The Inheritance of Loss

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The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai explores burdensome themes of cultural and national identity and the immigrant experience, but does so with an easy technique that makes for effortless reading. Winner of the 2006 Booker Prize, its relevance has only grown over the years.

The Inheritance of Loss is the second novel by Indian author Kiran Desai. It was first published in 2006. It won a number of awards, including the Man Booker Prize for that year, the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award in 2007, and the 2006 Vodafone Crossword Book Award.a ) American dream also exists in India. The western culture influences the psyches of Indians . Consequently, due to the extreme poverty probably brought about by big population, corruption, and ridiculous so-called Caste System, most Indians are so hapless that they dream of venturing out to the USA. In reality, their life turns out to be more miserable than what they expect to be. Kiran Desai (1 December 2007). The Inheritance of Loss. Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. pp.29–. ISBN 978-1-55584-591-9.

This is one of my favorite novels written about Indian immigrants in the USA. I generally consider myself a fast reader. But I took one whole month to finish this book. There were too many ideas that made me close this book and contemplate it for a long time. From the start it is hard to engage with the characters as Desai chooses not to "formally" introduce them to the reader. That is not to say that Desai's novel is an unremittingly depressing affair. She is a wonderful writer of comic set-pieces, most of them centring on Biju's experiences in New York. Yet, while these chapters are carried off with aplomb, it is the melancholy at the heart of The Inheritance of Loss that fuels the narrative. We see the crumbling dreams of Sai's neighbours, Swiss Father Booty and his alcoholic friend, Uncle Potty, still trapped in an older era when colonialism was for the best. But these individual characters and the experiences that challenge and inform their sense of identity are small participants in a much larger question posed by the novel – who is an ‘Indian’? While many modern nations, especially European ones, can be said to represent terrestrial boundaries enclosing a people who largely share a common language, history, culture, religion or ethnicity, albeit determined only after centuries of nearly constant war and one that is continually evolving; the modern Indian state, it could be argued, lies at another extreme of a territory whose boundaries contain an enormous level of diversity impossible to reduce to a unifying definition. Repeated failures to decide on a national language, of an all-inclusive definition of Hinduism, as well as sporadic threats of regional secession; are but small indicators of a large and bewildering question. High in the Himalayas sits a dilapidated mansion, home to three people, each dreaming of another time.

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After setting the scene with a moment of such high drama, Desai shows how the lives of Gyan and Sai and her grandfather, along with their cook and his son, intertwine before and after this horrible turning point. She casts her net wide, and scenes in which the cook's son, Biju, tries to make a life in the US are paralleled by the judge's experience studying in England in the 1940s. In both situations, we see a young Indian man setting off full of idealism about the cultural and material opportunities of the west, only to find himself ground down by the reality of being a second-class citizen. The major theme running throughout The Inheritance of Loss is one closely related to colonialism and the effects of post-colonialism: the loss of identity and the way it travels through generations as a sense of loss. Some characters snub those who embody the Indian way of life, others are angered by anglicised Indians who have lost their traditions; none is content. Second: The novel is what the social world must know . Its themes deal with the social issues nowadays even since before, not only applicable to India and Nepal but also to every nation in the world which must have the same conditions specifically such as :