Kiran Desai,the Indian born American writer, belongs to the twentieth century, is born in 1971. She is an Indian English writer. Her mother Anita Desai is another well-known Indian English writer. Kiran Desai and her contemporary women writers such as JumbaLahiri, Meena Alexander, Anita Nair, Ruth Prawar and Arundadi Roy etc are usually focusing on the post-colonial experience. They tried to expose the difficulties and struggle suffered by the people after the post colonialism in India. Although Kiran has not lived in India since she was fourteen she returns to the family house in Delhi in every year. She comes to literary criticism in 1997. Her first novel is Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard .She says that“The characters of my story are entirely fictional, but the journey(of my grandparents and my own provide insight in to what it means to travel between East and West and it is this I wanted to capture. The fact that lived in the particular life was not accident, it was my inheritance”. Her grandfather was a refugee in Bangladesh. Her paternal grandfather comes from Gujarat and educated in England. Her maternal grandmother was German but left before the World War second and never returned. From this, we can understand that her families even from her grandparents are victims of migration. May be that is why she become interested in Diasporic and Migration themes. Desai moved from India to England and from there she moves to America, then she became a permanent resident of United States. These multicultural, socio cultural and educated background helped her in shaping and developing the plot and characters of her work. Kiran Desai emerged in the literary world as a good Diasporic writer with her unique multicultural background. She is the permanent resident of United States of America with deep root in the rich cultural links with her Native land. That is why, she is known as Indian English writer.
Indian English writing or Indian English literature is the literary work produced by the Indians in English language or the Indians in other countries. Here, Desai is natively an Indian, but she wrote in English language like her mother. The Indian English literature was originated when the Native people began to communicate with the Colonial people. The colonizers taught Indians the English language for their own benefits and ease of communication, but later the same language became as a weapon to drive out the colonizers. The other Indian English writers include R.K Narayanan, MulkrajAnand, Raja Rao and Salman Rushdie, Rabindra Nath Tagore etc.
The Inheritance of Loss is her second novel published in the late 2006 and it won the 2006 Booker Prize Award. The main themes of the novel are post colonialism, migration, gender, ethnicity, racism, globalization, multiculturalism etc. Although a novel is a fictional prose work of considerable length, this novel has a link to her life. We mentioned that she is a Diasporic and migrating writer because she also is known as “The daughter of Diaspora”. She experienced the bitterness and suffering of migration that helped her to get a good acceptance for her novel. When she got the Booker Prize for her work, she becomes unlucky, because she cannot share her happiness and excitement with her mother, because her mother was in a remote area of India at the time. She cannot connect to her mother because her mother was in a village without a phone or TV. This novel consists of fifty-three chapters and about four hundred pages. The length of a novel is a major criterion for judging and ranking them. So the novel “Inheritance of Loss” well deserved the Booker Prize. There is a plot and story inside a novel. Story and plot is not same thing and it does not co-inside always. Here in this novel, Desai describing lot of flash backs. So in such a situation the story and the plot inside the novel do not a co-inside. The setting of the story is a beautiful description about the outdoor scene. The places mentions in the novel are not fictional, but the existing place. But the characters are fictional.
Desai uses the technique of Third person omniscient narration to describe her story. In third person narrative technique, the narrator knows all the thoughts and feelings of the characters. When writing in third person omniscient technique, the author will move from characters to characters, allow us to interpret the events in several voices, but always maintain an omniscient distant. When the author writes in third person omniscient technique, the audience is able to know and see everything. So that the reader able to see in to the minds of characters and can easily interpret the plot of the story. This technique allows the audience to adopt multiple voices in a story. They can write in the voice of an adult, child, man or women etc. By explaining the story in different voices, we can see the story in another depth. We can also able to have more objective interpretations of the events. The third person omniscient technique allows the author for a better story telling. Because there are multiple characters and several plot lines and many different interpretations to the same event. In contemporary fiction, third person limited, where we see only through one characters point of view which is much more common than third person omniscient narration. Desai used the style of both dialogue and narrative method and also narrating the past. The language of her novel is simple and standard vocabulary. She also inserts some Hindi words in between the English words in order to show the effect of migration in language. Theme is the main topic of a novel that developed through the characters.
The general themes of Desai’s novels are Diaspora and Migration. In this novel The Inheritance of Loss the main theme is migration. Migration is the movement of people from one place to another. Migration can be inter-national or intra-national. Inter-national means movements between different countries. Inter-national migrants further classified as legal immigrant, illegal immigrants, and refugees. Intra-national means movements within a country, such as between state, provinces, cities or municipalities. An internal migrant is someone who moves to a different administrative territory often from rural to urban areas. People migrate in different ways and for many different reasons. People move in order to improve their standard of living, to give their children a better opportunity, or to escape from poverty and conflict. Today, with modern transportation and communications, more people are motivated and able to move.Illegal immigration means, it refers to a person moving across national borders in a way that violates immigration law. Such a person may legally go abroad and refuse to return when demanded by the country of origin. However, a person who enters another country as an illegal immigrant may be sent back.
Migrant literature is the writing about the migrants. It is a topic which commands growing interest in literary studies since 1980. Although any experience of migration would qualify an author to be classed under migrant literature, the author does not necessarily need to migrate to another country for writing about migration. Migration literature often focuses on the social context in the migrant’s country of the origin, which prompts them to leave, experience of migration, mixed reception which they may receive in the country of arrival, on the experience of racism and, hostility, sense of rootedness and search for identity. Colonialism often creates a setting which results in the migration of large numbers of people. The migration literature and post-colonial literature show some considerable overlap. But not all the migration took place in the colonial period and not all post-colonial literature deals with migration.
A number of categories developed for discussing immigrant literature. Displacement is a key term in post-colonial theory which applies to all immigrant literature. It refers both physical displacement and social, cultural displacement. It is possible to distinguish the emigrant perspective of the migrant. An emigrant perspective is that, they focus for the permanent residence in the country of arrival. “First generation migration” means the migration of those who as adult themselves made the move from one country to another.“Second generation migration” are the children of migrants who were born in the country of arrival. Some critics also have been used the term “Third generation migrants”. But it is questionable whether this is meaningful.
Migration literature is a branch of literature that deals specifically with topics surrounding migration. The term migration literature also implies that the subject matter will have to do with migration or the life and culture of other nations and people. In the case of migration literature, a great deal of focus is directed on the host or receiving society. So migration literature less emphasizes on the author’s biography. A text is classified as migrant literature according to its thematic element and narrative perspective and not according to the biography of the author. Migration is not limited to the migration of workers, it also includes the international migration. The author must not necessarily have migrated herself in order to write migration literature, but in the case of Kiran Desai, she herself migrated to America from India. The terms migration literature and migrant literature have some advantages and draw backs. The perception and reception of migrant literature are shaped by traditional division and assumptions. That is, it is still regarded as autobiographical. The author of migration and migrant literature oriented themselves primarily towards their host society and contribute to their nation’s literature, while at the same time maintaining the affiliation to their home country. By regarding as an autobiographical work, the migrant literature is paid by little attention.
Desai wrote the novelInheritance of Loss from the historical background of post colonialism. Post colonialism is a theory which emerged as a reaction to the domination of the world by European colonizers. Post colonialism deals with the effects of colonization on the culture and society. Most post-colonial writers have the experience of migration. Post-colonial literature is labeled to the literature written by the people living in countries formerly colonized by other. Some scholars argue that the term post colonialism denotes the work written after colonization not only those created after independence. Post-colonial literature re-examines the colonial literature especially social discourse between the colonizers and colonized that shaped and produced literature.
There are several aims behind the publication of the novel TheInheritance of Loss. It deals with the quest for individual identity and struggle for search for once root in a world where the concept of home has undergo a significant change. The novel contains 53 chapters which include the anxiety and tension of the people living in two different worlds. Some common historical factors like colonialism and century old economic and cultural subjugation of the third world by the west have affected the characters and their destiny. Through this work Desai tries to show what it means to live between East and West and what it means to be an immigrant. She tries to show what happens when a western element is introduced in to a country that is not of west. The frustration and difficulties suffered by the poor people, who put into a wealthier country and how it affects their thought, feeling, thinking, attitudes etc. The Malayalam edition of The Inheritance of Loss is named NashtangaludeAnandaravakasham translated by Andrew Philip.
Exile appears both as a liberating experience as well as a shocking experience. Whatever may be the geographical location of the exiled writer, in the mental landscape of the writer is forever trapped among the string attached to poles that pull in opposite direction. The only way writer can rescue oneself from the trap is by writing or by other forms of artistic expressions. The relief is only a temporary condition for no writers work is as sharp as a wedge that can snap the string that history-makers have woven. Even if a writer consciously tries to justify one and simultaneously, but unconsciously there arises a longing for the other.Prominent in exile literature are the works of writers who were made to flee their countries by oppressive regimes. Many writers get out of their native land because either the weather does not suit them or the society does not suit them. Exile in the form of migration has been the cause of literature. Internal exile is another form of exile that many writers face. It is the most damning of all exiles for in this case the exile stay in their own country, and yet is alienated. In fact it was the colonial powers that made most people aliens in their own country, firstly through linguistic displacement. It is in this colonial context that the native writers emerged the various sub-genres of English literature. Writers like MulkrajAnand, R.K.Narayanan and Raja Rao who establishes Indian English literature. Even after the colonized countries got independence, writers of many of those countries still faced a state of exile either because of the dictatorship in their countries or because of racial persecution, or because of ethnic cleansing, or because they chose to migrate. The Indian English writer notably Raja Rao become an expatriate even before the independence of the country. G.V Desani was born in Kenya and lived in England, India, and USA. Kamala Markandaya married an English man and lived in Britain. Indian English writers like Anita Desai, Shashi Taroor, BaratiMukarjee, Rohinton Mistry and JumbaLahiri have all made their names while residing in abroad. The non-resident Indian writers have explored their sense of displacement. They have given more prominence to the exploration by dealing not only a geographical dislocation but also a socio-cultural sense of displacement. Their concerns are global concerns as today’s world isafflicted with the problems of immigrants, refugees, and all other exiles. These exilic states give birth to the sense of displacement and lack of identity.
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