Inheritance of Loss

A few weeks ago, the New York Times pub­lished an arti­cle in the travel sec­tion about the cur­rent agi­ta­tion here in Dar­jeel­ing. Sarah Besky, the anthro­pol­o­gist I’ve been hang­ing out with, had a let­ter in response to the arti­cle pub­lished in the Times yes­ter­day. The orig­i­nal arti­cle heav­ily ref­er­ences a 2006 award win­ning fic­tion novel by Kiran Desai. I agree with the New York Times book review in that Desai’s The Inher­i­tance of Loss does an impres­sive job of con­vey­ing the main char­ac­ters’ frus­tra­tions with the empty promise of moder­nity. Their expe­ri­ence reflects the con­fus­ing milieu of mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism in the wake of colo­nial­ism and the sub­se­quent spread of globalization.

In fact, Desai’s novel seems to argue that such mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism, con­fined to the West­ern metrop­o­lis and acad­eme, doesn’t begin to address the causes of extrem­ism and vio­lence in the mod­ern world. Nor, it sug­gests, can eco­nomic glob­al­iza­tion become a route to pros­per­ity for the down­trod­den.[NYT]

Is Desai’s insen­si­tive treat­ment of the Gorkhas of Kalimpong a reflec­tion of her own self-loathing cre­ated by a life in this milieu? A Guardian arti­cle about back­lash against the book points to this possibility.

The Inher­i­tance of Loss is not auto­bi­og­ra­phy, but there are par­al­lels with Desai’s life. The author has a per­sonal his­tory with Kalimpong and has admit­ted in recent inter­views that the book was “close” to her own family’s story. [Guardian]

I am not sure how Desai could have writ­ten this book from the per­spec­tive of the wealthy class such that Kalimpong and Dar­jeel­ing res­i­dents wouldn’t feel slighted. That said, it seems she made lit­tle effort to lis­ten to the other side. The other side con­sists of the major­ity of the pop­u­la­tion who are once again engaged in demand­ing the rights that were sought dur­ing the 1980’s agi­ta­tion. Yes, this is a work of fic­tion and artis­tic license is due. When the work becomes the West’s main source on this region and that period in his­tory, so much so that the New York times quotes the book to explain cur­rent events, we have a prob­lem. The lives of the main char­ac­ters, an orphaned daugh­ter of astro­nauts, an Oxford edu­cated Gujarati, and a young undoc­u­mented immi­grant to New York City, are care­fully posi­tioned in the con­text of recent world his­tory and cur­rent event. Why then can’t the major­ity of the pop­u­la­tion of the book’s set­ting be afforded the same con­tex­tual footing?

He had been recruited to bring his coun­try­men into the mod­ern age, but he could only make it him­self by cut­ting them off entirely, or they show up reproach­ful, point­ing out to him the lie he had become. – Kiran Desai, Inher­i­tance of Loss

Vimal Khawas gives a lev­el­headed and metic­u­lous run­down of the dis­crep­an­cies between Desai’s novel and the real­ity of Kalimpong and the 1980’s agi­ta­tion in a com­ment to this blog post.