Kiran Desai’s Booker prize winning novel The Inheritance of Loss (2006) examines the immigrant’s feelings of England and America from South Asian countries to the other parts of the world, where the life of Indians is Westernized. The novel exposes its literary value in a new type of immigration in a globalized labour market. The novel not only shows the remarkable difference between the poor and rich in the global earth but also the immigrant experience of racialization of cross ethnic Diaspora in America. Desai links unusual geography of migration and Diaspora, showing that just as globalization creates new social and economic dividend, it also enables migrants to challenge ethnic and social barriers by forging cross cultural connections.The novel explores the nostalgia of the writer’s childhood being in India. Desai, in her portrayal of India, belongs to the third generation of writers. The novelist employs the omniscient narrative technique. The subject matter of the novel attracted the attention of the western readers. Events of the past such as Judge’s early life and marriage or details of Sai’s parents and her childhood are treated as flash back of characters.
The density of the aspects of the novel is indicated through the title. The word “loss” relates to what people miss in the contemporary life. Desai explores the aspects of “inheritance” and “loss”. The loss that Sai’s father, an Air force officer, who is about to become the first Indian to fly into space is moving. His loss is due to his untimely demise in an accident along with his wife in Moscow. Sai, aged six, is admitted to the convent school which she apparently hastes. Sai becomes an orphan. Sai’s mother was disowned by her parents, because she runs away with a Parsi boy and gets married against the will of her parents. Thus the tradition of orphanage continued through three generation in the family, this lead to a sense of rootless which is inherited from generation to generation.
Sai inherits the rootedness of her parents after their death. The solid notion of the homeland is a familiar and conventional view human being hold innately in their consciousness. It signifies the unquestionable home or home land in human life as a place of origin and means of orientation to the world. This idea considers home a single and territorially fixed place, a centre of one’s private and personal life over which one has full control. This home is described as a safe and secure haven to belong to and live in and also to leave and return if necessary. It can be a house, a single building, a locality, a nation or collection of nation and even a sense of cultural identity. Kiran Desai provides an example of this, citing “Ghorkhas for Ghorkhas” the slogan of the Nepali movement in India.
We can read, The Inheritance of Loss as an attempt by Kiran Desai to play with the traditional concept of home. She displays here a Diasporic world with people moving from India to the West and returning to India again, thus turning the solid sense of home into something more fluid. Desai instead of grouping herself among the theorists, who advocates an exalted image of Diaspora, treats the ideal experience rather pessimistically in her novel. She conceives it as a type of consciousness and examines the various loopholes in the phenomenon of voluntary Indian migration. Originally the term Diaspora referred to the Greek-speaking Jews, who were dispersed from the Holy land among the Gentiles in the sixth century BCE. This new type of the depiction of Diaspora reflects the latest notion of migration, which is that, instead of elevating their circumstance. The Diasporic individual tries to welcome multiple sense of home, giving up the real, concrete sense of it and at the same time feels an emotional pull to the far away old country which has some claims to his or her being. This pain-infused duality creates a desire in them either to return to the past eventually or to make his or her presence felt by the home community through frequent contacts. Desai critically examines this problematic home or new home issue through the dramatization of the anguished consciousness of JemubhaiPoplal Patel.
We find JemubhaiPoplal Patel, widely known as the judge, in the novel presenting at Cho-Oyu in the foothills of the Kanjenjunga at Kalimpong. His hidden life unfolds before us like film. Jemubhai from the very beginning of his career was a bright student of the mission school. He desires to wear a white wig at the top a dark face, achieving a space at the top of the prestige etc. This longing to be part of the colonial power structure as one of the most powerful men in India in turn germinates in him a series of desires. He wants to attain higher education at Cambridge, to benefit materially, to achieve social elevation and thus creates a happy home-abroad linkage between India and England.
Jemubhai is also a masked man constantly putting on white powdered wig over white powdered face. His brown skin and white mask feared and disliked by his family and former friends, are expressive of his split identity and desires to occupy the two place on currently even in his ancestral home. He attempts to stands his duality on Nimy, appointing an English teacher for her. But Nimy silently refuses to become like him, he falls into the habits of answering all her silent disobedience with severe beatings. He finally finds satisfaction in making her utterly homeless. Cho-Oyu does not prove to be a home, a place to be re-rooted, either structurally or emotionally. Here, he plays chess with himself and love only Mutt, the dog. He finds in Gyan, an ambitious Nepali student and Sai’s tutor, his mirror image.
In the same manner, but under different circumstances Biju, the postcolonial subaltern suffers a lot like Jemubhai, the colonial subject. In the split narratives of the novel, we are introduced to Biju in New York, where he had arrived approximately three years earlier as the luckiest boy in the whole wild world. He is the representative figure of the turmoil-form third world minds, who desires to attain the American dream by hook or crook. He belongs to the second wave of the less-skilled Indian migrant, who used to consider America the symbol of utopia and the Promised Land that offers equal opportunity to all. The cook believes that unlike India, New York is a very spacious city with enough space, food, comfort and facilities for all. He has had a dream to see his beloved only son Biju there and transmitted his desire to him. He feels like the happiest father in the World when Biju obtained the Visa. His heart swells with pride dreaming that what Sai’s parents and the Judge had failed to do, his son would accomplish. But Biju’s displacement creates an ordeal of homelessness damaging his identity painfully. He confronts a stressful alien environment in New York and experiences social exclusion as an illegal immigrant which inhibits him from publically calling it his own name. He finds himself marginalized to the shadow class who are contemned to movement forever. He always moves from one odd job to another and becomes bitterly split inside experiencing the flustered conditions of the restaurant. Biju gradually becomes terrified at the unsympathetic treatment of the workers there. After his arrival, his father’s friend Nandu rents him a place in a basement in Harlem and abandons among the foreigners. He has neither language skill nor the capability to toil all day long like other workers. He feels cornered among workers from innumerable countries and stick to his day-held prejudices about the Pakistani’s as “Paki”. Biju’s mindset creates a serious dilemma in his introduction to an ultimate intimacy with the black man, Zanzibar Muslim Saeed. However Saeed functions as the optimistic lens through which Biju sometimes tries to look at transcultural life.
Biju’s anxiety increases, and wounded his heart, already severely assaulted by the dry transistor and utilitarian human relationship in New York. He founds a profound loneliness in this big city like the homeless man or homeless chicken which in the park scratches. At this juncture, Biju becomes nostalgic as going home is the only rout to restoring his soul to its desired dignified place. Biju’s nostalgic links him back to his motherland, to his cultural identity to his presence Indianite. In his mood of nostalgia, Kalimpong visits him, studded with memories of joyful pastoral days together with his grandmother. He recollects his carefree exploration of exotic nature with friends and his peaceful closeness with beloved Pitaji. He is vexed by their faith as an immigrant family, this fate contemned them to go far away from their homes but he feels an unrelenting attraction to his cultural value. Biju can already envisage that his future here will be empty. If he stays here after ten or fifteen years he will see the parents had gone and the child was too late worse tragedies that the love gone. He also comes to three conclusions about his migrant self, firstly, having no family and friends here. He is the only one who suffers the pain of displacement so his life here is empty and meaningless. Secondly, it will not be possible for him to manufacture a fake version of himself like other fellow Indians in America. And finally he feels that he cannot bear the burden of his gigantic monotonous self-consciousness and self-pity anymore. Like a giant sized monster, it has been expanding day-by-day and cannot be reduced. So he desires to relocate to the national space where he will never be the only one in a photograph.
But return to India is not an easy decision to take. In thinking what to do, he feels a burden of double consciousness. Now psychic struggle is not only between curing India and callous America, but real India and ideal India. Ideal India is for him the beloved father and the joyful, happy memories in lovely Kalimpong to go back to, and real India means the unfeeling reality of being destitute, deprived and unprivileged Indian. He wonders at his father’s letter that presses him to say and make money and even to help more local boys cross the Atlantic.
However eventually Biju returns, we find him in the gulf Air plane promising to begin anew. He is also in a home making fantasy planning to buy a taxi with the hidden money in different parts of his cloth and to build a new house with solid walls and a sturdy roof that will endure seasonal cloud bursts. When he gets of the plane in Calcutta, its dust appears to him warm, mammalian. A mixed feeling of sadness, tenderness, oldness and sweetness entrances him and feels like a baby falling asleep in his mother’s lap.As an immigrated individual, Jemubhai is dislocated thrice from Piphit to London to Piphit and Cho-Oyu and Biju twice from Kalimpong to New York to Kalimpong again. Both tragically fail to grow any lasting spatial and emotional connection with any of their homes as the displacement of desire repeatedly occurs in their lives. No space proves to be home and no home offers homeliness. They are the victimized products of their time, which has ruthlessly split and doubled their consciousness and snatched among all the possibilities of being re-rooted and finding peace at any place.
The novel tells the story of two different kinds of Diaspora, that of exploited immigrants in New York and an aging elitists cluster of Indians settled after retirement in a hill town, wonderfully presented in Sai’s grandfathers among others. Characters belonging to both these worlds face challenges of a globalized society that is fraught with increasingly separatist and nationalistic agendas. Desai’s novel describes human migration and show that it has always been part of the human experience. The realistic portrayal of the lives in two continents Diasporic on multiple levels demonstrates a deeper understanding of the human condition. Though Kiran Desai left India as a teenager in the 1980, she has been deeply rooted in her nationalism and the novel is a study on a human emotion and relationship. Reading the novel makes one feel the pangs of Indian immigrant in America. To present her characters deeply rooted nationalism, Desai had to part from her American style of writing. In an interview, she spoke of the reason for her choosing the story of immigrants in New York. “The novel does not have a geographical location but an emotional location” she opined. Hence she wrote something very close to her sensibility as an immigrant. She further affirmed her Indian roots through the various characters portrayed. She throws the light on the problems and plights of the Indians going abroad in search of their lots. It is a well acknowledge fact that, Indian laborers by their hard work played a significant role to make the West beautiful and developed. But their invaluable contribution is often denied and disregarded. Exploring the hopes and expressions of Biju and his father Nandu, the novel reveals the social and political history in India.
Illegal immigration to the USA is massive in scale. On one hand the presence of so many aliens is a powerful testament to the attractiveness of America. Throughout the story of Biju in New York, we saw a lot of other immigrants from different parts of the worlds like Africa, Pakistan, India, Punjab etc. On the other hand it is a sign of law dangerously open our borders are. Typical illegal aliens come to America primarily for better job and in the process add value to the US economy. Biju is an example of this. He migrated to America for seeking a better future. However they also take away value by weakening the legal and national security environment. The real problem presented by illegal immigration is security, not the supposed threat to the economy. Indeed efforts to curtail the economic influence of migrants actually worsen the security dilemma by driving many migrant workers underground, thereby encouraging the culture of illegality. The home country also faces specific challenges in regards to immigration. In many cases immigrants move to another country to provide to positive changes for their future. Reasons to immigrate can include the standard of living not being high enough, the value of wages being too low, a slow job market or a lack of educational opportunities. A home country must analyze immigration statistics to determine and address why citizen are moving to other countries. While a citizen is living in another country, if they receive an education and create a solid life, their individual success can also be beneficial to the home country, if they use their acquired skill to make a different. Many individual do not forget their home country and continue to support family members financially through the income from the country they migrate to. Here Biju saves all his earning in different part of his clothes and wishes to buy something for his family when he returns to his home country.
There are lots of problems and challenges that the figure has been facing. The most important challenge is the difficulty speaking and learning English. United States is not known for being multilingual. While most refugees and immigrants are happy to take whatever job is available when they first enter the country, finding a job and slowly moving up the ladder, is incredibly difficult. Refugees and immigrants are easy victim for discrimination and exploitation in the work place. In this novel both Biju and Jemubhai were discriminated due to their colour and race. Biju constantly shifting from all of his working place and he had to face a lot of humiliation from his co-workers. One of his owner’s wife remarked him by smelling curry and brought to him soap and perfumes. Undocumented immigrants particularly assumed they have no right and workers who can’t speak English are easy targets. Undocumented immigrants have an especially difficult time accessing service largely because they are afraid of being deported. Consequently people will avoid seeing the doctor or reaching out for service like legal guidance when they are badly needed. That is why Biju had not got any hospitality when his leg had broken from Gandhi’s café. He feared that while he attended the hospital or doctor he will be deported or punished. Cultural barriers transcend each and every aspects of life for refugees and immigrants. We find that Biju’s friend’s attitude, “without sex, he will not be a man”. They encourage Biju to engage some sexual activity. But Biju cannot join with them.
Unemployment rate for non-Western immigrants of both the first and second generation is higher than that for native people. Here focusing on Biju he does not have a proper and permanent job. Day-by-day he moves from one job to another. The average non-Western immigrant has less money to spend than the average people.
A host country experiences both advantages and challenges as a result of immigration. When immigrants move to a new country, they are focused with many unknown, including finding employment and housing. Housing is a more important challenge. The Judge and Biju, wandered a lot for finding a shelter. Finally the Judge got a house of his friend and Biju also got a place for staying whish filled with rats and such creatures. Adjusting new laws, cultural norms and possibility a new language are difficult for an immigrant. It can be a challenge for a host country to assimilate immigrants in to society and provide the necessary support.
Immigration does cause an increase in the labor force. This can impact greater quantities of them if the migrants are generally the same type of workers and immigrant in large enough numbers so as to significantly expand the supply of labor. Some believes that immigration brings many advantages to a country both for the economy and society as a whole.
The displacement of Biju, the son of the cook is more important than any other characters in the novel. He manages to get a visa. Biju joining a crowd of Indians scrambling reach the visa counter at the US embassy is one of the most narrowing scenes in the novel. However, in the end, Biju become an illegal immigrant in New York does odd jobs to survive. The irony is that his father, the cook in the Judge’s house, thinks that he is doing well and is proud of the fact that his son is in America. “He works for the Americans” the cook had reported the content of the letter to everyone in the market. But for Biju America is a world of frustration and helplessness. He was taken to America as a mechanic but he ends up as a waiter in a restaurant.
On the contrary, his friend Saeed has a carefree life. He has not been affected by the agonies of an immigrant. But Biju is a lost man in the new world. Saeed is very adaptable and can lead a life of ease without any frustration. Biju’s longing for home continues but Saeed never thinks of leaving America. Biju was so restless sometimes that he could barely stand to stay in his skin. After work, he crossed the river not the part where the dogs played madly in hanky-sized squares with their owners in the fracas picking up feces, but to where, after singles, long skirted and sleeved girl walked in an old fashioned manner with the old looking men wearing black suit and hates as if they had to keep their past with them at all times so as to not lose it. He walked to the far end where the homeless man often slept in a dens chamber of green that seemed to grow not so much from soil as from a fertile city crowd. A homeless chicken also lived in the park. Every now and then Biju saw it scratching in a homey manner in the dirt and felt as a pang for village life.
Saeed is in fact a foil to Biju. The two characters are juxtaposed together to show the difference between two types of immigrants. Saeed does not react to Biju with suspicion or hate, like the Pakistani that Biju had worked with. America is a melting pot for Saeed. But he is also on the born of the dilemma as there are conflicts in his mind about his identity. He explains why he does not eat pork, “first I am Muslim, then I am Zanzibari, there I will be American”. He is in fact not a true Muslim. He marries a woman just to get a green card. He then tells to Biju he has met another woman to marry. Desai compares Biju and Saeed to show how they handle the dilemmas faced by an immigrant. Saeed seems to be more pragmatic while Biju is sort of idealistic as he resists the Western culture in which he is trapped in and longs for his homeland India. The writer seems to suggest that people like Biju faces repeated miseries and misfortunes and those like Saeed do not bother and they survive in an alien culture at any cost. Even the minor characters Noni, Lola, Uncle Potty, princess Mrs.Sen and Mummun are all inheritors of loss. They are all inherited by a sort of imbalance by leading a dual life which profoundly affects their thoughts and feelings. All are post-colonial characters forced into contact with culture in conflict. They are all trapped by their peculiar ambivalence environment that they are forced in to.
All immigrants are concerned about their safety and security in a foreign land. In the beginning usually they depend up on their relatives who are settled there long back. But in the case of Biju he has no relation to support him. He has to fight his battle on his own. His relation with Harish –Harry shows an immigrant’s concern for safety. He broke his leg and Harish-Harry wants him back to India. He is a broken man both emotionally and materially. His return to India is equally very disturbing. Back in India the GNLF struggle is already in progress. His father does not know about his coming back. Yet in another traumatic scene, his father goes to Kalimpong to get to know about his son from whom all forms of communication have stopped due to the GNLF agitation. He fears that his son is no more. Finally when he reaches Kalimpong, Biju does not find his father. He also lost everything as a group of robbers have taken away all the money and the things that he had brought.Biju sat there in terror of what he had worn of being alone in the forest and of the men coming after him again. He could not stop thinking of all that he had brought and loss of the money he had hidden under fake soles in his shoes of his wallet. Suddenly he felt an old throbbing of the knee that he had hurt slipping on Harrish-Harry’s floor.
The characters in Desai’s novel are always negotiating the boundaries of the past, present and future. Jemubhai’s and Biju’s departures drive from an Indian tradition of mail mobility associated with status elevation. For example Jemubhai’s role is constructed from his childhood, when the boy is sent to school on account of his being the family’s single male inheritor. While attending Bishop’s collage on a scholarship, the boy becomes attracted for the incomprehensible greatness of the British sovereignty. His admiration for the imperial rule is shaped under the auspicious of Queen Victoria’s portrait. The parent’s reasoning portrays Jemubhai holding a higher rank in the judiciary system and thus compensate for the father’s marginal status within it. Indeed as Jemubhai returns as a member of the Indian civil service, the son’s social triumph is also shared by his father. Consequently the neighbors express their admiration in envy soaked voices while Mr. Patel feels like a king holding court. This diffusion of power consolidates the father’s status within the community, revealing a collective Indian equation of the British space with the idea of authority. Similarly Jemubhai’s future father-in-law is keen on marrying his daughter to an Indian connected to the West. This alliance is considered a step forward on the social ladder.
In Biju’s scenario of displacement, Biju’s father considers that working in America is the ultimate Indian achievement. The layer of successful Indian immigrants in the US has been paralleled by a category of urban workers like taxi drivers, hotel, restaurant, factory workers or clerk who has not achieved the American dream. These individual experience lack of security and receive low incomes. The novel presents contemporary illegal Indian immigration to America as a mass phenomenon aided by an industry of fabricating fake identities. The procedures for obtaining an American visa entitle a series of humiliation accepted by the Indian applicants. These facts along with Biju’s example illustrate the powerful appeal of the American hegemony based on the idea of affluence. Biju’s father associates the idea of welfare with Biju’s access to be American world imagined as the provider of economic advantageous. For examples the cook conceives America as the land of water and electricity and the best country in the world. Biju’s contact with the Western space elicits the local community respect for his father. Thus while Biju barely survives in New York the cook proudly informs his neighbors that his son work for the Americans. The improvements of the cook’s status consist in his receiving small material offers in exchange for promises to help other Indian immigrate. Thus migration to America as well as migration to Britain modifies a local hierarchy, proclaiming equality between otherwise socially different categories.
Thus the cook is proud that both he and the doctor have their sons abroad. This common element is perceived as a weakness of the social different entitled by their different professions. The discussion has so far established that Indian migration to the UK and the USA is conceived as an opportunity to elevate the family status both in the area of colonialism and after decolonization. While the colonized Indians hope to transgress the local hierarchies by taking over the badge of imperial authority independent Indians hope to improve their status by accumulating capital in the era of decolonization stressing the Indians antipodal Western allegiances.
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