Insurgency was just a word which I have only heard about, but the beginning of Kiran Desai’s book The Inheritance of Loss made me experience it. This took me back to the days in which I read Jahnvi Barua’s “The Next Door”, a Short Story anthology in which she explicitly sheds lights on the insurgency that took place and still prevails in the north eastern parts of India. The Inheritance Of Loss began with the description of a group of insurgents who loot the protagonist Sai’s house. The story revolves around the lives of Sai, a teenager who lives with her grandfather, the retired judge Jemuabhai Patel at Cho Oyu, situated at the foothills of Kanchenjunga and Biju, the cook’s son who lives miserably as an illegal alien in New York .
The insurgency becomes a hurdle for the relationship between Sai and her Nepali math tutor Gyan, while the class struggle shatters the life of Biju under the Whites. The story is told from different perspectives including that of Sai, her Grandfather as well as Biju. Throughout the novel one could see that each character seeks redemption but does not receive it. They are trapped in an identity crisis where they fail to root themselves either in the traditional Indian culture or the Western culture. Thus the book is a haunting look at how cultural expectations, isolation and the search for identity can keep us in a circle of guilt and searching.
The elements of diasporic writing are well visible in this novel. This quietly resembles with Kiran Desai’s another novel named Hullabaloo In The Guava Orchard. This is evident through the fact that all of the characters struggle with their cultural identity and the forces of modernization, while trying to maintain their emotional connection to one another. Biju and Jemubhai Patel are the prime examples for this. This is one of the common themes in majority of the diasporic writers such as Jhumpa Lahiri, Salman Rushdie etc.
The novel also sheds light on many of the contemporary issues such as globalization, multiculturalism, economic inequality, fundamentalism and terrorist violence or insurgency. All these themes are presented one after the other or sometimes simultaneously through different perspectives. If one part was described through the point of view of Sai, then the next would be through the perspectives of Biju or Jemubhai or the Cook. At the very next moment this will change and can be vice versa. Thus a recklessness of a fraction of a second can make reader completely thrown out of the thread of the story (and I have been a victim of this).
In this alternatively comical and contemplative novel, Desai skillfully shuffles between the First and the Third worlds, clarifying the pain of banishment , the imprecision of post colonialism and the blinding desire for a “better life”, when one person’s wealth means another’s poverty. The Inheritance Of Loss is an eye opener to all of us, the new generation, who blindly mimics the Westerners without even realizing the value and power of our own rich tradition and culture.
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