MARGINALITY AND POSTCOLONIALISM IN KIRAN DESAIS THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS

DEBAYAN BASU POST GRADUATION SECOND YEAR DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH JADAVPUR UNIVERSITY ROLL NO. 55

With The Inheritance of Loss (2006), Kiran Desai became the youngest ever female writer to win the prestigious Booker Prize. Daughter of Anita Desai, Kiran Desais literary affinities with her mother was noted by the chairwoman of the judges for the 2006 Booker Prize Hermione Lee as: It is clear [] that Kiran Desai has learnt from her mothers work. Both write not only about India but about the Indian communities of the world. Although her first novel Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard was published in 1998, her first breakthrough came in 1997 when Salman Rushdie published her novel-in progress in Mirrorwork. It won the Betty Trask Award in 1998 as the reviewer in New Yorker described Desai as a lavish, sharp eyed fabulist whose send up of small town culture cuts to the heart of human perversity. The novel established Desai as part of the Anglo-Indian literature and compared with Rushdies The Moors Last Sigh and Banerjee Divakrunis The Mistress of Spices. Set in Postcolonial India, The Inheritance of Loss vividly highlights a number of issues, which are of interest in the world today, major issues like globalisation, economic inequality, postcolonialism, marginality, immigration, racism, fundamentalism, terrorism and nationalism are dovetailed into comparatively minor issues of personal gains and loses. The novel shows how this impact is passed from one generation to the other. In the case of colonial experience, it has been remarked that this impact, often, continues inspite of the withdrawl of political control due to the strategic economic and

consequently cultural power of the former colonisers. Formal colonialism gave way to what Kwame Nkrumah influentially called neo-colonialism, or as flag independence to quote Ngugi. This postcolonial pessimism is also evoked by Arundhuti Roy as: Independence came (and went), elections come and go, but there has been no shuffling of the deck. On the contrary, the old order has been consecrated, the rift fortified, we the rulers, wont pause to look up from our groaning table. Arguably in the postcolonial times it should be easy to challenge the existing practices which are unjust and discriminatory. The novel exposes the ambiguities of postcolonial possession and dispossession and shows how one persons gains becomes another persons loss. Those who live on the margins lead a pathetic and dispossessed life, be it in India a Third world Nation and the United States of America, a First world Nation, as the perils of immigration and globalisation catch up with them. The shift of power will result in a new aggressive national bourgeoisie taking over the colonial elite, even as the class hierarchies remain unchanged. In both Kalimpong and New York, The Inheritance of Loss mirrors the struggle between the poor and marginalised and those who are rich and occupy a position of centrality. The novel is set in Kalimpong and New York, as we alternate between two continents, between the narratives of judges cooks son Biju in New York where he shuffles from one C grade restaurant to another in search of the elusive Green Card. The Indian part of the story dwells on Sai, a teenage orphaned girl living with her Cambridge educated Anglophile grandfather in Kalimpong. Sai is romantically involved with her Nepalese tutor Gyan, who recoils from her privileged upbringing and joins

a team of Nepalese insurgents. Jemubhai, a retired judge still suffers from a colonial hangover and finds his position openly challenged as the novel unfolds. The Indo-Nepal insurgency upsets the existing power equations as the insurgents enter Cho-oyu, the Judges sprawling through crumbling residence, in an open challenge to his authority and take away his guns. Not only this they also make bold to insult and humiliate the judge, instructing the judge to lay the table since they are hungry. At this juncture everybody thinks the world was upside down and absolutely anything could happen. The Indo Nepalese are tired of being treated like a minority in a place where they themselves are in majority. They air their grievances as: In 1947, brothers and sisters, the British left granting Indian her freedom, granting the Muslims Pakistan, granting special provisions for the scheduled castes and tribes, leaving everything taken care of, brothers and sisters Except us. EXCEPT US. The Nepalis of India. At that time, in April of 1947, the Communist party of India demanded a Gorkhasthan, but the request was ignored The novel travels through the annals of history as it captures the birth of the Gorkha National Liberation Front or (GNLF), during the turbulent 1980s . As the agitation for Gorkhaland gathers momentum, incident after incident successfully proves the erosion of the power and authority of those who occupy a position of centrality. When Jemubhai had joined the ICS, his entire community was overjoyed and Bomanbhai, a wealthy member of the Patel clan went over to hand over his daughter in

marriage to him with the intention that his daughter would be the wife to one of the most powerful men in India. Jemubhai desired power as he has been experienced by the colonial encounter during his stint as a student in racist England. The future judge hardly feels like a human and yet finds himself despising his Indian wife after his return. He is shown to exercise the power over those sections of the society which had once subjugated his families for centuries. The judge is one of the brown sahibs dubbed as ridiculous Indians by the novelist, whose Anglophilia can only turn into self-hatred. These Indians are also an unwanted anachronism in postcolonial India, where the long suppressed people have begun to awake from their dereliction, to express their anger and despair. Even Lola and Noni, two educated sisters of Bengali origin who have a house named Mon Ami lose not only their social standing but their land is encroached upon to accommodate young insurgents and their families. They are shaken and stirred from their colonial stupor as they face reality and truth. There is no mistaking the literary influences on Desai's exploration of postcolonial chaos and despair. Early in the novel, she sets two Anglophilic Indian women namely Lola and Noni to discussing "A Bend in the River," V. S. Naipaul's powerfully bleak novel about traditional Africa's encounter with the modern world. Lola, whose clothesline sags "under a load of Marks and Spencer's panties," thinks Naipaul is "strange. Stuck in the past. . . . He has not progressed. Colonial neurosis, he's never freed himself from it." Lola goes on to accuse Naipaul 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." As further evidence, she mentions her own daughter, a newsreader for BBC radio, who "doesn't have a chip on her shoulder." In an interview to Man Booker Prize Foundation, Desai singles out Naipauls A Bend in the River for special praise as she puts it: Naipaul I admire for that brutal honesty, the width of his perspective. He is the first fiction writer (for whom) the big wars pervert the smallest places. In the middle of the Gorkha unrest portrayed in the novel, Father Booty, a native of Switzerland who had opted to stay in India even as after the British have left is forced to deport. It is found that his stay is illegal as his resident permit has lapsed. Father Booty ran a dairy farm and in the words of Sai had done much more for the development of the Hills than any of the locals. As news of his imminent deportment spread, a Nepali doctor comes to buy his property at a very meagre price. His rationale is: I have arranged it and you have no choice. You are lucky to get what I am giving you. You are residing in this country unlawfully and you must sell or lose everything. Father Booty wishes that his property would rather be seized by the Government than an individual using strong armed tactics. The doctor had decided to set up a nursing home for rich patients. How would this endeavour help the marginalised Indo-Nepalis remains to be seen? The Inheritance of Loss explores immigrant experience and the overlap between East and West brought about by colonialism and its aftereffects. The novel looks at both the Western infiltration of Eastern cultures and the experiences of those, such as the cook's son Biju, who migrate from

the East to the affluent west, chasing a dream which is often crushed by harsh reality. Desai comments that the novel is not autobiographical, but is nonetheless inspired and informed by her family's cross-cultural background and by her own experiences of living between two cultures: 'The characters of my story are entirely fictional, but [my grandparents'] journeys, as well as my own, provided insight into what it means to travel between East and West and this is what I wanted to capture. Biju is forced to stay in the basement of a kitchen and belongs to the shadow class of the illegal immigrants eking out a hand to mouth existence. Poor and lonely in New York, Biju eavesdrops on businessmen eating steak and exulting over the wealth to be gained in the new markets of Asia. Not surprisingly, he eventually becomes "a man full to the brim with a wish to live within a narrow purity." For him, the city's endless possibilities for self-invention become a source of pain. Though "another part of him had expanded: his selfconsciousness, his self-pity," this awareness only makes him long to fade into insignificance, to return "to where he might relinquish this overrated control over his own destiny." Arriving back in India in the climactic scenes of the novel, 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 the others, Desai suggests, withdrawal or escape are no longer possible. Gyan impulsive act to join the insurgents stems from a basic uprooted ness which makes him and his kind susceptible towards the first available political cause in search for a better way. He is in some ways a rebel without a cause. His alignment with a largely ethnic separatist movement gives him an opportunity to vent out his anger and frustration.

Gyan at one point in the novel looks at the revolutionaries protesting and comments: The men are behaving as if they are being featured in some documentary about the war. Are these men simply wearing a mask and after a while the mask becomes the self? Where Desai does shine however, is not just in the detailing of Biju's life alone but in subtly contrasting his life with that of his father's. Desai is at her best when showing how even globalization cannot solve the trappings of class. Globalisation is just another name for submission and domination or as Appudurai calls: a complex overlapping, disjunctive order that can no longer be understood in terms of existing centre-periphery models. In the USA, as in India, Biju remains on the margins and periphery, economically and socially. Kiran Desai's extraordinary new novel manages to explore, with intimacy and insight, just about ever contemporary international issue: globalization, multiculturalism, economic inequality, fundamentalism and terrorist violence. It shows how those who had lived on the periphery displace the established centre while agitating for their rights leading to the conclusion that there is more than one narrative and more than one point of view. Is Biju more Indian than Sai? What constitutes his Indian Identity? Amartya Sen illustrates this through a letter by Rabindranth Tagore to C. F. Andrews, which says that the idea of India itself militates against the intense consciousness of the separateness of ones one own people from others. it is therefore noteworthy that the judges proclaimed The Inheritance of Loss as 'a magnificent novel of humane

breadth and wisdom, comic tenderness and powerful political acuteness.

Bibliography
Ashcroft, Bill. Et al. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 2006 Desai, Kiran. The Inheritance of Loss. Delhi: Penguin Books, 2006 Gandhi, Leela. Postcolonial Theory: A critical Introduction. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999 Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London: Routledge, 2007 Roy, Arundhuti. The Algebra of Infinite Justice. London: Flamingo, 2002 Sen, Amartya. The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity. London: Penguin Books, 2005