Adrija Guha
Assistant Professor of English, JIS College of Engineering, Kalyani, Nadia, West Bengal.
Abstract
An embittered
judge living in a crumbling isolated house; his orphaned grand-daughter, Sai,
who has grown up in isolation; the judge’s cook whose hopes and dreams are
focused on his son, Biju; Biju
hopscotching on an elusive search for a
green card; Lola and Noni, Sai’s elderly neighbours still dreaming of an
England of Christie and Wodehouse; Swiss Father Booty and Uncle Potty thinking
of the time when colonialism was for the best;
Gyan, Sai's tutor and love, taking part in the Gorkhaland movement :
what binds these seemingly disparate characters is a shared historical legacy
and a common experience of impotence and humiliation; an ‘inheritance of loss’.
"Certain moves made long ago had produced all of them," Desai writes,
referring to centuries of subjection by the economic and cultural power of the
West. Each and every one is trapped in a world that once promised a better
future. In my paper I would like to show how in her award-winning novel, The
Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai
portrays the desperation for a ‘better life’ and the hope for a world that has not yet been
born. Ultimately, the characters are bereft of all their hopes. "Never
again could she think there was but one narrative and that this narrative
belonged only to herself, that she might create her own mean little happiness
and live safely within it"—seems to be the only consolation that Desai
offers her characters.
Keywords:
Colonialism, Postcolonialism, Neocolonialism, Multiculturalism, Globalization
Rereading The
Inheritance of Loss: Identity Crisis in the colonial, (post)colonial and
the (neo)colonial Worlds.
More silent than
my shadow, I pass through the loftily covetous multitude.
They are
indispensable, singular, worthy of tomorrow.
--Jorges Luis Borges
An embittered
judge living in a crumbling isolated house; his orphaned grand-daughter, Sai,
who has grown up in isolation; the judge’s cook whose hopes and dreams are
focused on his son, Biju; Biju
hopscotching on an elusive search for a
green card; Lola and Noni, Sai’s elderly neighbours still dreaming of an
England of Christie and Wodehouse; Swiss Father Booty and Uncle Potty thinking
of the time when colonialism was for the best;
Gyan, Sai's maths tutor and love, taking part in the Gorkhaland movement
: what binds these seemingly disparate characters is a shared historical legacy
and a common experience of impotence and humiliation; an ‘inheritance of loss’.
"Certain moves made long ago had produced all of them," Desai writes,
referring to centuries of subjection by the economic and cultural power of the
West. Each and every one is trapped in a world that once promised a better
future. In my paper I would like to show how in her award-winning novel, The
Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai portrays
the desperation for a ‘better life’ and
the hope for a world that has not yet been born.
The novel opens
with a handful of young Nepali would-be revolutionaries invading the judge's
falling-down house in search of the judge’s hunting rifles. Soon it is revealed
that they are the supporters of the Gorkhaland Movement . “[A]n impoverished
movement with a ragtag army” [Desai, 4], is how Desai describes this movement.
This phrase encapsulates the whole problem of the Gorkhaland Movement. Besides
Desai also shows the newspapers’ reaction to the movement: while in Bombay the
news is about the performance of a band, in Delhi it’s about the technology
fair, in Kalimpong, there is “a new dissatisfaction in the hills, gathering
insurgency, men and guns.” [Desai, 9]. The importance and immediacy of the
movement is as much as that of the band’s performance and the technology fair.
This shows how much the Government and media ignore the East and their
problems. As the novel unfolds, the story alternates between Kalimpong and New
York, between Sai and Biju. Both are aliens: Biju, in the ‘first-world’ America
and Sai, in the ‘third-world’ India. With
Biju, we experience the world of illegal aliens, the ''shadow class . . .
condemned to movement"; the class who 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, maids’ rooms, laundry rooms, and
storage rooms at the bottom of what had been a single-family home, the entrance
still adorned with a scrap of colored mosaic in the shape of a star.” [Desai.
51]. At the same time, the story shuttles back and forth between Sai's youth
and that of her Anglophile grandfather, Jemubhai Patel, who belongs to the
class of persons “Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions,
in morals and in intellect.” Quite interestingly there is also a parallel
between Jemubhai’s experience in England and Biju’s experience in America. Through
Jemubhai and Biju, Desai beautifully portrays the post-colonial and the
neo-colonial worlds with all their cruelty, hatred and prejudices. In fact by
setting the novel against the backdrop of the Gorkha Movement Desai shows how
the inequalities of the colonial era still function in different forms.
In the colonial era
England was the “promised land” to the Indians. When the young Jemubhai went to
Cambridge he had been “serenaded at his departure by two retired members of a
military band hired by his father-in-law” [Desai, 36]. because people like Jemu
who got a chance to visit the ‘promised land’ let alone study there were
considered to be the ‘chosen ones’. In the 20th Century, the era of
neo-colonialism, this place has been replaced by America, the land of
‘unlimited opportunities’. Moving to America is itself considered a good luck
that a few people have; getting a green card simply adds a cherry on top. Desai shows the parallel between ‘then’ and
‘now’: When Jemubhai left Bombay by ship he felt a “piercing fear”, not for his
future, but “for his past, for the foolish faith with which he had lived in
Piphit” [Desai, 36].. Upon reaching England he felt disappointed as it was
totally different from its concept. This England was formed of “tiny gray
houses in gray streets, stuck together and down as if on a glue trap.” He was
appalled by this England as he expected only grandness; he did not realize that
here too could be people who were poor and lived unaesthetic lives. On the
other hand when Biju joins a crowd of
Indians scrambling to reach the visa counter at the United States Embassy at
first he felt contended: "Biggest pusher, first place; how self-contented
and smiling he was; he dusted himself off, presenting himself with the
exquisite manners of a cat. I'm civilized, sir, ready for the U.S., I'm
civilized, mam. Biju noticed that his eyes, so alive to the foreigners, looked
back at his own countrymen and women, immediately glazed over, and went
dead." The America of his dreams was filled with illegal aliens, from all
over the world, the ''shadow class . . . condemned to movement". In Piphit
Jemubhai was considered worthy of a hot dinner; in England his land lady put
out a tray at the foot of the stairs. In America, Biju put a “padding of
newspapers down his shirt . . . and sometimes he took the scallion pancakes and
inserted them below the paper.” Once Biju began to weep from the cold, and the
weeping unpicked a deeper vein of grief. Grief for a lost identity, for the
dreams that shattered.
Wonderfully Desai
shows the similarities between colonialism and neo-colonialism, the latter
being a continuation of the former. In this multicultural USA people flock from
all over the world, especially from the economically developing countries:
Mexicans, Indians, Pakistanis, Colombians, Tunisians, Ecuadorians, Gambians. Developed countries like USA block growth in
developing countries and retain them as sources of cheap raw materials and
cheap labour. This happened particularly
with the U.S. policy, the Truman Doctrine, during the Cold War. Under that
policy the U.S. government offered large amounts of money to any government
prepared to accept U.S. protection from communism. That enabled the United
States to extend its sphere of influence and, in some cases, to place foreign
governments under its control. The United States and other developed countries
also ensured the subordination of developing countries by interfering in
conflicts and helping in other ways to install regimes that were willing to act
for the benefit of foreign companies and against their own country’s interests.
Hence, the coming together of people from different cultures, ethnicity,
religion. This makes the USA a multicultural society.
Ideally
multiculturalism seeks the inclusion of the views and contributions of diverse
members of society while maintaining respect for their differences and
withholding the demand for their assimilation into the dominant culture. It is
both a response to the fact of cultural pluralism in modern democracies and a
way of compensating cultural groups for past exclusion, discrimination, and
oppression. However, in reality multiculturalism undermines the notion of equal
individual rights, thereby weakening the political value of equal treatment.
With multiculturalism a few questions arise :
which culture/s will be recognized. This leads to a competition between
various cultural groups all vying for recognition. The Americans hope for “men
from the poorer parts of Europe—Bulgarians, perhaps, or Czechoslovakians. At
least they might have something in common with them like religion and skin
colour, grandfathers who ate cured sausages and looked like them, too, but they
weren’t coming in numbers great enough or they weren’t coming desperate enough
…”. The Indians thought America to be a country where “people from everywhere
journeyed to work, but … surely not Pakistanis! Surely they would not be hired.
Surely Indians were better liked--.” And to the first-world people, all the
third-world people, especially people from South Asian countries, ‘smelled’.
Years ago when Jemubhai went to England, he faced the same problem: to the
English, he ‘smelled’ - “He began to wash obsessively, concerned he would be
accused of smelling ….”[Desai, 40] The
author tells us that till the last day of his life, Jemubhai has always worn
socks and shoes and has preferred shadow to light as he is afraid that
“sunlight might reveal him, in his hideousness, all too clearly.” [Desai, 40]
Both colonialism and neo-colonialism have been successful in making these
third-world people question their identities: “[H]e grew stranger to himself
than he was to those around him, found his own skin odd-colored, his own accent
peculiar....” [Desai,40].
Desai’s characters
do not suffer from identity crisis in an alien land only. Her characters back
at home face the same problem. Anglophile Jemubhai maintains an English
lifestyle and ever since his return from England he has disliked everything
Indian. He has despised his wife as well. Through him we can see, what Fanon
has stated in his famous book, Black Skin, White Masks, that the agony
of the colonised people lies in their effort to embrace the language and the
values of the coloniser followed by the realisation that this process of
internalization will not erase their feeling
of inferiority because their brown skin is an impediment to the
possibility of being accepted as
civilized people. Through Jemubhai we see the alienation of the colonized
people and the disastrous psychological impact of colonialism over them. Even
Sai’s Anglophile neighbours, Lola and Noni, living in India, talks about a ‘New
England’, a "completely cosmopolitan society" where "chicken
tikka masala has replaced fish and chips as the No. 1 takeout dinner",
without even realising the effects of colonialism on the people around them. Desai,
quite interestingly comments on how Lola thought of India as a “ concept, a
hope, or a desire”, far removed from the real country.
Touching upon the
chord of multiculturalism and globalization, Desai tries to show how these concepts have failed
to address violence in the modern world. Setting the novel in 1986, against the
backdrop of Gorkhaland Movement , Desai has already touched upon the chord of
identity crisis of the Gorkhas in the Indian state. In 1986, Subhash Ghisingh,
the leader of Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF) demanded a separate state
that included the hill regions of the Darjeeling district and the Kalimpong and
Duars areas, based on their ethnic and cultural identity and the fact that
under the state government they were deprived and were not treated as bonafide
Indian citizens. In fact in 1986, ethnic riots broke out in Meghalaya in which
local Khasis threw out thousands of Indian Gorkhas and Nepalis from blue-collar
jobs and chased them out of the state. All these incidents called for bandhs,
vote boycotts and a “do or die”
struggle. Which side was at the fault – GNLF or the state and central
government – is not important here; neither Desai raises that question. Rather
she focuses on the fact how this movement gradually gained support from the
educated youth like Gyan. When Sai visits his house she “felt a moment of
shock” [Desai, 255] by seeing the living condition of Gyan and people like him.
Desai comments: “There were houses like this everywhere…the house slipping
back, not into the picturesque poverty that tourists liked to photograph but
into something truly dismal— modernity proffered in its meanest form, brand-new
one day, in ruin the next.” [Desai, 255-56]. Lack of opportunity, career
prospects along with the age-old responsibilities – “Sisters’ marriages,
younger brother’s studies, grandmother’s teeth” – led to the venting out of
frustration and rage; the Movement came to their use.
Each and every
character tries to escape from his / her immediate reality. Dreaming of an
England of Christie and Wodehouse, living
an Anglophile life, talking about his family’s achievements in the war,
thinking about getting a green card— all of them try to escape the reality
until the day comes, when it is at the door, and they do not have any option
but to face the reality. "Never
again could she think there was but one narrative and that this narrative
belonged only to herself, that she might create her own mean little happiness
and live safely within it"—is the only consolation that Desai offers her
characters. The novel began with the mighty Kanchenjunga “gathering the last of
the light, a plume of snow blown high by the storms at its summit” and ends
with “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." The landscape that ignited hope for
a better tomorrow in the beginning is left bereft of all its possibilities;
only the landscape survives.
Works Cited
Desai,
Kiran. The Inheritance of Loss. Penguin Books, 2006.
Eagan,
Jennifer L. “Multiculturalism”. Encyclopaedia
Britannica. 1 Sept. 2019,
Halperin,
Sandra. “Neocolonialism”. Encyclopaedia Britannica. 1 Sept. 2019,
Harleman,
Ann. “Luminous family saga bridges eras, cultures”. The Boston Globe. 1 Sept. 2019,
Ivison,
Duncan. “Postcolonialism”. Encyclopaedia
Britannica. 1 Sept. 2019,
Macaulay,
Thomas Babington, ‘Minute on Indian Education’ in Sayantan Dasgupta (ed.) A South Asian Nationalism Reader.
Worldview Publications, 2007.
Mishra,
Pankaj. “Wounded by the West”. The New York Times. 1 Sept. 2019,
Pryor,
Fiona. “Review: The Inheritance of Loss”. BBC News. 1 Sept. 2019,
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