fresh water, energy

shortages, decreasing resources of forest and the desertification of land etc are

increasingly serious which make ecological environment be worse and worse. It tells

us to pay more attention to the man-nature relation and review behaviour of human

being. It is very much necessary to take every action into consideration. If humans

take any one thing in this world for granted, then they start a vicious cycle of

repercussions like extinctions of some species, which may lead to the extinction of the

human race and the final chapter for this lively planet.

The first stirrings of insurgency were being felt at that time. But at that age,

she had no real understanding of the issues involved. She was concerned only with

her own world. Some of these postcolonial issues reflect in Sai’s character. The

petulance of the lover’s spats between her and Gyan who wants to join the insurgents

reminds us that they are children caught in events over their head. Desai says that she

wanted to depict how we never really try to understand what life is like for other

people.

Certainly, there is the feeling, even within India, to move beyond this label

of postcolonialism, because it signifies a trap. There is a huge desire to leave that

world behind. When we move to the Western world, we see that they have left it

behind. There is a very little memory of colonial history. Certain things have not

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changed. The power balance has not changed, the ways of doing business have not

changed, it is still about finding the cheapest labour possible. There are things that are

entirely intact. We desire a new vocabulary. The vocabulary of globalization is very

glossy and advertising is completely seductive. We think of immigrant issues in a city

New York. This is held up as a symbol of multicultural success that is just a part of

the story. In the United States, there is a huge amount of illegal immigration that

keeps this country afloat. There is a lot of richness to the vision of a multicultural

world and it works in isolation. Living in that kind of mixture of food, music, people

from everywhere is certainly a rich movement.

Indians do not buy Indian products. Father Booty supplies homemade cheese

to the local restaurant. He persuades the manager of Glenary’s Restaurant to switch

from Amul. Products which come in factory tins with names stamped on them (with

lots of advertisements) are considered better than anything made by local farmers.

When Father Booty asks whether the manager doesn’t want to support the local

farmers, he says: “Quality control, Father! All-India reputation, name brand, customer

respect, international standards of hygiene . . .” (193)

Again Lola and other Indian women discuss about A Bend in the River. Lola

thinks that Naipaul has never freed himself from colonial neurosis. She goes on to

accuse him of ignoring the fact that there is a new England, a completely

cosmopolitan society where chicken tikka masala has replaced fish and chips as the

No. 1 takeout dinner.

Human being is part of the natural world. Scientifically speaking, he is made

up of various elements: carbon, water, cellular material. These elements are all

elements found in nature. So, we are part of nature. In the natural world, everything is

interconnected. Our culture influences the way we see the nature, which influences

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nature itself. It is easy to see how parts of our culture have influenced the world in

which we live. All of nature has utility, all is important. If humans are to aid in the

conservation of nature, they must understand that every action has a repercussion. In

H. Hardless’ The Indian Gentleman’s Guide to Etiquette, the author says:

Although you may have acquired the habits and manners of the European,
have the courage to show that you are not ashamed of being an Indian, and
in all such cases, identify yourself with the race to which you belong.
(199)

Kiran Desai offers an interpretation of the globalize world which stands out

among her contemporaries work as complex and sensitive. She artfully unravels the

personal and political strands that have brought her characters to their dismal present

and journeys with ease through Gujarat, New York and Britain. In this novel, there

are two parallel narratives about alienation and migration one tracks Sai, and

awakening to adulthood and to the political turmoil gushing into her little patch of

Kalimpong.

As a modern international expatriate Indian novelist, Kiran Desai writes of

the cultural hybridity of the post colonial migrant and the expatriate condition of

hybridity. She records the suppressed anguish of the illegal immigrants in New York

in her novel. Her novel deals with her own situation of migrancy, expatriation and

alienation from the mother country. A critic Mala Pandurang writes:

Yet despite his unhappiness as an alien in England, he envies the English

and loathes Indians and grows increasingly embittered by the realization
that he would be despised by absolutely every one English and Indian
both. (The Journal of Indian Writing in Eng. 50)

The main theme of the novel also appears to be the influence of the

European powers in India and how Indians are hounded by the colonization policies.

These influences have oppressed and degraded India. Desai’s fiction is set in the

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modern day India. The story is narrated to depict the collapse of the established order

due to the political unrest. Desai tries to bring forth the issues of poverty and hints

that globalization is not an easy solution to the problems of the trapped people of the

lower social stratas. Desai’s novel registers the multicultural reverberations of the new

millennium with the sensitive instrumentality of fiction. In this regard, her novel can

be compared with the novels of Ruth P Jhabvala and Salman Rushdie who did in

pervious eras. It is a globalized novel for a globalized world.

Desai has portrayed the state of homelessness, displacement, exile,

marginalization and lack of belongingness being experienced by the legal and illegal

Diaspora communities and individuals in America (transnational land) as well as by

the people from other states, regions and communities from India residing in

Kalimpong (national land). Tejender Kaur in his scholarly paper states that:

After the economic and political shifts following the new economic order
and polarizations across continents and since the spread of the recent
phenomenon of globalization practically to all societies and nation states,
Diaspora experience has assumed newer and vibrant dimensions. The
experience of migrancy and Diaspora also engenders various problems
and facts of journeys and relocation in new lands e.g. displacement,
uprootedness, discrimination, alienation, marginalization crisis in identity,
cultural conflicts, yearning for home and homeland etc. (Qtd in Sharma
Vijay & Tondon Neeru. 2011: 2)

4.4 REPRESENTATION OF SOCIAL REALISM THROUGH CHARACTERIZATION:

Kiran Desai has effectively represented the characterization hovering

between cultures in the novel. The feeling of inferiority complex grasped them. We

find them dwelling between the cultures. Despite all his efforts to refuse his Indian

identity, Jumubhai Patel can never belong to English upper-class. On the contrary,

Biju leaves western culture. He comes back to India. He is welcomed by his own

people. Sai and Gyan are departed because of cultural differences.

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 The major characters who get trapped in class and cross-cultural conflicts

are Jemubhai Patel and Biju. Both are the victims of racial discrimination and cross-

cultural problems. Jemubhai hates the human beings after his bitter racial

discrimination he faced during his days. Another parallel story runs through the

Gorkhas indomitable fight for their own land where the environment gets completely

destroyed.

The protagonist of the novel is Sai. She is the orphaned granddaughter of the

Judge. She is exiled from the convent to be home schooled discovering the first flush

of youth, the first pangs of love. There are the delightful Bengali sisters Noni and her

sister Lola. Sai is with her Nepalese tutor Gyan and Biju. The son of the judge’s cook

is moving from one restaurant job to another, as an illegal immigrant in New York.

All these discussions state the core idea of novel that these problems are occurred

during the post-colonial period. The multiculturalism is somewhere responsible for

the problem of self-identity.

The Inheritance of Loss, partly set in America, is a sprawling novel that runs

from the Himalayas to New York city. It takes in Marx and Spenser Knickers, Grand

Mariner and Nepalese insurgents along the way. It offers an insightful and often

humorous commentary on multiculturalism and postcolonial society. Desai has set the

plot of the story. It was the period of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. During these

periods, the two superpowers the USA and the Soviet Union had entered into a cut

throat competition in globalizing their respective ideologies. One advocated

capitalism and the second strongly stood for socialism. These powers directly and

indirectly, consciously and unconsciously affect the social milieu of the immigrants,

residents and non-residents of various countries.

Certainly, her characters in this novel are affected by a sort of imbalance in

1980s India. There is Sai, the newly orphaned 16-year-old girl. She arrives

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unannounced at the doorstep of a grandfather she has never met. She has thrust from

the bleak, regimented, sheltered convent boarding school she was attending into the

lush, misty Himalayan city of Kalimpong in Northeastern India, where a growing

Nepalese insurgency is about to unravel her life even further. To quote J.C. Hall:

Orphaned as a young child, Sai is sent to Cho Oyu, a crumbling mansion

in Kalimpong in the foothills of the Himalayas to live with her
grandfather, a retired Indian judge. The cook, the judge’s retainer, looks
out for Sai as best as he can while worrying incessantly about his son, Biju
who has travelled to the United States where he works as an illegal
immigrant in a series of restaurant kitchens. As Sai grows to adulthood,
she falls in love with her tutor Gyan, a Nepalese boy who, though at first,
infatuated with her, becomes increasingly caught up in the postcolonial
Nepalese political movement. (J.C. Hall. google.com)

Set in the mid-1980s in Kalimpong, high in North-eastern Himalayas, The

Inheritance of Loss centres on three people Sai, Biju and Gyan, and a dog Mutt,

living together in an ancient house named Cho Oyu. There is the reptilian judge

Jemubhai Patel, lost in his chessboard and his memories of a youth spent at

Cambridge many decades earlier, of humiliation in foreign land. But his anglicized

ways and Cambridge education led him to abandon his traditional wife. He loves his

dog. He abuses his cook a loyal servant whose object poverty is relieved only by the

hope that his son, Biju will do better in America. This novel manages to explore with

intimacy and insight, just about every contemporary international issue.

Jemubhai Patel, her grandfather, is an embittered and surly retired judge.

The anglicized ways of the judge and Cambridge education led him to abandon his

traditional wife. He loves his dog and abuses his cook, a loyal servant. The abject

poverty of the servant is relieved only by the hope that his son, Biju, will do better in

America. Biju is an illegal immigrant. He bounces from low-paying job to low-paying

job in the cruddy basement kitchens of Manhatten ‘learning to sear steaks.’

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 Desai has presented all major characters as the victims of postcolonial

issues. We come across the postcolonial, migration, history, subaltern and language.

Desai very cleverly handled all these issues. This novel raises several important

questions with regard to the advantages of globalization, the celebration of hybridity,

the global citizen and the development of new ideas. Dr. Bhatt’s compilation sums up

the novel thus:

In a generous vision, sometimes funny, sometimes sad, Desai presents the

human quandaries facing a panoply of characters. This majestic novel of a
busy, grasping time – every moment holding out the possibility of hope or
betrayal – illumines the consequences of colonialism and global conflicts
of religion, race and nationality. (2013: 161)

Gyan’s life is affected by the postcolonial issue of history and uprising.

While teaching Sai, he created an affair with her. In her company, he forgot about his

poverty and inferiority to Sai’s family. Their romance was affected by the Gorkha

National Liberation Federation. He became conscious of his nationality. He responded

to the call of his countrymen and involve himself in Nepalese Independence

movement. The movement quickly becomes violent. The movement devoted to free

Nepalis of India from perceived Indian and English oppression.

Desai has dealt very harshly with the Nepalis or Gorkhas who want their

land and are fighting for their freedom. Originally, they belong to this land and have

been through centuries serving as chowkidars for English Sahibs or anglicanized

Indians like the judge. They have been taunted to be thieves, their brains thought to be

too dull for education. Every struggle for freedom has its roots in suppression. The

Nepalese struggle has its roots in their suppression. Gyan’s commitment to the

insurgency offers an ironic contrast with the commitment of his family to the colonial

British army in earlier times.

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 Gyan is an ambivalent Nepali tutor. He abandons his young romance with

Sai to join the violent separatists agitating for an independent state. Desai navigates

the disparate worlds of her characters with sensitivity and deep insight, unafraid to

leave their bleak lives with a bit of gentle comedy. Her deft narrative is compelling,

and her prose: “Allow me to gush: gorgeous, fluid, magnificent.” Like this opening

paragraph:

All day, the colors had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water
creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows
and depths. Briefly visible above the vapor, Kanchenjunga was a far peak
whittled out of ice, gathering the last of the light, a plume of snow blown
by the storms at its summit. (1)

In the process of this tug of war, the historical period witnessed a process.

Here a large number of countries were gaining political freedom. These two global

super-powers are instilling the sense of freedom in many countries across the world to

cater to their own vested interest. The novel is a critique of American Hegemony.

Simultaneously, it celebrates and comments on its multiculturalism. It focuses on the

state of immigrant there. In the narrative, the old times of colonialism flow into the

new contemporary ‘high modern times of American Hegemony with ambivalent

altitudes towards both’.

The characters – the Judge Jemubhai Patel, Sai, Gyan, Noni, and Lola and

Biju – all have experiences where their identity comes in contact with a foreign

culture. Unfortunately, each of these experiences results in a strong negative reaction,

illuminating the division between cultures that still exists today. She has presented the

premise of cultural differences metaphorically by geography and atmosphere of the

region. Many characters in the novel share common parallels of experience which are

sometimes too neatly drawn:

The five peaks of Kanchenjunga turned golden with the kind of luminous
light that made you feel, if briefly, that truth was apparent. All you needed
to do was to reach out and pluck it. (10)

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 Desai describes Lola and Noni, two ‘aunties’ as lovers of an old India where

civilization had an order of finery lacking in the new democratic country. Lola, whose

daughter has moved to England and is working for the BBC in London, characterizes

the ‘new England’ as a ‘cosmopolitan’ society where lack of a British inheritance

does not impede a person’s chances at a successful life. Lola and her sister Noni are

not fond of the new England. They prefer the old one along with the old India. They

feel at home in that past, in a world of tradition they have learned to accept as natural

rather than historical.

Desai gives much importance to two places in this novel Kalimpong and

New York. She gives two different storyline for two places having a totally a different

outlook. The New York life is remarkably different from the life in India. The Indian

part of the story deals with a makeshift family. This family comprises of a grumpy

retired judge Jemubhai, his young granddaughter Sai, his old cook and his pet dog

Mutt. There is a small coterie of Anglophiles in the wake of a political disturbance.

This shakes them out of genteel retirement challenging their older ways of life.

The American part of the story narrates the story of Biju. He is the son of a

judge’s cook. He struggles to survive as an illegal immigrant in New York. He moves

from one ill-paid job to another. He tries to stay one step ahead of the INS. He is

compelled to experience the anxiety of being a foreigner as well as the unfairness of a

world. In it, “one side travels to be a servant, and the other side travels to be treated

like a king”. (269)

What strikes us most is her observation of minute details of characters at

every nook and cranny of their living space. In fact, sustained vigour of her narrative

keeps the reader spell bound. The exposition of the setting of the novel and characters

in the background of Kanchenjunga and its majestic summit is a fascinating portrayal

of Nature’s beauties and bounties.

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4.5 FOCUS ON CONTEMPORARY ISSUES LIKE GLOBALIZATION & ETC:

Kiran Desai highlights most of the outstanding issues and themes of

contemporary society in her novel. Her self-confidence, committed views on terrorism

and weaknesses of a poverty-stricken society are candid, bold and forthright. In

addition to this, she focuses our attention on alienation, cultural clash, displacement,

exile, exploitation, economic inequality, fundamentalism, globalization, hybridity,

insurgency, immigration, loss of identity, loneliness, multiculturalism, poverty and

racial-discrimination.

The concept of homelessness has attained new dimensions in the skillful

hands of Kiran Desai. This novel encompasses broader issues ranging from ills of

colonization, Gorkhaland agitation, deportation, refugees, to homelessness by choice

and death. Kiran Desai has presented India as a concept, and a land of hope and desire

rather than a home. Jemubhai Patel’s moral maiming by colonialists made him admire

the Whiteman for everything and undervalue India which thwarted him to enjoy the

bliss of marital life with Nimi. After banishing every relationship from his life, he is

homeless due to his own choice. There are people like Sai, Lola and Noni who

harbour the vision of India of cheese toast and rum cake but Sai is homeless through

no fault of hers, except that of birth. The theme of alienation remains all pervasive

throughout the novel. To quote a critic Sophie Kalkreuth:

Desai spoke of her own hybrid identity as one that contains both
extraordinary richness and a terribly difficult perspective: ‘It teaches you
to clarify your place in the world. You are forced to see yourself from the
outside. (Book Review, google.com)

Desai, a skilled novelist, wonderfully depicts a festive multicultural global

society in The Inheritance of Loss. An example of such a society, leading to cultural

hybridity, from the novel: “Biju at Baby Bistro, Above the restaurant was French, but

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below in the kitchen it was Mexican and Indian. And when a Paki was hired, it was

Mexican, Indian and Pakistani.”(21) The noted Indian writer Pankaj Misra wrote:

Although it focuses on the fate of powerless individuals, Kiran Desai’s

extraordinary novel manages to explore, with intimacy and insight, just
about every contemporary international issue: globalization, economic
inequality multiculturalism, fundamentalism and terrorist violence. (News
clips Interview)

The Inheritance of Loss represents the themes of loss, ambition, wandering

and return. The retired grumpy judge, Jemubhai Patel studied in a Victorian England,

groomed by the Raj. All of these made him rise above his humble roots, to be a

revered, fearsome and very confused judge.

In this novel, she discusses her post-colonial perspectives and multicultural

view-point as well. Retired judge rules as a colonist living in post-colonial period.

The protagonist is Sai who represents multicultural class. The reason is that she

shifted from her native place, managed in a different place and tried to adjust in a

different culture. The son of a cook Biju adjusts in a foreign country for better life-

style but feels frustrated in a different culture. There are the true examples of post-

colonial problems and aspects of multiculturalism in The Inheritance of Loss. Kiran

Desai’s interview to Rediff.com gives us an insight into the basic themes of the novel:

The second book isn’t a book that is set entirely in India, but one that tries
to capture what it means to live between East and West and what it means
to be an immigrant. On a deeper level, it explores what happens when a
Western element is introduced into a country that is not of the West, which
is what happened, of course, during colonial times and is happening again
with India's new relationship with the States. I also wanted to write about
what happens when you take people from a poor country and place them
in a wealthy one. How does the imbalance between these two worlds
change a person’s thinking and feeling? How do these changes manifest
themselves in a personal sphere, a political sphere, over time? These are
old themes that continue to be relevant in today’s world, the past
informing the present, the present revealing the past.
(rediff.com/ news /2006/Jan/30)

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 Kiran Desai manages to tell a coherent tale of many people’s interlinked

lives across continents. Born in India, Desai moved to Britain at the age of fourteen

and was later relocated to the US. The people and the society around her aided well

for the creation of such a widely acclaimed novel The Inheritance of Loss:

Set against the gigantic backdrop of Himalayas, the novel presents lives of
people belonging to different cultures, nationalities, religions, languages
and customs and rituals. (Mishra, Pankaj. 27 June 2009)

Desai crosses the international borders (India and USA) to portray the

difficulties faced by the Indians who go to foreign country for their survival and who

are mentally attacked by the impact of westernization and blindly get attracted

towards the west resulting in immigration. Almost all the characters in the novel

becomes victimized and goes without identity inside or outside their native land. Biju

is a victim of identity crisis. He is a victim of cross-cultural subjugation in Indian-

American social set-up.

4.6 EXPLORATION OF CONFLICT & CONTRAST:

Kiran Desai exposes powerfully the ill-effects of globalization and

liberalization on the society. She exposes these ill-effects through the characters,

settings and the diversity of the atmosphere and activities. These profess to create

wealth and improve the quality of life. But in reality, these activities widen the gulf

between the rich and the poor. Kiran Desai acknowledges the gulf between Green-

card holders and undocumented workers. There is gulf between rich and poor. There

is also contrast between herself and her subjects. She is inherited from her personal

experiences. She handles socio-political ramifications, identity loss. She also handles

exile immigration alienation and nostalgic experiences.

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 Desai handles disillusion in the midst of the global community. She has

deftly exfoliated the politics of liberalization, claims of globalization with the

advancement of information technology. These profess to create wealth and well-

being in integrating the cultural diversities. But the fact is that there is a darker side

where millions are deprived of the basic human rights. On the other hand, Desai tries

to capture what it means to live between East and West. She captures the social milieu

of the two cultures. She also captures what it means to be an immigrant through the

character of Biju. She captures the tensions created because of the contrasts between

two societies and cultures.

Desai has presented all major characters as the victims of postcolonial

issues. We come across the postcolonial, migration, history, subaltern and language.

Desai very cleverly handled all these issues. This novel raises several important

questions with regard to the advantages of globalization, the celebration of hybridity,

the global citizen and the development of new ideas. Dr. Bhatt’s compilation sums up

the novel thus:

In a generous vision, sometimes funny, sometimes sad, Desai presents the

human quandaries facing a panoply of characters. This majestic novel of a
busy, grasping time – every moment holding out the possibility of hope or
betrayal – illumines the consequences of colonialism and global conflicts
of religion, race and nationality. (2013: 161)

Gyan’s life is affected by the postcolonial issue of history and uprising.

While teaching Sai, he created an affair with her. In her company, he forgot about his

poverty and inferiority to Sai’s family. Their romance was affected by the Gorkha

National Liberation Federation. He became conscious of his nationality. He responded

to the call of his countrymen and involve himself in Nepalese Independence

movement. The movement quickly becomes violent. The movement devoted to free

Nepalis of India from perceived Indian and English oppression.

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 Desai has dealt very harshly with the Nepalis or Gorkhas who want their

land and are fighting for their freedom. Originally, they belong to this land and have

been through centuries serving as chowkidars for English Sahibs or anglicanized

Indians like the judge. They have been taunted to be thieves, their brains thought to be

too dull for education. Every struggle for freedom has its roots in suppression. The

Nepalese struggle has its roots in their suppression. Gyan’s commitment to the

insurgency offers an ironic contrast with the commitment of his family to the colonial

British army in earlier times.

Kiran Desai describes The Inheritance of Loss as a book that tries to capture

what it means to live between East and West and what it means to be an immigrant.

She also says that it explores at a deeper level, what happens when a Western element

is introduced into a country that is not of the West. It happened during the British

colonial days in India. It is happening in postcolonial India with India’s new

relationship with the states. Her third aim was to write about what happens when we

take people from a poor country and place them in a wealthy one.

The Inheritance of Loss explores the postcolonial chaos and despair. She has

created the postcolonial atmosphere from the very beginning of the novel. She takes a

skeptical view of the West’s consumer-driven aspects of multiculturalism. The

sanitized elegance of Lola’s daughter’s British-accented voice, which is triumphant

over any horror the world might thrust upon others. In a generous vision, sometimes

funny, sometimes sad, Desai presents the human quandaries facing panoply of

characters. This novel of a busy, grasping time every moment holding out the

possibility of hope or betrayal illuminates the consequences of colonialism and global

conflicts of religion, race and nationality.

One of the main themes of Kiran Desai’s novel is the dislocation of

invasion, empire building and migration. She detects the sense of loss of the

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dispossessed and the pangs felt by the separation. The diaspora depicted in the novel

shows that voluntary migration for studies to European countries affected the culture

of the Indian people.

In this comical and contemplative novel, Desai deftly shuttles between first

and third worlds. She illuminates the pain of exile, the ambiguities of postcolonialism

and the blinding desire for a better life. This novel presents many postcolonial issues.

This is a remarkable novel in the contemporary Indian English writers. Her novel has

brought her national and international recognition. It has become a part of the corpus

of Indian English literature and has contributed to the enrichment of Indian English

novel. Desai’s novel is full of wisdom and subtle parallels. Her scope is broad,

looking at the consequences of large cultural and political forces for both people and

individuals. In this novel: “Kiran Desai explores such complicated issues as

colonialism, racism, immigration, young love, regret, hope, the role of family and the

myths of both India and America.”(www. relibrary.com)

The Inheritance of Loss lucidly demonstrates the socio-political situation in

Kalimpong. It is a brilliant study of Indian socio-cultural scenario in its transitional

phase. In fact, significant social changes have occurred in India due to the people’s

craze for western values, manners and life-style, impact of modernization,

consumerism and globalization. Desai, a diasporic writer, presents the characters who

fail to assimilate new culture and give up their original culture in totality.

In her narrative, Desai deftly shuttles between First and Third worlds. She

illuminates the pain of exile. She also illuminates the ambiguities of post-colonialism

and the blinding desire for a ‘better life’. Through the characters, Kiran Desai muses

about her conceptualized status of India in the present globalized world. This world

has been compressed with the insurgence of migration, diaspora and transnationalism.

This is a novel about India written from the global perspective.

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4.7 THEME OF LOSS IN THE NOVEL:

The title can be interpreted in alternative way where the loss is passed on.

This loss can be carried over from one generation to the other generation. It is

witnessed that everyone is experiencing the loss. The word in the title “Loss” gives

negative associations. It shows the loss of many social and cultural aspects. Each and

every character in the novel finally experiences loss. Both the natives and immigrants

lose their dignity and respect. The feeling of being lost is reflected throughout the

novel. The title therefore reflects an important aspect of the novel: “Could fulfillment

ever be felt as deeply as loss?”(2)

In titling the book The Inheritance of Loss, Desai emphasizes ideas of

inheritance and transmission. Loss, like abuse, can be transmitted from person to

person or society to society. It is not an excuse but it is a complicated moral picture. It

is a social picture that Kiran Desai wafts in lightly passes over quickly, just as we pass

over the wife, Nimi - invalid and invisible. The Inheritance of Loss is a tale of losses.

The theme is the loss of identity and the way it travels through generations as a sense

of loss. It presents the stark reality of losses that a country suffers when such

separatist movements are at work. They affect all progress, peace, normalcy and even

everyday life pattern. Here is an excerpt from the novel in respect of the Gorkha

Movement:

A seventy-two-hour strike in May. No national celebrations. No Republic

Day, Independence Day, or Gandhi’s birthday. Boycott of elections with
the slogan, ‘We will not stay in other people’s state of West Bengal.’(192)

The novel begins and ends with the description of mountain Kanchenjunga,

as Sai arrives at Cho Oyu. The mountain is described as macabre. It symbolizes the

sober mood of child who has lost her parents. The loss in each character’s life is

warned by the change in nature. Almost all the characters lose what they possessed in

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the beginning. They experience a heavy loss both in public and private life. The

fertility of the land is lost. It is shown very clearly even though there is possibility of

cultivating all crops. “It is very isolated, but the land has potential”, the Scotsman

states, “Quinine, Sericulture, Cardamom, Orchids”.(35) The impact of alien culture

and the deep rootedness of the native culture run in the blood of all the characters in

the novel.

Arriving back in India, Biju is immediately engulfed by the local eruptions

of rage and frustration from which he had been physically remote in New York. For

him and others withdrawal or escape are no longer possible. People in the west are

scarcely aware of this overwhelming feeling of humiliation that is experienced by

most of the world’s population, “which” neither magical novels that endow poverty

and foolishness with charm nor the exoticism of popular literature manages to fathom.

This is the invisible emotional reality Kiran Desai uncovers as she describes the lives

of people fated to experience modern life as a continuous affront to their notions of

order, dignity and justice.

This novel is viewed as a polemic with the conception of the positive

multiculturalism of Salman Rushdie. It is written in a very interesting way. The

narration is somewhat fragmentary and full of metaphors at the same time. It

functions well outside of the Indian context. Its uniqueness is based on the fact that it

describes an existential situation of being cast away, homelessness and alienation. The

title mentions some ‘loss’. The title refers to the richness of some kind balance with

the ‘loss’. We all search for a wider world or an understanding of the wider world. It

certainly has richness to it, a gain to it, but it is balanced by a certain feeling of

rootlessness or a loss of connection to something that has gone on for generations and

historical debt behind - that is the loss.

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4.8 SOCIO-POLITICAL ISSUES OF IMMIGRANTS – GORKHAS & NEPALES:

Kiran Desai narrates the insurgency activities in Kalimpong. There the

Indian Nepalese who demanded a separate state for themselves during the 1980s. The

Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF) has been formed mainly by the Indian

Nepalese youth. These youth are fed up with their minority status in a place where

they are in the majority. The GNLF has taken a vow to get their demands fulfilled

unconditionally. Desai has highlighted this complex picture of terrorism and political

self-derivation with considerable clarity and vision:

They wanted their own country, or at least their own state, in which to
manage their own affairs. Here, where India blurred into Bhutan Sikkim,
and the army did pull-ups and push-ups, maintaining their tanks with
Khaki paint in case the Chinese grew hungry for more territory than Tibet,
it had always been a messy map. The papers sounded resigned. A great
amount of warring, betraying, bartering had occurred; between Nepal,
England, Tibet, India, Sikkim, Bhutan; Darjeeling stolen from here,
Kalimpong plucked from there-despite, ah, despite the mist charging down
like a dragon, dissolving, undoing, making ridiculous the drawing of
borders. (9)

In this context, Kiran Desai has powerfully presented the deeply disturbing

social and political trends. These trends are signifying the worst social, cultural and

political turmoil in the post-modern era. The rebels want ‘Gorkhaland for Gorkhas’.

But no such neat solution is plausible in the face of the intricacies of ethnicity,

culture, language and class, even in this small piece of India. Desai is more interested

in the movement than the movement itself so. It is the poignant story of the common

people, the bleakness. It is the story of hope and ultimately resigning oneself to the

realities of life in a turbulent society. Being away from one’s home and country forces

certain curbs on oneself. There is a loss of certain case. This has an obvious effect on

the writing also. The writer of the novel has inherited from her parents certain

characters that find their place in the novel in an imperceptible way.

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 The Nepalis considered that in their own country. They are treated like

slave. So they want to fight to manage their own affairs. They want everyone to unite

under the banner of Gorkha National Liberation Front. They want to build hospitals

and schools, and provide jobs for their sons. They want to defend their own

homeland. The crowd gathered there screamed ‘Jai Gorkha, Jai Gorkha’. Some

supporters came forward and cut their thumbs with their Kukris and write a poster

demanding Gorkhaland in their blood.

The national love is aroused in Gyan and Sai when they saw new posters and

read the new slogans painted on the side of government offices. “We are stateless,’

they read. ‘It is better to die than live as slaves.’ We are constitutionally

tortured.”(126) Gyan came to senses observing all those things all around him. There

were fifty boys members of the youth wing of the GNLF.

They gathered to swear on oath to fight to the death for the formation of a
homeland, Gorkhaland. Then, they marched down the streets of
Darjeeling, took a turn around the market and the mall, Gorkhaland for
Gurkhas. We are the liberation army. (126)

Watching them in such a mood, everybody started to use the word

‘insurgency’. Noni considers that the Nepali have been there from several

generations. It is also considered as an illegal immigration:

Because on that basis, they can start statehood demands. Separatist

movement here, separatist movement there, terrorists, guerillas,
insurgents, rebels, agitators, instigators and they all learn from one-
another, of course, the Neps have been encouraged by the Sikhs and their
Khalistan, by ULFA, NEFA, PLA; Jharkhand, Bodoland, Gorkhaland,
Tripura, Mizoram, Manipur, Kashmir, Punjab, Assam. (129)

The author draws parallel between the stories of Nepali immigrants in India

and Indian immigrants in the States. All are struggling with the questions of what it

means to be cheap labour, with the questions of rights and identity. The theme of

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alienation plays important role in the novel. The geographical location itself reflects

alienation in the family and its inhabitants:

They (the Judge and Sai) sipped and ate, all of existence passed over by
nonexistence, the gate leading nowhere, and they watched the tea spill
copious ribbony curls of vapor, watched their breath, join the mist slowly
twisting and turning, twisting and turning. (4)

The barrenness is also evident when the author says: “Time might have died

in the house that sat on the mountain ledge, its lines, grown distinct with moss, its

roof loaded with ferns.” (17) Kiran Desai presents the post-colonial setting of

Kalimpong, its diverse ethnic groups and the ongoing Gorkhaland Agitation of the

1980s. The Indian Nepalese want their own country or state a Gorkhaland where they

will not be treated as servants. The young boys roam the mountainside looting houses

and collecting ammunition. Their predicament is contrasted against the Indian who

settled abroad. The narratives highlight in the novel her understanding of the socio-

cultural and economic dynamics operating in the area.

The Gorkhaland Agitation traces its root to the merger of Sikkim into the

Indian Union and also the rising insurgencies in the north-east India. Ethnic

discontentment in Darjeeling started long before the country saw its independence.

The Nepalese struggle with their cultural identity and the forces of modernization

while trying to maintain their emotional connection to one-another. The historical

backdrop Desai has chosen is that of the Gorkhaland movement of 1980s West

Bengal. Throughout the novel, the movement makes the hills a site of violence and

torture. Desai attempts to recreate the atmosphere of the uprising which takes place

because of the feeling of being orient. Thus, these Nepalese insurgents are the victims

of orientalism in India. Through the picturization of the Gorkhas and Nepalese and

their problems, the novelist depicts their social reality and political riots.

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4.9 SOCIAL REALISM THROUGH CHARACTERIZATION OF JEMUBHAI PATEL:

The Judge Jemubhai Patel is one of those ridiculous Indians who could not

get rid themselves of what they had broken their souls to learn. His Anglophilia can

only turn into self-hatred. These Indians are also an unwanted anachronism in

postcolonial India. Here the long-suppressed people have begun to awaken to their

dereliction, to express anger and despair.

In the first wave of immigrants, Jemubhai Patel leaves for Cambridge in

1939. But his dilemma is different from Ashima’s or Ashok’s as he had stepped in an

England where Victorian values still lingered. His identity crisis is mainly due to his

colour. He becomes the victim of colonization. Even after spending a lifetime in the

host country, Ashima and Ashok respect their culture and Indian heritage. But

Jemubhai Patel returns with hatred for Indian culture. After banishing love, human

earth and every relationship from his life, he lives in a dilapidated house (Cho Oyu)

and considers himself more British than Indian.

Jemubhai completed his education in England but he could not enjoy beauty

of English countryside. He became pusillanimous and lonely. He lived always in

solitude. Rich persons always kept pet animals for hobby. Mutt, pet dog of Jemubhai,

Mustafa cat of Lola and Noni are taken care by them. There are cows which booms

like foghorns through mist. There is rooster of uncle potty from where kookar raja

sent big Kukrookoo up like a flag. Its sound is described as silly and loud as if calling

everyone to circus. Due to cloudy atmosphere in Kanchenjunga there was not clear

broadcast of radio television. Such is the reality of nature and politics. The novel has

personal overtones. It can be viewed as having themes of belonging, estrangement,

exile and homecoming. A retired judge Jemubhai Patel feels alienated, depressed and

isolated in England.

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 Jemubhai Patel is also the representative of the orient or the othe in England.

He was unable to acquire the manners of the English. He started to think that he is

inferior to these English. He feels ashamed of his odd-coloured skin and his peculiar

accent. In the Cambridge University, he always encounters racism and isolation. But

his stay in England for few years developed some feelings in his mind. He begins to

dislike his Indian heritage. He has become all anglophile, as he shows his affection for

English biscuits and penchant for tea made the English way, even after his arrival in

India. He is disgusted by the backward ways of his wife and Indian people when he

returns to India upon completion of his studies. He treats his wife with contempt and

harasses her after a long lasting ordeal. He banishes her from his life:

He did not like his wife’s face, searched for his hatred, found beauty
dismissed it. An Indian girl could never be as beautiful as an English one.
His hatred never extinguishes but kindles his disillusionment. (168)

He mimics the treatment he received in England and looks down upon his

fellow Indians particularly those of the working class. The novel depicts in its many

details the tragedies of a Third World country just freed from colonialism. It presents

the boring and mundane life of its characters in the beautiful surrounding of

Himalayas. Jemubhai lives in the dilemmas of postcolonialism. He is caught between

the past and the present. He is caught between his days in London and his slow and

mundane life in the crumbling house at Cho Oyu. He is caught between his daughter

and grand-daughter. He is also caught between the Nepali’s struggling for their land

and freedom and his own British world. He showed great regard for his pet dog, Mutt:

The Judge, exhausted from waiting, fell asleep and dreamed that Mutt was
dying for a moment she came all of a delirium, gave him a familiar look,
wagged with a heroic effort and then, in a second it was gone, the soul
behind the eyes. (312)

Jemubhai actually remains conscious and ashamed of his brown colour,

Indian accent, pronunciation and above all, the despising as well as discriminatory

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racial looks of the whites. He is also a self-alienated personality. The judge becomes a

split psyche as a result of discrimination, alienation, isolation, and the feeling of

marginalization. In him, Kiran Desai has very precisely portrayed the suppressed

psyche of a young Indian among the white Britishers:

For the entire day nobody spoke to him at all, his throat jammed with
words unuttered, his heart and mind turned into blunt aching things, and
elderly ladies, even the hapless -blue-haired, spotted, faces like collapsing
pumpkins – moved over when he sat next to them in the bus . . . the young
and beautiful were no kinder . . . girls held their noses and giggled, “phew,
he stinks of curry! (39)

While searching for room in England, Patel was rejected twenty two times

and finally got a room only because the land lady, Mrs. Rice. She was in need of

money, she didn’t want him either. He is unable to interact with the locals. The

anguish of the diasporic is similar whatever may be their social status. The England

that he sees seems to be totally different from what he had expected to find on the

basis of what he had read and heard:

The England in which he searched for a room to rent was formed of tiny
grey houses in grey streets, stuck together and down as if on a glue trap. It
took him by surprise because he had expected only grandness, hadn’t
realized that here too people could be poor and live un-aesthetic lives. (38)

Desai takes the narrative in a parallel way by focusing on the life of the

character, Jemubhai Patel. A retired judge, Patel faced such a discomfort in adjusting

to the new culture when he went to Cambridge for his studies and for his survival. He

was almost disturbed by the new culture and with the confusion of finding many ways

to get adapted to the dominative alien culture. He realizes that he is almost an

‘unknown citizen’ in both foreign and in his native land. He sees everything over

there modernized. Jemubhai Patel starts completely losing his emotional balance. The

colour complexion makes him to feel inferior. This culture variation spreads like a

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disease in almost every Indian who goes to a foreign land for their living. Desai

succinctly points out:

Thus Jemubhai’s mind had begun to warp; he grew stranger to himself

than he was to those around him, found his skin odd-colored, his own
accent peculiar. He forgot how to laugh . . . In fact he could barely let any
of himself peep out of his clothes for fear of living offence. He began to
wash obsessively, concerned he would be accused of smelling. (47)

After his education, Jemubhai Patel becomes a member of the ICS. He is

posted in Uttar Pradesh. Later, he is posted in West Bengal. He directs his frustration

towards all Indians and especially towards his wife because he is a product of a male

chauvinistic society. He treats his wife most inhumanely. He abuses her physically.

Finally, he deserts her for no fault of hers. He felt that his wife, too uncivilized,

should not be taken to official parties. Thus the Judge’s wife who has really provided

financial assistance for the Judge to go abroad is double-alienated-once as an Indian at

the hands of the British and then at the hands of her husband. He feels compunction

over being violent and inhuman to his wife. Only after he lost his Mutt, he wondered:

“If he had killed his wife for the sake of false ideals, stolen her dignity, shamed his

family, shamed hers, turned her into the embodiment of their humiliation.” (308)

The retired judge belonged to a family of the peasant caste. At his youth, he

went to England to acquire a difficult education. But in England, he was considered

‘Other’ by the English. “His colour, his religion, his language, all made him the

embodiment of ‘other’ in England and he began to question his identity and his

connection to India while there.” (www. relibrary.com)

He left his ancestral home of Piphit. He travelled to Bombay dock from

where he sailed to liverpool. Finally from liverpool, he had gone to Cambridge. In

England, he was amazed by the sights of greeting. He wandered a lot to find a room.

He got a room situated on the side of railway station. The landlady westernized his

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name by calling him James instead of Jemubhai. He was unable to adjust himself with

English because he started to think that he is a marginalized and he could not acquire

the centre. He retired into solitude. The solitude became a habit. He was conscious of

his position in England.

Jemubhai is misunderstood, ignored and humiliated in England. He was one

of the ridiculous Indians in England. He returns after three years’ stay in England.

During this period, he had hardly spoken to anybody. He followed the same silence in

India as well. Everyone in his house tried to know the cause of his silence but they

could: “His new ideas of privacy were unfathomable.” (167) Jemubhai, the victim of

otherness, acquires the feeling of superiority over his wife after returning to India. He

tries to silence her voice.

His wife is a traditional woman who prefers to live in the house. His distaste

and his persistence made him angry. In public, he never spoke to or looked in her

direction. She was also accustomed to his detached expression. She did not

accompany her husband on tour. She was left alone in Bonda. She had spent nineteen

years within the confinement of her father’s compound and she still was unable to

contemplate the idea of walking through the gate. In the words of Gayatri Spivak:

The wife of judge is a subaltern. She is unable to speak and she is doubly
marginalized. When the patels were invalid for the party arranged at Mr.
Mohan, Jemubhai unwillingly took her there. He humiliated her in that
party. He used many insulting words for her, but she uttered nothing. He
poured a venomous question: “Are you just incredible stupid? (2010: 304)

At this moment, she gathered all her courage and replied that he is the one

who is stupid. Jemubhai tried to rape her in a violent. He ignored her, hit her and on

one occasion, thrust her head down the toilet. A critic Gilbert says: “The more the

subaltern is seen as a theoretical fiction . . . the more the suffering and exploitation of

the subaltern becomes a theoretical fiction, too.” (289)

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 The judge did not like the growing intimacy between Sai and Gyan. He felt

his presence as an insolence. He found an obvious lack of familiarity. He sensed Gyan

was someone with plans. He felt a sinister urge to catch the boy off guard. He tried to

test his knowledge of poetry. Gyan was irritated by the unnecessary enquiry made by

the judge and wanted to escape at once. He left for his house. Sai came to say sorry to

him. He gazed at Sai as if he were eating her alive in an orgy of the imagination.

Jemubhai lost his identity in England as well as in India. He was unable to

create a bond of relationship with English and Indians. In England, he was the other,

the marginalized. But in India, he tried to consider others marginalized. So he could

not establish himself. His Anglophilia turned into self-hatred: “Such Indians are also

an unwanted anachronism in postcolonial India, where long-suppressed peoples have

begun to awaken to their dereliction to express their anger and despair.” (234)

4.10 PORTRAYAL OF GYAN - AN ORIENTAL IN INDIA:

Another character Gyan is Mathematics teacher of Sai. The love-affair of Sai

and Gyan is also interesting from the point of view of nature-man relationship. The

description of the love-affair of Sai’s parents is scripted in terms of man’s relationship

with nature. The narrative constantly swings between the present and the past. Desai

presents Gyan as an oriental in India and Jemubhai as an oriental in England. She

views the entire community of Nepalese of Kalimpong and Darjeeling as the orient.

They are poor, illiterate and insignificant. In the novel, Gyan, the Nepali, is presented

as an educated ambitious man but he is a poor man living in sordid atmosphere of the

Bong Barti. He is a tutor of Sai. He develops a romance with her. Gyan is aware of his

status in the house of the judge. He considers himself inferior to Judge and everybody

related to him. Gyan’s painful realization of class, his feeling of being orient in the

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family of Sai, drives him to join the Gorkha National Liberation Front Movement.

Gyan is the kind-hearted, soft-spoken young man Sai fell in love with.

The society in which the old judge lives with his granddaughter is Sai. Sai is

overshadowed by the postcolonial atmosphere. She lives in a mossy Indian hill

station, Kalimpong. She is the last remnant of British Empire. Her neighbours are

Uncle Potty, Father Booty, the sisters Noni and Lola who have India’s only broccoli

grown from English seeds. Sai has started a relationship with her Nepalese Maths

tutor, Gyan. But their romance is disturbed as Gyan rediscovers his Nepalese heritage,

and joins the insurgents. Gyan had a feeling of history being wrought, its wheels

churming under him, for the men were behaving as if they were being featured in a

documentary of war. Gyan could not help but took on the scene already from the

angle of nostalgia.

Gyan is the descendant of Nepali Gurkha mercenary. He is a tutor of Sai

who is in love with him. Her life had continued in Kalimpong until she met Gyan. Sai

used to think about Gyan. But he did not respond her love at the beginning. Whenever

they sat together, Gyan used to cook in another direction. Sai thought herself pretty.

But soon she realised that the beauty was a changeable thing. When they sat together,

they used to think to run away. Their departing hour is very painted for them. They

were restless and angry because they had to wait for a week for the next meeting.

Sai’s lover Gyan is a well-educated, sensible, young man. He belongs to the

Gorkha community. His great grandfather is sent to Mesopotamia where the Turks

kill him. Many of his family members fight and die in Burma, Gibraltar, Egypt, and

Italy for the British army. He leads the poor life of native Indians. He is an active

member of GNLF (Gorkha National Liberation Front) which fights for a separate

Gorkhaland.

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 Gyan has felt embarrassed while eating with Sai. He is puzzled about her

finickiness and curtailed enjoyment. She does not like his slurps and smacks. With

fake Englishness, Jemubhai eats even chapatis, puris, and parathas with knife and

fork. He insists Sai also to do the same in his presence. Sai feels proud for her

behaviour. She considers it as a status symbol. Gyan thinks that she may be masking

it as a shame for the lack of Indianness.

Gyan’s ancestors had left their village in Nepal in the 1800s. They arrived in

Darjeeling to work on tea plantation. The imperial Army came measuring potential

soldiers in villages all over the hills. His great-grandfather was chosen as a soldier. He

got married and begot three sons. But he became the victim of Turkish bullets. After

his death, his eldest son was employed by the army. He was also killed in Burma

while defending the British against the Japanese. His brother was employed who died

in Italy. Gyan’s father escaped the recruitment. He taught in a tea plantation school

near Darjeeling.

Gyan and Sai were still unable to forget the presence of each-other. They

were spending most of the time in the company each-other. Their romance was

flourishing. They pushed the political trouble in the background. They called each

other by the nicknames and phrases of endearment. They aimed at different placed.

They also entertained themselves by watching movies and by visiting zoo and ancient

bars.

Kiran Desai slowly awakened Gyan’s nationality. Once he was in market.

He was buying rice. At that very moment, he heard the shouting of the people. He was

surrounded by a procession led by young men holding their kukris aloft. Most of the

young men were his college friends. He tried to call them but they did not listen him.

They were shouting “Victory to the Gorkha Liberation Army”.(156) Gyan was

stunned for a moment and was unable to take any decision. He had a feeling of history

being wrought. He also had a feeling of nostalgia. The man in procession said that no

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Nepali owned any tea garden. Their children are not taught their language in school.

They are unable to compete for jobs. Gyan was eager to join:

Struggle waged by people of Nepali descent for an autonomous homeland

in north-eastern India. Comprising a majority of the population in many
Indian communities, these Nepali are (and have been in real life) treated
like a dirty, undeserving minority. Gyan feeds off the energy and
militancy of the liberation army, finding within it a kind of purity that
makes him rethink this attraction to Sai. (156)

Desai made Gyan to forget his national identity when he was involved in

love-making with Sai. She remembers delicate observations she had made during her

own explorations before the mirror that had been overlooked by Gyan. They started to

play the game of courtship everywhere. As they were young, they forgot the world

around them. They had not paid much attention to the events on the hillside.

Gyan’s role was overdone, when Sai demands that he should feel ashamed

of his and his family’s poverty. Describing a country, landscape is one thing, but

creeping into the skins of the characters is another. The Gorkha characters remain

shallow, like caricatures in Bollywood films. Kiran Desai overdoes it with the

dialogue between Gyan and Sai. The description of Gyan’s visit to Kathmandu was

extremely superficial. Kathmandu is a world, cosmos in itself, with exquisite temples

and stupas.

4.11 SAI – REPRESENTATION OF THIRD WORLD COUNTRY:

Sai grows in a Christian convent in Dehradun with a lot of contradictions.

She experiences hybridity by reading Lochinvar and Tagore along with economics

and moral science. She practices Highland fling in tartan and Punjabi harvest dance in

dhotis. She sings national anthem in Bengali and recites a motto in Latin. She learns

Indian and English at the same time, inheriting the latter for her way of life.

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 Sai is a westernized Indian brought up by English nuns and feels estranged

in India. Her mastery of the English language and little knowledge of Hindi makes her

a stranger in her own country. She develops a feeling of rootlessness in Kalimpong as

she is caught between two extremely different cultures, the Indian and the Western.

Sai is orphaned when her parents are crushed by a local bus in Moscow and

is compelled to leave the convent and stay with her grandfather. By virture of her

anglicized education, she too is “an estranged Indian living in India”.(210) She has a

brief romance with Gyan. He despises the bourgeoisic life style of Cho Oyu and is

sympathetic with the cause of the Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF). He

therefore rejects a potential relationship with Sai because she becomes a “reflection of

all the contradictions around her.”(262) He dreams of an advancement and is soon

longing for a way out of his involvement in the rebel movement.

Sai is also the representative of the Third World country. She is a romantic

girl who developed an affair with her Maths tutor Gyan. Sai does not dwell in the

past. She is glad to be out of the convent where she lived while her parents were

abroad. She is young enough to live in the movement. This helps her to overlook

some of the issues with her boyfriend Gyan, the issues that work just under the

surface of their affair. Sai always thinks about him. She thinks whether her desire

could be fulfilled:

Romantically, she decided that love must surely reside in the gap between
desire and fulfillment, in the lack, not the contentment. Love was the ache,
the anticipation, the retreat everything around it but the emotion itself. (2-3)

Day by day, their love flourished. They started to make love at public places

as well. Sai was very happy in the company of Gyan. But Gyan was affected by the

Gorkhaland Movement. He was torn between his love for Sai and his love for his

motherland. He became indifferent towards Sai. Sai understood the change in his

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nature: “Sai at Cho Oyu also sat contemplating desire, fury and stupidity. She tried to

suppress her anger, but it kept bubbling up; she tried to compromise her own feelings

but they wouldn’t bend.” (175)

Sai is a romantic girl. She dreams of a romance with her Maths’ tutor, Gyan.

In an old cook, she finds a ready friend and confident. He brings up Sai as best as he

can. Sai’s neighbours are an odd assortment from Uncle Potty who loves his tipple

and Aunt Moni and Lola. The aunts take care of Sai’s sketchy education. The cook is

eager to hear something from his son Biju. He lives in United States to earn his living.

He belongs that tribe of Indians that keeps shifting from one lowly paid job to

another. His whole life sets the pace for his final act of despair and defiance. When

fed up and left alone in a system, he turns homewards. When he returns to his native

land, there is a huge change which has taken place in the hillsides.

When Sai arrived at Cho Oyu, she felt change in atmosphere. She was

travelling by car. There was forest making ‘sss tseu ts ts uuu sounds’. Sai entered in

enormous space where there were mountains covered with mist, swollen forest,

sounds of hollow knuckled of bamboo, the sound of jhora that ran deep in the

decollete of the mountain. According to Sai, the convent system is fully obsessed with

the notions of purity and morality. She thinks that those people are very much talented

in defining the flavor of sin. For them:

. . . cake was better than laddoos; fork, spoon, and knife better than hands;
sipping the blood of Christ and consuming wafer of his body was more
civilized than garlanding a phallic symbol with marigolds. English was
better than Hindi. (30)

In her grandfather’s house, Sai lives like an outsider. Jemubhai has no

affection for her. She is accompanied by the cook at home. Though Sai and Jemubhai

live as strangers under the same roof, he insists her to follow the English manners at

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home. We find that Sai’s mother was not accepted warm heartedly by her maternal

grandfather. So, like Sai, she too was bound to stay at the boarding school. Sai’s

father was a spaceship pilot. He professionally was so competent that he was chosen

among his colleagues to become the first Indian to go to the space. The love

relationship between Sai’s parents has been described by Kiran Desai in such a

manner that one feels the presence and participation of natural environment in their

coming close to one another:

They became acquainted in this grassy acre, cows tethered to enormous

rusty lawn mowers slowly grinding back and forth before a crumbling
Mughal tomb. Before a year was up, in the deep cool centre of the tomb,
golden indirect light passing from alcove to hushed alcove, duskier,
muskier through the carved panels each casting the light in a different lace
pattern – flowers, stars – upon the floor, Mr. Mistry proposed. She thought
quickly. This romance had allowed her to escape the sadness of her past
and the tediousness of her current girlish life. (26)

Finally, she leaves the Judge’s house in search of a home that would really

make her happy. Biju belongs to the shadow class of illegal immigrants in New York.

He tries to eke out an existence without being caught in an alien culture which is not

kind to him. Thus, the judge Sai and Biju suffer from rootlessness, alienation and

quest for identity.

4.12 PORTRAYAL OF BIJU – ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT IN U.S.:

The novel follows the journey of Biju. He is an illegal immigrant in the US.

He is trying to make a new life. Sai is an Anglicized Indian girl living with her

grandfather in India. Almost fifty years after the jingle went to England, Biju survives

a grueling existence as an illegal immigrant in New York. Despite having attained a

slice of home, Biju becomes increasing distraught. He becomes burdened by his

expanded self-consciousness. Such instructive narration offers insight into Biju’s

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dilemma over his identity. But it fails to penetrate his personality. This social reality is

present everywhere. Biju is torn between two cultures and drifts in an alien land with

a quest life for identity.

Biju is the follower of multicultural perspectives. His disillusionment with

the American dream is important section. His deplorable living conditions in America

are also very important section of this novel. In his first letter, Biju writes:

Respected Pitaji, no needs to worry. Everything is fine. The Manager has

offered me a full-time waiter position. Uniform and food will be given by
them. Angrezi Khana only, no Indian food and the owner is not from
India, He is from America itself. (7)

The beautiful ambience of Kalimpong has left an indelible mark in Biju’s

mind to think of the “roti prepared using choolah is better than the roti cooked in a

star hotel”. It picturizes the village life that serves as a complete contrast to

mechanistic life at present. Desai uses the food as a symbol of identity. It highlights

the class discrimination which forms a major gap between two cultures. This novel

describes his journey to America with effortless grace.

Kiran Desai takes us to New York through the character of Biju. He is an

illegal immigrant in New York. He works in one hellish kitchen after another. He is

exploited. He is poor. He is terribly lonely and homesick. The sections of the novel

that deal with Biju’s life in New York are the most powerful and the most acutely

observed. He is usurped by exhaustion. He is also usurped by the hunger and ill-

treatment. He realizes the truth that it was horrible what happened to Indians abroad

and nobody knew but other Indians abroad. It was a dirty little rodent secret.

Biju, son of cook, was working in America in restaurant. He always

remembered his village where he lived with his grandmother. The village was buried

in silver grasses that were taller than a man and made a sound shuu, shuuu, shu, shuuu

as the wind turned them this way and that. He remembered dry gully through the

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grasses. There was a tributary of Jamuna. Men travelled downstream on inflated

buffalo skins, the creatures, very dead legs, all four, sticking straight up as they sailed

along. On Diwali, the holy men lit lamps and put them in the branches of the peepal

tree and sent them down the river on rafts with marigolds. Kiran Desai throws light on

how culture of human being interferes in the nature and creates serious impact on it.

Biju remembers everything about his village. He used to sit with his father outside of

home in evening. His father was quite happy with that life:

. . . How peaceful our life is! How good the roti tastes there it is because
the atta is ground by hand, not by machine and because it is made on
choolah, which is better than anything cooked on gas or a kerosene stove.
Fresh roti, fresh butter, fresh milk, still warm from buffalo. (103)

This underlines importance of natural, cultural and social life of village

where everything is fresh and original. Biju understood importance and delight of
village life when he got bad experience in America. Ecological wealth of birds like
bats, eagles, butterflies, pet animals like pet buffaloes, horses, elephants, donkeys,
snakes, caterpillar gives this novel crucial importance from ecological perspective.
People face natural disasters like landslides, storms, thick fog, extreme cold, and
aqueous season. Biju has inherited feelings of nationality and hatred for the
subjugating white world as such:
This habit of hate had accompanied Biju, and he found that he possessed
an awe of white people, who arguably had done Indian great, harm, and a
lack of generosity regarding almost everyone else, who had never done a
single harmful thing to India. (77)

Poor and lonely in New York, Biju remembers his village. Lying on the

basement shelf in sordid squalor, he thought of his village where he had lived with his

grandmother:

. . . Biju and his grandmother with her sari tucked up . . . on diwali the
holy man lit lamps and put them in the branches of the people tree and
sent them down the river on rafts with marigolds - how beautiful the sight
of those lights bobbing in that young dark . . . how peaceful our village is.
How good the roti tastes there . . . fresh roti, fresh butter, fresh milk. Still
warm from buffalo . . . (102-103)

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 In New York, Biju feels tormented by the cross commercialism, rampant

racism and rapacious ruin perpetuated by the neo-colonial exploitation. It shows the

neo-colonial exploiting the social values. He eventually comes back to India robbed

of his belongings. All his NRI drams of “holding green cards and passports . . .

dollars me kamaenge, pum pum pum” (298) comes to naught. But yet the reader finds

a quaint satisfaction in the union of father and son in the backdrop of a disturbed

Kalimpong. At last, Biju feels safe and at peace compared to his lonely life in New

York as a waiter moving from one restaurant kitchen to another.

Biju migrates to New York for better opportunities, living standards and

wealth. In him, Kiran Desai has portrayed the impact of the politics of globalization

and post-colonialism on the economic structure of the once colonized nation. When

an advertisement appears in the local paper for drudge staff in America, Biju applies

and goes through an interview in Kathmandu, Nepal, and finally gets selected.

However, while standing in queue for visa processing at the U.S. embassy, he

observes the pitiable conditions of her applicants and undergoes feelings of disgrace

and humiliations:

Standing there, feeling the enormous measure of just how despised he

was, he would have to reply in a smart yet humble manner . . . In this
room it was a fact accepted by all that Indians were willing to undergo any
kind of humiliation to get into the States. You could heap rubbish on their
heads and yet they would be begging to come crawling . . . (184)

Biju makes the return journey home out of fear of the greatest loss that can

come out from one’s family:

Biju stepped out of the airport into the Calcutta night warm, mammalian.
His feet sank into dust winnowed to softness at his face and he felt an
unbearable feeling, sad and tender, old and sweet like the memory of
falling asleep, a baby on his mother’s lap. (300)

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 His never ending tale of pain continues till a gang of robbers stripped him of

all his material possessions even his dignity. He reaches the judge’s house as a figure

in a night gown, a symbol of the dispossessed. Through the apathy of the life of Biju,

she presents the status of illegal immigrants and the feeling of alienation often

experienced by expatriates. A critic Beena Agarwal remarks:

The dawn of twenty first century, with the emerging trends of liberation
and exodus of public has witnessed a social phenomenon where native and
ethnic identities are gradually seeking their moorings in the wider centres
existing in the axis of Globalization. Uncontroversially, it acknowledges
the fractured and unidentified, identity of the marginalized communities
for better and wider national solidarities. The idea of globalization made it
essential to negotiate how to reconcile the creeping trends of universal
civilization along with ensuring the due status to native cultural practices.
The concept of universal civilization and “social imperialism” requires the
unconditional acceptance of emerging ideologies but simultaneously it
also demands a reference to the forgotten past as means of spiritual and
psychological consolations. The homogenizing spirit of globalization
espouses non imperialistic ideologies but it often shadows the basic
identity of minorities and induces new modes of marginality in
ethnocentric socio-culture fabric. However the discourse of
postmodernism has searched out the spaces wherein “difference” and
plurality are accentuated. Spivak and Ahmed have tried to locate such
centres which control Third world subjects corresponding to their own
constitution of margin. (2011: 8)

Kiran Desai has used humour and satire in the episode of the second wave of

immigrants where Biju succeeds in attaining the tourist visa. He asked the watchman:

‘Is this the American embassy?’…“Amreeka nehi … This is U.S.

embassy!” … ‘Where is the American embassy?’ ‘It is there.’ The man
pointed back at the same building. ‘That is U.S.’ ‘It is the same thing,’
said the man impatiently. (182)

But Biju, the luckiest boy in the whole world, lived in a miserable condition

in America. He is not only exploited by Americans but by Harish Harry an Indian in

the guise of free housing. Biju led a very miserable life in America. He was unable to

get the Greencard. Towards the end of the novel, he decides to return to India. The

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ending finds Biju flying back to India out of concern for his father. Yet on his journey

back home, he is robbed of his belongings, gifts and the little savings hidden in the

fake sole of his shoe. He ends up half-naked at the foot of the mountain to Kalimpong.

Through the character of Biju, Kiran Desai shows that migration is a sword with sharp

blade on both sides. The feeling of loss when one leaves one’s motherland is just as

intensive and dreadful as having to leave a foreign home, due to deportation when one

doesn’t have the green card.

The Bengali sisters see beyond their own concepts of India when they

witness the rebellion and when the Gorkhalis poach their property and build hutment

over it. Gyan and Budhoo are Indians. But in their own country, they are treated as

others under the tag of Nepalese. For both Biju and father Booty, India is a land of

hope and desire. ‘Home is where heart is’ fits on Father Booty aptly. He gives his

whole life to India only to be told that he does not belong here anymore and is sent

back to England he does not recognize.

For Biju, India is the final homecoming. He constructs a notion of home in a

foreign land and returns to find that what he claims to be a home is a contested

territory. Thus for all the characters, home is elsewhere. Thus the novelist has

presented a realistic and touching picture of the palpable life of the Diasporas. In

America, Biju has to eke out an existence as an undocumented worker. Stumbling

from one low-paid restaurant job to another, living in seedy squalor with groups of

other immigrant men, spurred by his father, Biju had come to America to realize the

American dream, but the reality had something else in store for him. He recognizes

that “It’s a whole world of basement kitchens” and in exasperation dubs it, “they call

this first world ??? Ekdum bekaar!” (300)

Kiran Desai has skillfully blended immigrant and diasporic sensibilities in

this novel. In it, through the character of Biju, Desai expresses her own feelings and

emotions. Biju acts as the mouth piece of Kiran Desai. Biju feels alienated in New

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York, where he switches from one job to another and from one hotel to another. As an

immigrant in New York, he has no one there to help him. So he feels isolated in the

glamorous city of New York. He longs to come back to his motherland.

Kiran Desai captures the rhythm of life in her characters who are finely

imagined and persuasive. The Inheritance of Loss is a novel about dislocation. The

way in which Desai communicates the immigrant’s daily despair, his desire to only

comment, the imaginary homeland – shaped hole at the heart of his foreign experience

– gives it its unique bleakness and compassion. Transitions between continents and

eras consist of the natural connections among the characters. Biju and his father think

constantly of each other. Biju writes moving, funny letters home. While his father

dreams of Biju making it big, the son is trying to stay afloat in the underground

economy of New York city, bobbing from joy to joy, sleeping among rats, scratching

subway trains and undaumented immigrants.

Biju and his father’s once easy relationship has become complicated by

distance. The cook mistakenly believes that only Biju can help other young

immigrants to survive in the United States. Desai attempts to show the conflict

between Biju’s struggle to survive in New York and the steadily gathering insurgency

of men and guns in the hills of Kalimpong. Desai portrays a world on the cusp of

globalization, desperately trying to cope with a rapid modernization. Her characters

are stubborn and arrogant, often refusing to cast off the strictures of colonialism yet

continuing to struggle with loss of identity, loss of roots, poverty and the trappings of

their social class.

Desai creates the same Indian atmosphere in New York where Biju works in

city’s restaurant kitchen. He is an illegal immigrant. With Biju, we experience the

world of illegal aliens, the shadow class condemned to movement. Biju put a padding

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of newspapers down his shirt. Sometimes, he took the scallion pancakes. He inserted

them below the paper. He was inspired by the memory of an uncle who used to go to

the fields in winter with his lunchtime parathas down his vest. But even this did not

seem to help.

Kiran Desai presents the postcolonial issue of displacement through the

character of Biju. Biju, the son of the cook at the Judge’s house, belongs to the

shadow class of illegal immigrants in New York. He spends much of his time dodging

the authorities, moving from one ill-paid job to another. The cook has harboured

many desires from his son. Biju would earn enough money in America. Then the cook

will retire from his job and he would play with his grandchildren. But Biju was unable

to settle down in America. He has to change many jobs for better earning. The cook

had thought that as he was cooking English food, he had a higher position than if he

were cooking in India. This is the different social realities in the two countries.

Once Biju was serving at the Baby Bistro, above, the restaurant was French,

but below in the kitchen, it was Mexican and Indian, ‘On top, rich colonial, and down

below, poor native.’ In the same restaurant, a Paki was tired to work with Biju. He

was relieved to have the Pakistani companion. When he informed his father about his

new companion, the cook asked him to keep himself away from his new companion.

Biju’s experiences at various restaurants show the multiculturality of a place

as a result of the harmonious existence of various national cultures. At the Baby

Bistro, “Above, the restaurant was French, but below in the kitchen, it was Mexican

and Indian. And, when a Paki was hired, it was Mexican, Indian, Pakistani”.(21) At

Le Colonial, “On top, rich colonial, and down below, poor native. Colombian,

Tunisian, Ecuadorian, Gambian”. (21) The Stars and Stripes Diner is shown as a place

where the American, Indian and Guatemalan flags fly together. The novel also shows

how Indians get accustomed to various cultures all over the world. Thus, the novel

shows and interprets various cultures, different societies and social dichotomy.

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 Desai tried to present an old of Desis against Pakis. Soon Biju and the Paki

became conscious about their nationality and began to quarrel. The sound of their

fight had travelled up the flight of steps and struck a clunky note. They might upset

the balance, perfectly first world on top, perfectly Third World, twenty-two steps

below. After this quarrel, Biju was to leave the job.

It was Biju’s second year in America. Now he was serving at Pinocchio’s

Italian Restaurant. Here he was treated respectfully. Biju was to deliver orders on a

bicycle. Biju becomes happy when he used to deliver not-and-sour soups egg too

young to three Indian girls. Kiran Desai tried to present the nostalgic feeling of Biju

when he was in the company of these Indian girls. The girls also showed some regard

for Biju. They give him extra tip to buy topi-muffler-gloves to protect him from the

cold of winter:

The shiny-eyed girl said if many ways so that the meaning might be
conveyed from every angle-that he might comprehend their friendliness
completely in this meeting between Indians abroad of different classes and
languages, rich and poor, north and south, top caste bottom caste. (50)

There was constant complaint by the customers that the food was cold. Biju

cannot bear the cold while delivering the orders on a bicycle. He began to weep from

the cold. He returned his house in a building which belonged to an invisible

management company. The Superintendent earned his income by illegally renting out

basement quarters by the week, by the month and even by the day. So the illegal

fellows used to live in that building. Thus Biju is one of such illegal immigrant. Being

an illegal immigrant, he bounces from low-paying job to loan-paying job in the

cruddy basement kitchen of Manhattan. Biju also presents the postcolonial issue of

race and ethnicity. He remembered what they said about black people at home. This

shows the ethnical and racial social realities: “Once a man from his village who

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worked in the city had said, “Be careful of the hubshi. Ha, ha, in their own country,

they like monkeys in the trees. They come to India and become men.” (58)

Biju met Saeed Saeed at the Queen of Tarts bakery. He was admired in the

United States of America. He came from Zanzibar. Zanzibar is full of Indians. His

grandmother is also from Zanzibar. Saeed Saeed expressed his liking about Indian

movies, stars and songs. Biju felt very proud of his country’s movies. Biju

remembered his previous fight with a Pakistani, the usual attack on the man’s

religion. Though Muslim, Saeed Saeed was a different man. Biju was eager to be his

friend. So he arranges the abode for the illegal immigrants. He is always surrounded

by such illegal immigrants. Biju liked muscles but hated Pakis. Biju thought that India

was so advanced that black men learned to dress and eat. On their arrival, the black

men ran about to seduce every Indian girl. So Biju disliked all black people:

This habit of hate had accompanied Biju, and he found that he possessed
an awe of white people, who arguably had done India great harm, and a
lack of generosity regarding everyone else, who had never done a single
harmful thing to India. (77)

Saeed Saeed was hired by the imam to do the dawn call to prayer at the

street mosque. It was his first job in America. Actually, he was from Africa. He went

to Zanzibar, where he was hailed as all American. He used to romance with the girls

in the Stone Town. When he achieved something in his life, the fathers of the girls

tried to marry their girls to Saeed, but he escaped. He has great feelings for his nation.

The country recognized something in Saeed. Sometimes Biju felt so restless that he

couldn’t stay in his skin. He felt a pang for village life. Biju couldn’t help but feel a

feast of anger at this father for sending him alone to this country. But he knew he

would not have forgiven his father for not trying to send him, either. Without green

card, he could not leave. Saeed was also tired by managing the illegal immigrants. His

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mother was dispensing his phone number and address to everyone who came to her.

He tried to avoid such illegal immigrants by his absence:

Mere tribes more tribes. I wake up, go to the window, and there - MORE
TRIBES. Every time, I look -ANOTHER TRIBE. Everybody saying, ‘Oh,
no visas anymore, they are getting very strict, it so hard, and in the
meantime everybody who apply, EVERYBODY is getting a visa. (96)

Saeed wondered why they gave visa to these tribes. He would not answer the

phone call. Biju wanted Saeed to help the immigrants. He remembered that he also

faced the same problems on his arrival there. He was asked to go back to India. But

his friend searched job for him. Biju started his life of suffering in America. Now he

was tired of this life and wanted to return to his motherland. He knew that to leave the

country, one must have the green card. One can even marry a disabled or mentally

retarded green card holder to escape from the country.

Their romance is affected by the Gorkha National Liberation Front

Movement. Gyan is quickly swept up in a nationalist movement for the Independence

of Nepalese State. The revolutionaries are insurgents forming a thrilling backdrop to a

love-affair. Gyan’s Nepalese family lives in poverty, struggling to make ends meet

while providing him with a good education. But he falls under the spell of a Nepali

uprising. He is affected by his heritage of Third World. Gyan cannot go beyond this

limit. Biju tries to establish himself in a New World, in New York, but he carries the

Third World identity with him. Working as an illegal immigrant in New York City’s

restaurant exposes him to harsh conditions and humiliations. Though he is in the high

rise capital of the world, in the Manhatten basements we think, he is in Third World:

Biju at Baby Bistro. Above the Restaurant was French, but below in the
kitchen it was Mexican and Indian. Biju at Le Colonial . . . on top, rich
colonial and down below, poor native, on to the stars and stripes Diner.
All American flag on top, all Guatemalan flag below. (21)

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 Biju is condemned to menial labour and abject living conditions. Tired by

the labour and changing jobs, Biju longs to return to India. He becomes the victim of

the ‘third world’ frustration even after his return. On his arrival in India, he is robbed

of his belongings. The story of judge is mirrored in the story of Biju who sets off to

New York to make his fortune in the land of plenty. His father has harboured many

hopes from him. He lived an isolated and bored life. His life is a miserable chain of

illegal jobs in cheap restaurants. Biju himself is consistently dazzled by the world.

4.13 SUMMING UP:

Desai acknowledges the gulf between Green Card holders and

undocumented workers, rich and poor and herself and her subjects. Sai, who was

educated in a convent school, is close to the semi-literate cook. But when she visits

his quarters, ‘he was ill at ease and so was she, something about their closeness being

exposed in the end as fake, their friendship composed of shallow things conducted in

a broken language, for she was an English-speaker and he was a Hindi-speaker.’

What Kiran Desai ultimately highlights is not just individual experiences,

but rather the relations of recognition between immigrants, exile, and foreigners who

all grapple with the weight of history and society. Kiran Desai’s realistic portrayal of

life on two continents, diasporic on multiple levels, demonstrates a deep concern from

the human and social condition. In New York, Biju works in different restaurants as

an illegal immigrant and thus encounters unhappy social as well as cultural

experiences in the West: “Biju joined a shifting population of men camping out near

the fuse box, behind the boiler, in the cubby holes, and in odd-shaped corners that

once were pantries, maid’s room, laundry rooms, and storage rooms.” (51-52) Kiran

Desai delineates the sense of loss experienced by people of different social strata and

its inheritance over generations. A critic Anila A. Pillai rightly observes:

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 The predominant traits of existentialism are alienation, quest and conflict.
Aspects of alienation and conflict are epitomized in the lives of the
protagonists. The retired judge, Sai, Gyan and Biju are a study in
alienation and existential angst. (2012: 172)

In this novel, Desai takes her landscape as the air of India rather than its

ground soil. She is not after a depiction of the geography and history of her forbears’

country, but in the essence of a state shadowing its descendants. Her grasp is on the

inheritance India bestows. This theme of rootedness – or lack of it – pervades the

novel. As Anju Bala Agarwal rightly perceives:

Her range is not a limited one restricted to only home affair. With a wide
range of relations, she has presented the tense, chaotic, antagonistic and
shifting locations and also the precarious, disgraced and displaced lives...
(254)

Desai’s cool scrutiny of society’s cruelties has an unabashedly critical and

unsentimental edge. It is not just a case of launching diatribes against the West or

elitism. She makes it clear that India is wrought by disparity, Biju is full of prejudice

and the Liberation Front consists of boys ‘taking their style from Rambo.’ At the end

of the novel, there is no formulaic redemption for the characters, no facile solutions to

the world’s problems. Kiran Desai’s 324-page novel The Inheritance of Loss cannot

be accused of shying away from expansive issues. It is really a representation of the

social, historical and cultural reality.

In this novel, Kiran Desai has not only portrayed how Americans look at the

people from Third World countries but also how the immigrants view the Americans.

Racial situations and reactions have come up at many places in the narrative.

The love-affair between Sai and Gyan is a conscious creation of the author

to promote intercultural and intersocial dialogue between the Neps and the Bengis.

Similar is the case of Biju and Saeed who are in the U. S, meeting and mingling with

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people from different nationalities. It shows and promotes the interconnections and

interactions between two or more different cultures, societies, religions and nations.

By the representation of difference in terms of social and ethnic status even between

her two main protagonists, Desai calls for intercultural interaction which include

interaction with foreign cultures, consciousness of one’s own culture, stress tolerance,

tolerance of ambiguity, bucketfuls of empathy, dichotomy of social milieu.

Desai depicts the overwhelming feeling of humiliation experienced by the

people who reach America in search of a better future. Biju’s experiences are

reflective of the ‘shadows class’ of illegal migrant workers. Kiran Desai being an

Indian might have experienced the same anxiety as a foreigner. This novel reflects

modernity as an inseparable mass of commercialism, oppression and suffering. It

describes how human kindness wilts at the omnipresence of suffering, poverty and

injustice.

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WEBLIOGRAPHY:
www.relibrary.com
www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The Inheritance of Loss
www.buzzle.com
www.google.com
www.rediff.com/news/2006/Jan/30

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