The Inheritance of Loss
by Kiran Desai (2006).

INTRODUCTION
The Inheritance of Loss is a novel by Indian author Kiran Desai, written in English and published in 2006. Desai won the man Booker Prize that year for it. The lives of ordinary people in India at the beginning of the XXth century until present days are told with anunsophisticated, natural and at times humorous language. The big themes in the novel are the difficulty that is involved in trying to live between East and West and the consequences of introducing foreign elements in a given culture. Readers are filled with emotion, amusement, pity and annoyance while reading the life stories of a bunch of characters quite dissimilar among themselves but all related in one way or other. The news is that living between East and West is not always easy and that the introduction of foreign elements in a given culture is not always welcome and positive; the novel by Desai is worth reading to illuminate the reasons for this.

Main body
What first captured my attention in the novel by Indian author Kiran Desai from 2006 was its name. The Inheritance of Losssounds likea highly significant name; significant and at the same time mysterious. It is loaded with reminiscences of the past andseems to point toward experiences, sorrows, joys and “losses” passed on from ancestors to descendants.

In an article about the results of the Man Booker Prize 2006 published by “The Guardian” on October 11^th 2006, John Ezard quotes words from previous interviews with the winner Ms Kiran Desai. She asserts that her title “speaks of little failures passed down from generation to generation.” Also, that

The novel tries to capture what it means to live between East and West. It explores what happens when a Western element is introduced into a country that is not from the West, which is what happened of course during colonial times and is happening again with India’s new relationship with the States. (John Ezard: 2006)

Therefore, my research was governed by the wish todelve into these matters namely, the little failures or lossescaused by living between two cultures and by the introduction of Western elements in India ever since colonial times till now. I had the feeling that sense of deprivation might be rathermeaningful given the fact that the writer chose the word “loss” itself to be part of the name of her narrative.

Jemubhai Patel, the judge, Sai, his granddaughter, Gyan, Sai’s sweetheart, Lola and Noni, the judge’s neighbours, the cook, employed by the judge, his son Biju and a few more minor characters populate the pages of this work of art and most of themhave inherited some kind of damage, some kind of deprivation, some kind of loss.

In this essay, I am only going to refer to the judge because I consider his case to be the most poignant one. JemubhaiPatel was born under colonial rule in India, at the beginning of the XXth century.He managed to find his way to England to study andbecome a member of the ICS, the Indian Civil Service. This was achieved thanks to the dowry that was given to him by Mr. Bomanbhai, a rich merchant from Gujaratwho saw the possibility to improve his social status by marrying his daughter Belato a person who would berather conspicuous in the future.

Although Jemubhai was a proficient user of English, in England he was laughed at because of his accent and he almost missed his language exam altogether for this reason, apart from the due unkindness and prejudice of the examiners. He had a terrible time in Britain where he experienced in his own flesh and in loneliness, the racial and class prejudice exercised by English society in general against Indians. He just passed the language and culture exam in June 1942 and then he stayed for two more years to be fully trained for the ICS.

He always felt that he was unwelcome in England.In the bus, people wouldn’t sit near him because they didn’t like his smell. On the street, he was laughed at even by children.

Six little boys sat at the bus stop.
Why is the Chinaman yellow? He pees against the wind. HA – HA
Why is the Indian brown?He shits upside down. HA.HA.HA.
Taunting him on the street, throwing stones, jeering, making monkey faces. How strange it was: he had feared children, been scared of these human beings half his size. (Desai: 228)

He made no friends apart from Bose, another Indian student. He never managed to feel good in the country: “He sat alone because he still felt ill at ease in the company of the English” (Desai: 131)

Why all this intolerance? Where did it come from?In Culture and Imperialism Edward Said writes that Latin America, Africa and India “had an independent history or culture that the imperialist violently disturbed” (xviii) because the imperialists always perceived the conquered territories and peoples as radically inferior and “(…) as in need of la mission civilisatrice.” (Said: xix)

In the article published by “The New York Times” on December 4^th 2017, called “Why Does Our Side Keep Losing Elections?” the Nobel Prize winner, Ohran Pamuk, quotes André Gide, the French novelist, when he says in an opening from his diary from 1924:

“…for too long I thought that there was more than one civilization, more than one culture that could rightfully claim our love and deserve our enthusiasm. Now I know that our Occidental (I was about to say French) civilization is not only the most beautiful; I believe — I know — that it is the only one.”

Even though Pamuk’s article refers to the winds of intolerance and nationalism that lurk Europe and the U.S.A. these days, I would like to use Gide’s words from 1924 as an example of the lack of tolerance and respect for other cultures and human groups shown by Europeans at that time. I suspect more than one English, Dutch or German colonizer would have happily adhered to Gide’s thoughts. Europe was best. The rest did not exist and it was with this frame of mind that they always approached the native populations in all the conquered territories.

After some time in England and probably because of the confidence gained through learning, Jemubhai

“… found he began to be mistaken by something he wasn’t – a man of dignity. This accidental poise became more important than any other thing. He envied the English. He loathed Indians. He worked at being English with the passion of hatred and for what he would become he would be despised by absolutely everyone, English and Indians,both. (Desai: 131)

In order to accommodate to the actuality of his life, the young Jemubhai tried to adapt from the very beginning and by doing this he denied himself, he “lost” himself and one day, he had to admitthat “he had tolerated certain artificial constructs to uphold his existence. When you build on lies, you build strong and solid. It was the truth that undid you.” (Dessai: 229)

It was in England that he discovered things about India he didn’t even suspect. India was more than he had experienced of it. In India, “an Englishman might sit against a tropical background, yellow yolk of sun, shine spun into the palms, and consume a Yarmouth herring, a Breton oyster. This was all news to him and he felt greedy for a country that was already his.” (Desai: 121)

The British badly needed this kind of people in India to help them safeguard their colonial system of law at work. People like Patel and Bose were the men with white curly wigs and a dark face covered in powder, bringing down their hammers, “always against the native, in a world that was still colonial.” (Desai: 224)

In his book, The Location of Culture,HomiBhabha, the Indian academic, describes the reformed colonial subjects with words from the book Minute (1835) by Thomas Babington Macaulay. These men were “a class of interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern – a class of persons Indian in blood and colour but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, in intellect’ – in other words a mimic man raised through our English School.” (Bhabha: 215)

In their book The Empire Writes Back, Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin assert that these menwould be the successful citizens created by colonial administrators who “discovered an ally in English literature to support them in maintaining control of the natives under the guise of a liberal education.” (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin: 3)

The final consequence of all this was that for many, leaving India to live in Europe or the U.S.A. was and is a major and desirable objective in their lives. When this is achieved, it gives them a status before their fellow countrymen that nothing else can give. The judge and Biju, the cook’s son, are a good example of this.

The sense of inferiority imprinted in the Indian unconscious for years and the loss of their natural identity were inherited by the judge via his family and his social environment. Jemubhai reconfirmed what an Indian citizen meant to the English during his stay in England. No matter how much he could grow professionally or in any aspect, he would always be different and less. Evidence of this was for example that Indian civil servants were paid less than any white civil servant working in India.

When he went back home after his years in Britain it was evident that things between the judge and his fellow countrymen,including Bela,his wife, had changed for good.He had slowly and finally moved into a position that made him see the members of his family as “thieving, ignorant people” (Dessai: 184) or even worse, he would think and say that no “Indian girl could be as beautiful as an English one.” (Dessai: 185)

Bela, Nimi Patel by marriage, was Jemubhai’s most cruel and most tragic victim. Things got so bad between them that “cruelty to her became irresistible. He would teach her the same lessons of loneliness and shame he had learned himself. In public, he never spoke or looked in her direction.” (Dessai: 186)Out of stubbornness Nimi never learnt English and she “was left to sit alone in Bonda; three weeks out of four, she paced the house, the garden. (…) She was uncared for, her freedom useless, her husband disregarded his duty. (…) Nimi had fallen out of life altogether. (Dessai: 188)

NImi made invalid by her misery, grew very dull, began to fall asleep in heliographic sunshine and wake in the middle of the night. She peered out at the world but could not focus on it, never went to the mirror, because she couldn’t see herself in it, and anyway she couldn’t bear to spend a moment in dressing and combing, activities that were only for the happy and the loved. (Dessai: 189)

The relationship the judge developed with his wife was a sick one. He abused her in all forms, physically and psychologically to the point that Nimi stopped being Nimi.

Bela was used by the judge to channel all his hatred and personal frustrations generated by the conditions that were part and parcel of his own life. He took revenge on her for all his own personal “losses” and by doing that, he lost her as a life companion, he drove her to madness and finally to death. She died in a domestic fire everybody chose to think of as an accident when it most likely was a suicide.

Sai, Nimi’s granddaughter, wanted to know about her grandmother and it was the cook, not the judge, who provided her with some information.

Remembrance, now authentic shone from the cook’s eyes.
“Oh no,” said the cook. “He didn’t like her at all. She went mad.”
“She did?!”
“Yes, they said she was a very mad lady.” (Dessai: 97)

The omniscient narrator uses very harsh words to describe the way Jemubhai and Nimi felt towards each other. The dread they felt for each other was so severe that one could say “they belonged to this emotion more than to themselves, experienced rage with enough muscle in it for entire nations coupled in hate.” (Dessai: 190)

The end of all this process came when Mutt, the judge’s dog, disappeared. The pet was the only living being the judge managed to relate to, to love. When it disappeared,the judge uses highlyrevealing words to express his anguish. We almost seem to hear a promise of change, a desire for redemption, a plea for forgiveness for all his unfortunate past decisions and actions.

The judge got down on his knees, and he prayed to God, he, Jemubhai Popatlal the agnostic (…)“If you return Mutt, I will acknowledge you in public,I will never deny you again. I will tell the world that I believe in you – you – if you return Mutt.” (Desai: 331)

It is impossible not to think of Nimi and India itself when we read these words. The loss of Mutt faced the judge with the “sins he had committed that no court in the world could take on.” (Dessai 332)

And so,
“He thought of his father, whose strength and hope and love he had fed on, only to turn around to spit in his face. Then he thought of how he had returned his wife, Nimi.” (Desai: 333) He did it because she had partaken scrambled eggs and toast with top members of the Congress Party without even knowing where she was and who she was sharing with. This event put the judge in a rage because it jeopardized his career within the ICS. After days of exercising utter violence against Nimi, he sent her home. It was only out of a sheer cold logic that he didn’t kill her; a final violent act would have ended his career. (cf. Dessai: 335)By the time Nimi got home to Gujarat, her father had died. A baby daughter was born a few months later.

Although it would be unfair to blame all of the judge’s decisions and misdeeds on colonial presence in India, it is true to say that the very conditions created by the coloniser on Indian soil for Indian society for years and years brought as a consequence the loss of a sense of identity for many Indian citizens, the judge one of them. He went to England and returned a stranger to his own people. The feelings of inferiority he already nurtured at home, grew stronger while staying in Britain and over there, he reconfirmed his deep hatred for all that was Indian. Therefore, it is not easy to separate colonial rule and British presence in India from the life of the judge.

The judge accumulated in his own person years and years of colonial rule, inherited it all, was shaped by it whether he liked it or not. Although we as humans have a certain degree of freedom to make decisions, it is also true that the social and even geographical environment plays an important role in shaping our personalities and individual histories. India gained independence in 1947 but Jemubhai was part of the process of falling heir to many years of colonialism with all that it had meant in terms of subjugation, negation of your own self, identity dilemmas, exploitation and even death.

There is another aspect worth revising. In The Empire Writes Back, Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin argue that:

“A major feature of post-colonial literature is the concern for place/displacement. It is here that the special post colonial crisis of identity comes into being; the concern with the development or recovery of an effective, identifying relationshipbetween selfand place.” (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin: 9)

The judge, the character we are mostly involved with, saw his sense of self heavily eroded by ‘dislocation’ resulting from his temporary migration to England and by ‘cultural denigration’ which is understood as the conscious or unconscious oppression of his indigenous personality and culture. All of this, he endured in England and at home. (cf. Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin: 9)

After his interview to Kiran Desai, John Mullan, the director of the Guardian Book Club, published an article on November 13^th 2009, where he refers to Desai’s motivations to write her novel. He comments on the writer’s emphasis on the fact that she couldn’t ignore in her writing “those migrations made long ago that had ensured that some of us would never again be able to find a place in our own landscape.” Neither could she ignore those “whose sense of dislocation didn’t even involve the rest of the world: the rift had been so deeply absorbed that they were rendered foreigners in their own country reading Jane Austen to feel cosy.”

Place and displacement, dislocation, cultural denigration, identity dilemmas: very few words to explain so much. The cruelest consequence of the divided soul some Indians had to live with was that for example in the judge’s case, he got lost in a labyrinth of pride and self satisfaction for succeeding in Cambridge and for becoming an ICS but also into a labyrinth of hatred and scorn for his Indian fellowmen and women and for India’s past, traditions and soul.

The judge and his friend from the past, Bose, were affected by dislocation and they also found themselves caught in the middle of two cultural groups. “In England they had a great good laugh, no doubt, but in India, too, everyone laughed with the joy of seeing people like Bose cheated. There they had thought they were superior, putting on airs, and they were just the same – weren’t they? – as the rest.” (Dessai: 224)

In the judge’s particular case, he tried hard to belike the “white man” and this kind of mimicry was seen as desirable. However, itbrought as a consequence the loss of himself and he entered in a limbo where attitudes, behaviours and affections were influenced or shaped by the culture he was trying to be part of, in this case the British culture.

After all the enthusiasm and energy that he put into it he ended up being “almost the same but not quite” (Bhabha: 127) Besides, the expectation to become an equal with the white man was never fulfilled. No matter how hard you tried, Indians remained inferior in the eyes of the white man: “He and Bose in the boat, holding themselves apart in case they brush against the others and offended them with brown skins.” (Desai: 223)

Finally, allBose and Jemubhai were left with was this sense of demerit passed on from generation to generation ever since the East India Company set footin Surat, on the West coast of India, at the beginning of the XVIIth century in order to pursue trade with the East Indies.

At the end of their working lives, Bose shares his frustration with the judgewith thoughts and feelings such as:

“Bastards!” he said with bitterness. “What bastards they were!” (…) “Goras – get away with everything, don’t they? Bloody white people. They’re responsible for all the crimes of the century!” (Dessai: 225)

In a reconciling tone, trying to be fair, the judge admits: “YES! YES! YES! They were bad. They were part of it. And we were part of the problem, Bose, as much as you could argue that we were part of the solution.” (Dessai: 226)

Towards the end of his life, Jemubhai is haunted by his memories. They surround him in his hiding place in Kalimpong. Only for the sake of maintaining his mental balance, he decided not to tumble his pride to melodrama at the end of his life because he knew the danger of confession – it would cancel any hope of dignity forever. (cf Dessai: 228)

CONCLUSION
Summarising, I think it would be fair to say that after a long time of injustice and oppression, today things are different both in England and in India. Apart from the fact that India’s destiny has been in Indians’ hands for a good many years now, there is also at the moment an abundant bibliography concerned with the matter of empire that tries to look at events in a more balanced manner bringing out into the open the unfair treatment Indians were submitted to. In addition, for Indian authors, it would be unthinkable to write about their country and its people without mentioning the empire, its existence and consequences in the life of the nation and its citizens.

The judge’s losses are tragic in many ways and there is no reason to rejoice over his life story. Nevertheless, at the end of the novel we read a very short sentence that refers to his granddaughter Sai and herideas for the future.After her relationship with Gyan falls apart and after she becomes aware of her family’s past, she admits to herself that she “must leave.” (cf Dessai: 356) This statement in itself gives us a sense of hope and redemption. I argue that with her departure we readers are informed that Sai is prepared to get beyond the frustrations and pain from the past whit a positive, regenerative attitude that will probably help her in her own personal life and contributes to infuse some kind of balance into history as a whole as well.

Corpus
Desai, Kiran. (2006) The Inheritance of Loss.Grove Press: New York, U.S.A.

Works Cited

Ashcroft Griffiths and Tiffin. (1989)The Empire Writes Back. Routledge: New York.

Bhabha, Homi. (1994) The Location of Culture. Routledge: New York.

Said, Edward. (1993)Culture and Imperialism. Random House: New York.

Webgraphy

Why does our side keep losing elections? By Ohran Pamuk

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/04/opinion/multiculturalism-nationalism-america-europe.html

First-timer beats the odds to take Booker prize that eluded her mother by John Ezard

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/oct/11/books.bookerprize2006

John Mullan and Kiran Desai The Guardian Book Club: Week three

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/nov/14/inheritance-loss-desai-book-club