Dilemma of Identities: A Transcultural Study
of Kiran Desai’s Novel Inheritance of Loss
Daughter
of a well known Indian author, Kiran Desai is the winner of the 2006 Booker
prize. She was born on the 3rd of September in the year 1971 in
Chandigarh. She spent the early years of her life in Pune and Mumbai. She
studied in the Cathedral and John Connon School. When she was around nine years
old, her family shifted to Delhi. By the time, she turned fourteen, the family
moved to England. A year later, they shifted to the United States. Kiran
completed her schooling in Massachusetts. She did her graduation from Hollins
University and Columbia University. Thereafter, she took a break of two years
to write her first book "Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard".
Her
maiden novel "Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard" was published in the
year 1998. It was an amazing piece of work, for which Kiran received many
accolades. Her second book "The Inheritance of Loss" was also well
acclaimed. She also received the 2006 Man Booker Prize and 2006 National Book
Critics Circle Fiction Award for it. Reviewers mostly praised the novel and
Desai’s technique. Ann Harleman writes that Desai’s “rich and often wry
descriptions [: : : ] have the depth and resonance of Dickens laced with rueful
postmodern ambivalence.”[Harleman 39] Marjorie Kehe characterizes the
book as “a work full of color and comedy, even as it challenges all to face the
same heart-wrenching questions that haunt the immigrant: Who am I? Where do I
belong?”[Kehe 13] Pankaj Mishra argued that “Desai takes a skeptical
view of the West’s consumer-driven multiculturalism” and that the novel reveals
an “invisible emotional reality” felt by “people fated to experience modern
life as a continuous affront to their notions of order, dignity and justice.”[Mishra
194] These reviews only hint, though, at the postcolonial issues that the
novel addresses. Carmen Wickramagamage has recently argued that “most people
envision relocation as a painful choice between assimilation (betrayal) and
nativism (loyalty)”[Wickramagamage 195]. The importance of this book
becomes apparent in light of this distinction, which divides much postcolonial
literary criticism. Some critics view assimilation positively, while others
insist that the differences between cultures should be maintained and
preserved. I shall argue that whether the characters should embrace cultural
adaptability or remain in dilemma of their identities is of crucial importance
to the novel. Desai explores both sides of the issue and ultimately challenges
the desirability of assimilation and the wisdom of maintaining difference,
inhabiting the margins, and avoiding “full and unapologetic participation in
the New World”.
Ever
since Post-Colonial literatures have come into existence, the writers were
trying to create a new form of fiction within the English language by
incorporating new images and above all new rhythms. One of the major features
of postcolonial texts is the concern with place and displacement, shifting of
location and resulting in “the crisis of identity into being”.[] Often, the
protagonist of a post-colonial work will find himself/herself in a struggle to
establish an identity; feeling conflicted between two cultures – one his own
native culture and the other an alien culture. Therefore, a central theme in
post-colonial writing is the transformation of the native into something other
than himself – a Westernized native, or at least one who is in a crisis
regarding his/her own cultural identity. Here, there is always a tension
between wanting to belong to the new society yet wanting to retain the culture
of the old one. The characters in Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss are in such
dilemmas. The novel addresses these issues in a direct and poignant way. It is
not merely a matter of adapting to a new environment, or adjusting to new
customs, or learning a new language. It is much more profound, a displacement
far reaching. It is an agonizing process of alienation and displacement which
may create an imbalance that can profoundly affect a person’s feelings,
thoughts and ideas.
Writing
with wit and perception in her the booker prize winning novel Inheritance of
Loss, Kiran Desai creates an elegant and thoughtful study of families, the
losses each member must confront alone, and the lies each tells to make
memories of the past more palatable.
Macaulay,
in an educational, Minute in 1835, thus advised the British government on
education in India “we must at present do our best to form a class [in India]
who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of
persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in
morals, and in intellect.”[Gauri 58] His words led the then cultural and
educational policies adopted by the British government in India and making
English the medium of instruction in some schools and universities in India in
1850 was the starting point of the impact of the western culture on the mind of
a class of Indians. It re-stratified the Indian society. The Indians ‘in blood
and colour, but English in taste’ were recruited into the British rule and thus
enjoying a respectful social status.
The
Novel begins with the character Jemubhai who significantly matches the
Macaulay’s expected results of his recommendations. Damaged unalterably by the
experience of being a young man during the British raj is Jemu, the retired
judge, now living in a rambling run-down mansion called Cho Oyu (built for a
Scotsman with romantic notions of Himalayan life) in Kalimpong. Sent to England
as a young boy by his ambitious father to complete his law degree (which he
passed only because of the quota system), Jemu wanted nothing more than to be
English and, after his return to India, found himself unable to reconcile
himself to being Indian. In his disgust at everything Indian and in his
readiness to invoke English class sensibilities to his own advantage, Jemu
epitomizes what Albert Memmi calls the 'duality' that was produced through
colonial education. In Memmi's words, the memory which is assigned to people
like Jemu is 'certainly not that of his people. The history which is taught him
is not his own.'[Memi 37] Such people, adds Memmi, 'change and serve no
one, but ...succeed only in finding moral comfort in malaise." Indeed, the
judge's daily life is suffused in malaise [Memi 42]. He despises
everyone and everything around him, resents having to assume guardianship of
his orphaned granddaughter Sai, and is redeemed from being an entirely
appalling character only by his doting affection for his dog Mutt. The dog,
too, is displaced - whoever heard of a red setter in the Himalayas!
Bose
the other character associated with the Jemu shows him what records to buy for
his new gramophone and recommends Caruso and Gigli. He corrects Jemubhai’s
mistakes in English pronunciation: Jheelee, not Giggly, Yorksher, Edinburrah,
Jane Aae, Jane Aiyer, etc. It is his education in a school of British milieu
and then in Cambridge University which makes him enjoy the status. In colonial
days, the English literature which was introduced in schools and universities
was western culture with it and thus fulfilling the dream of Macaulay. English
poured the concept and importance, especially for social status, in the minds
of Indians and thus people began to look power in relation to English this is
best reflected in the character of the judge. There is an interesting scene in
The Inheritance of Loss revealing the influence of English education in establishing
cultural hierarchy among natives. Above the entrance to the missionary school
where the judge studies in, a portrait of Queen Victoria, a symbol of imperial
power is hung.
People like Bose the
friend of Jemubhai, speak against the English people. “What bastards they were!
Goras – get away with everything, don’t they? Bloody white people! They are
responsible for all the crimes of the century”.[Inheritance of Loss 213]
He is happy that the English has left India at least in 1947. He says that they
stay in Africa, still making trouble over there. According to him, the justice
is always against the native as the world is still colonial. He speaks angrily
only because he failed in a case to win a pension equal to that of a white ICS
man. He bids even the farewell using English sentences (not Indian) like “Good
night. Good-bye. So long.”[Inheritance of Loss 215]
Jemubhai
and Mr. Bose read a lot of textbooks like A Brief History of Western Art, A
Brief History of Philosophy, A Brief History of France, etc. While studying, he
grows strange to others and himself. He finds his skin tanned and his accent
very awkward. He forgets how to laugh or smile. Even if he smiles, he holds his
hand over his mouth; he does not want anybody to look at his gums and teeth. Jemubhai
takes revenge on his early confusions and embarrassments in the name of
‘keeping up standards.’ He wants to keep his accent behind the mask of silence.
He works at ‘being English’ with fear and hatred, but he wants to maintain the
false pride throughout his life by ignoring his real identity at all. The
acceptance of cultural hierarchy leads to some enduring personal dilemmas
resulting into identity crisis. Kiran Desai very minutely paints this through
Jemubhai. He follows British Culture blindly. He gets recruited as an ICS
(Indian Civil Service) member and tries to become an official keeping up the
British standards. It clearly shows his mind set-up that Britain represents a
superior society to India. Homi Bhabha maintains that the powerful influence of
a different culture will cause a tension between the desire of identity stasis
and the demand for a change in identity; and mimicry represents as a compromise
to this tension [Bhaba 86]. ‘Mimicry of the center’, as Ashcroft claims,
is “the periphery to immerse themselves in the imported culture, denying their
origins in an attempt to become ‘more English than the English’”[Ashcroft 4].
Same is the case with the judge. He studies hard only and only to get more
acquainted with western culture and tries to adopt the British standards in his
daily life. He takes afternoon tea every day, tries to speak English in a
natural way of a native speaker, covers his brown skin colour with the powder
puff but he is always in a dilemma, a struggle of identity. All of his efforts
to find a place among those who are in the center are futile. Though he holds a
highly prestigious position like ICS, he has to work only to reinforce the
domination of Britain.
The
situation becomes more pitiable, when Jemubhai returns to India; even to the
members of his family, he is like a ‘foreigner’. Even in India he uses the
powder puff .He does not use the puff to protect his skin, but to cover his
brown skin color. This is because of the racial discrimination he faced during
his education at Cambridge. On one hand, he could not find a room on rent in
England for several days because people in Britain do not want to entertain
Indians, on the other hand, when he returns to India, The members of his family
are perplexed because of his odd behavior and some even mock at him; The family
faces a Herculean struggle, especially between the judge and his wife - ‘a
sense of estrangement is set up between the judge and others’. Therefore, the
judge suffers a kind of double isolation. So he is neither recognized by the
colonial center nor by his own culture and family and a feeling of ‘identity
crises’ has trapped his mind. His failure to get into the center, his isolation
from the Indian culture and differentiation of his own family corners makes it a
difficult task for him to form any meaningful cultural identification and thus
suffers from ‘identity dilemma’. Though, later on, the judge gets an idea of
the impossibility of getting into the ‘centre’. Once, while eating the chicken,
his cook pronounces ‘roast bustard’ as ‘roast bastard’ reminds him of the
Englishman’s jokes on the way Indian uses Indianised English which makes him
that he is also among the Anglicized Indians who are the subjects of such
jokes. In spite of doing his level best in following an English lifestyle, he
remains as ‘the other’.
After
retirement, Jemubhai leads a lonely life till Sai’s parents are dead, the
convent sends her to Jemubhai, her maternal grandfather. When Sai arrives at
Kalimpong, he begins to confront his own sufferings as a victim of racism and
colonialism as well as the violence he perpetrated against his wife (Egelman).
Jemubhai does not have affection for Sai. But he finds something familiar about
her. She has the English accent and manners.
Sai
Mistry is a young girl whose education at an Indian convent school comes to an
end in the mid-1980s, when she is orphaned and sent to live with her
grandfather, a judge who does not want her and who offers no solace. Living in
a large, decaying house, her grandfather considers himself more British than
Indian, far superior to hard-working but poverty-stricken people like his cook,
Nandu, whose hopes for a better life for his son are the driving force in his
life.
She
is a westernized Indian brought up by English nuns. Jemu relates himself with
her as an alienated Indian living in India. 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 practises 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. Though Sai’s romance, at
sixteen, with Gyan, her tutor, provides her with an emotional escape from
Kalimpong.
Sai
finds that Jemu and her tutor Gyan are having different attitudes towards the
western culture threaten their relationship. Sai eats with a fork and Gyan uses
his hands as he is not aware of the western ways of eating. Later when he has a
dinner with the judge, his discomfiture with the fork and knife is shown again.
But, interestingly, when he dines at the judge’s house later on, he feels
embarrassed for the way he uses the fork and the knife. He suffers from an
inferiority complex but later on he refuses to adopt the western culture and
retreats to his own culture. Gyan joining in ‘Gorkha National Liberation
Front’, his admission to “the compelling pull of history and finding his pulse
leaping to something that felt entirely authentic”[Inheritance of Loss 160],
and recovers a sense of recognition by mocking at the judge’s mimicry of the
western lifestyle but such attempts are nothing than illusions as Ashcroft
maintains “within the syncretic reality of a post-colonial society it is
difficult to return to an idealized pure pre-colonial cultural condition”[Ashcroft
108]. The fact that today the whole world is toward a ‘Global Village’
makes cross-cultural exchanges and influences inevitable. Grown up in a convent
school, Sai is influenced by western culture and impressed by her grandfather’s
use of better English than Hindus but the idea that the Indian culture is
inferior is intolerable to her.
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”.[The Inheritance of Loss 37]
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 home. She visits the Gymkhana club library and reads To Kill a Mockingbird,
Cider with Rosie, and Life with Father. She admires the pictures of chocolaty
Amazon and stark Patagonia in the National Geographics, ignoring the naïve
beauty of Kalimpong. Lepchas, Rong pa, Fodongthing, and Nuzongnyue who are
created from the sacred Kanchenjunga snow are fast disappearing.
When
Sai reads the book “Vanishing Tribes,” she finds that she does not know
anything about the original inhabitants of Kalimpong. But she is least bothered
about it.
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”[Inheritance
of Loss 206]. Instead of reacting
fiercely to it, she wants to search the descendants of H. Hardless to stab the
life out of them.
The
dominance of western civilization over Indian culture lingers in India. In
colonial days, the Indians who accepted the cultural hierarchy appeared as to
be great admirers of western culture. The mind of many Indians is still hovered
by the thought that this is only the West which stands for the civilized. This
can be seen in many scenes, especially where Biju, the son of the judge’s cook,
makes an appearance. When Biju is in the U.S. embassy for a visa, we find the
Indians struggling to reach the counter window. One among them tries hard to
prove himself to a western civilized being so as to impress the U.S. officials:
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 [Inheritance of Loss 183].
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.
Gyan
and Sai roam around Kalimpong. When they visit a museum and views the exhibits
of Tenzing and Hilary, Gyan claims that Tenzing is the real hero. He is a
Sherpa, and without him Hilary couldn’t have carried the bags. Tenzing may be
the first. But Hilary has taken “the first step on behalf of the colonial
enterprise of sticking the flag on what is not theirs”. [Inheritance of Loss
161] Gyan asks Sai why she wants to celebrate Christmas. She has no answer
for the question. Gyan complains that they are Hindus and don’t celebrate Id,
Guru Nanak’s birthday, Durga Puja or Dussehra, or Tibetan New Year. He calls
them ‘slaves’. He rages that they are running after the West, getting nowhere
else. They appear fools to the whole world. They are copy cats, imitating the
English people. But the English don’t want them. Gyan feels anti-secular and
anti-Gandhian while shouting at Sai.
Gyan
asks whether Sai and others try to be so westernized. He says that the Indians
are ready to clean the toilets of English people even if they don’t want them.
He hates the company of Sai and her grandfather with the fake English accent
and the face powdered pink and white over the dark brown. He considers even the
certificate from the Cambridge as an object to be ashamed of.
The
GNLF starts the protests and announces strikes in Kalimpong. Gyan participates
in the rally. When Sai questions about it, he speaks angrily with her. He tries
to avoid seeing her. He thinks why he hates her recently. After a while, he
could come out with a few issues about her: She who could speak no language but
English and pidgin Hindi, she who could not converse with anyone outside her
tiny social stratum . . . . She who could not eat with her hands; could not
squat down on the ground on her haunches to wait for a bus; who had never been
to a temple but for architectural interest; never chewed a paan and had not
tried most sweets in the mithai shop, for they made her retch; she who left a
Bollywood film so exhausted from emotional wear and tear that she walked home
like a sick person and lay in pieces on the sofa; she who thought it vulgar to
put oil in your hair and used paper to clean her bottom; felt happier with
so-called English vegetables, snap peas, French beans, spring onions, and
feared – loki, tinda, kathal, kaddu, patrel, and the local saag in the market.
Gyan
has felt embarrassed while eating with Sai. He is puzzled about her finickiness
and curtailed enjoyment. She doesn’t 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 behavior. She considers it as a status symbol. Gyan thinks that she may be
masking it as a shame for the lack of Indianness.
Kiran
Desai shows her or at least tries to show her agony on such western domination.
Biju, Gyan, and Sai are a little different from the judge and the cook. While
the judge blindly follows the existing cultural hierarchy Biju, Gyan and Sai,
though trapped in, but at least, on some occasions seem to try to resist. Biju,
like other illegal immigrants from the ‘Third World’ works in the basements of
New York restaurants. He goes to the U.S. with his father’s ‘American dream’;
since it is always his father who dreams of the modernity of the U.S. and
thinks that it is too easy to get rich there. Throughout the novel, we find
that Biju is fond of modernity and tries to enjoy it but with the passage of
time the West reveals to him another part of it i.e. the disorderly and the
uncivilized side. One day, Biju is amazed to see that Indians ordering beef in
New York restaurants. This makes him abhorrent towards this disorderly
situation: “One should not give up one’s religion, the principles of one’s
parents and their parents before them. No, no matter what. You had to live
according to something”[Inheritance of Loss 143]. This repulsion is
little more obvious when later Biju becomes aware of his exploitation. He shows
his anger to the boss but, pathetic that this could not lessen his fondness of
modernity in the western society.
Desai
takes as her landscape 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 and the identity--or lack of it--pervades the novel. It is
summed up in one of its many ironic and affecting scenes. Father Booty, the
Catholic priest who, in his eager pursuit of natural beauty snapped a
photograph of a beautiful butterfly, is charged with spying and ordered out of
the country.
Unfortunately
for him the butterfly had landed near a military installation. Father Booty has
lived in India for 45 years, and is a stranger to the Europe now assigned as
his forced destination. Yet as Desai shows, he is not an Indian citizen--he is
a visitor who has never applied for Indian citizenship and even has forgotten
to renew his working permit. A transplant for decades, he has assumed a family
position to his land. Now he finds himself a displaced person ordered into
exile to his native country.
The
paradox of globalism is put in these words by Desai: ... each of them [Sai, Father Booty, and
Uncle Potty] separately remembered how many evenings they'd spent like this ...
how unimaginable it was that it would soon come to an end. Here Sai had learned
how music, alcohol, and friendship could create a grand civilization...
There
were concert halls in Europe to which Father Booty would soon return, opera
houses where music molded entire audiences into a single grieving or
celebrating heart. But could they feel [Father Booty among the Europeans] as
they did here? Hanging over the mountains; hearts half-empty, half-full,
longing for beauty, for innocence that
now knows with passion for the beloved or for the wide world or for worlds beyond this one....
Earlier,
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, however, 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.
Setting
young and old against a shifting portrait of India, Desai explores the
conflicts raging and inherent in a world where national identity no longer
suffices in any one guise. Desai's heroine wants to be Indian; she wants as
well to be a part of the modern world (or rather, knowing she is a part of
modernity, she wants not to lose the past that has cradled her). Her journey to
maturity must pass through several stations of conflicting loyalties, of
demanding allegiances, and of losses that will prove a gain of illuminating
experience.
Parallel
to the relationship of Sai and her grandfather, and Indian consciousness, is
the story of the judge's cook and the cook's son. The cook has never attempted
to shed his servant identity, even in a new state where caste has supposedly
been cast away; he is content to remain a loyal worker dependent on his master
(Desai does not even give him a name till the end of the novel, for until that
climactic moment he has been only a part of an institution, a depersonalized
person without individuality. Again, the old and the new, the privileged and
the underprivileged, the individual and the person-less society, are given
parts in Desai's fiction.
Sai
has several roads on which she travels, though she never leaves the continent
of India. At the conclusion of the novel, she knows she belongs to the country
whose hold she has doubted. The cook's son must also find his way in his
journey from India to America, and back/forward to maturity. In giving up what
might be gained, both Sai and the cook's son, Biju, inherit loss, but that loss
will prove a lasting gain.
Along
with these parallel passages of journey Desai allows her heroine the experience
of romance, friendship, trust and betrayal. Sai learns her lesson in romance
with a young tutor, who has conflicting loyalties to progressive thuggery and
conservative decency. She learns to cope with compassion and rejection, and to
comprehend the reasons for prejudice; she learns as well that to accept the
prejudice she has come to comprehend is a continuation of that prejudice.
Desai
ends her novel in a shocking scene that suggests a Voltaire-like garden in
which, like Candide, the cook's son and the young heroine Sai assume
satisfaction with their biographies--circumstance becomes fate. The ending is
provocative, since it comments on the paths facing modern India.
Which
road will be taken? What will be excluded? Will cosmopolitan, global progress
change the fabric of India so that the veils of the past no longer provide
alluring shelter? Will India turn from a world view back to an insular
nationalism? Sai (and Desai) know these big words--cosmopolitanism, globalism,
nationalism, materialism--are giant and vague concepts that must be personified
to have meaning. A mixed horizon awaits Desai's young and new Indians. Freedom
is their gain to be shared with a loss of certitude.
All
the characters in Inheritance of Loss long for identity, for love and
acceptance in an alien land. But they hardly are able to locate where they
belong to since postcolonial hybridity is, in the words of Radhakrishnan, “a
frustrating search for constituency and a legitimate political identity. They
have developed a sense of loss, though in different degrees. The characters are
all victims of the so called postcolonial dilemmas. However, eventually it is
in Biju that the reader finds some hope of ‘true’ happiness in his supposedly
reunion with his father. It is pertinent that the novel opens with a poetic
description of a serene and peaceful landscape dominated by the awe inspiring
beauty of Kanchenjunga in the North East Himalaya.” [The Inheritance of Loss
51]. All day, the colours had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water
creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and
depths” and it also ends with an optimistic note when Sai saw the meeting of
the cook and his broken son Biju taking place: “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
Inheritance of Loss 8] Probably Desai wants to say that life, in spite of
all its sufferings and problems are worth living and one should always learn
from mistakes. One is often attracted by the material prosperity and comforts
that the west seems to offer. But, in spite of the backwardness, poverty and
illiteracy in one’s own land; one can probably derive a sense of belonging and
identity in one’s own land only. Uprooting from one’s own land and re-rooting
in an alien land is a painful process and Desai had successfully delineated the
dilemmas faced by her characters in their longing to find a green pasture in a
foreign land.
Works
Cited:
1.
Ashcroft Bill, Gareth Griffiths and
Helen Tiffin, eds. The Empire writes Back 2nd
Ed. New York:
Rutledge, 2002.
2.
Bhaba Homi K The Location of
Culture, London: Rutledge, 1994.
3.
Desai Kiran, The Inheritance of
Loss, Canada: Penguin, 2006.
4. Gauri Vishwanathan, The Mask of
Conquest, Columbia University Press, 1989
5. Harleman Ann, “Luminous Family Saga Bridges Eras, Cultures.” Rev.
of The
Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai, The Boston Globe 4th
Jan 2006.
6. Kehe, Marjorie “Hearts in Search of
Home; Questions of Identity Weave
Throughout this Rich Tragimic Second Novel by
Kiran Desai.” The Inheritance
of Loss
by Kiran Desai, The Christian Science Monitor 24th Jan
2006.
7. Pathak, R S Modern Indian Novel in
English, New Delhi: Creative Books: 1999.
8.
Said, Edward, Orientalism, New
York: Penguin, 2003.
9. Wickramagamage, Carmen, “Relocation of
Positive Act: The Immigrant
Experience in Bharati Mukharjee’s Novels.” Diaspora
2.2 (1992): 171-200.
