The Inheritance of Loss is a story of variations which leads to the cultural identities and cultural conflict present in the human civilization across the globe. Kiran Desai exhibits the social construction of human experience, interaction and social realities to reveal a social meaning out of it as an inter subjective process. Desai offers a panoramic representation of a constructed reality where individuals are engaged in an insecure search for personal identity. All the peripheral characters of the novel appear to be innocent victims of alienation from their real selves resulting in the crisis of identity. The present paper focuses on the fate of defenseless individuals who are insecure and unmoored and frequently struggling to survive in
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The novel deals with chaos, despair, ethno-racial and historical relationships between people from different cultures and backgrounds. Love, longing and losses are dexterously handled in a humane manner articulating diasporic experiences of the novelist who is an Indian citizen but a permanent resident of America. Kiran Desai is deeply interested in India- the India of 1980s which honestly represents the mixed image .Desai observes everything through the ‘lens of being Indian,’ without that perspective she acknowledged that she can’t write. The Inheritance of Loss is a novel of implacable bitterness and despair. Full of pathos and tenderness the novel presents its characters as ultimately frail human beings struggling in search of their identity. It was the feeling of being caught between two continents that infuses The Inheritance of Loss — a story replete with sadness over globalization and with pleasure at the surviving intimacies of Indian life. “The Inheritance of Loss is not only a story, it is, a perspective, an inside look into post-independence India, with its roots dug in colonialism, its branches embracing Americanism, but its leaves brown and dusty with the age-old prejudices that govern people’s minds; an India where a class of people still speak only English and squirm at the mention of their mother tongues; where a mother is proud because her daughter has chosen to marry an Englishman: where a foreigner is treated suspiciously in spite of his honest efforts to lay foundations of indigenous industries; where thousands of Indians enter America as illegal immigrants-in the eyes of their families, they are the heroes, but in reality, they sleep with mice on the kitchen floors of restaurants or in squalid suburbs of
The novel deals with chaos, despair, ethno-racial and historical relationships between people from different cultures and backgrounds. Love, longing and losses are dexterously handled in a humane manner articulating diasporic experiences of the novelist who is an Indian citizen but a permanent resident of America. Kiran Desai is deeply interested in India- the India of 1980s which honestly represents the mixed image .Desai observes everything through the ‘lens of being Indian,’ without that perspective she acknowledged that she can’t write. The Inheritance of Loss is a novel of implacable bitterness and despair. Full of pathos and tenderness the novel presents its characters as ultimately frail human beings struggling in search of their identity. It was the feeling of being caught between two continents that infuses The Inheritance of Loss — a story replete with sadness over globalization and with pleasure at the surviving intimacies of Indian life. “The Inheritance of Loss is not only a story, it is, a perspective, an inside look into post-independence India, with its roots dug in colonialism, its branches embracing Americanism, but its leaves brown and dusty with the age-old prejudices that govern people’s minds; an India where a class of people still speak only English and squirm at the mention of their mother tongues; where a mother is proud because her daughter has chosen to marry an Englishman: where a foreigner is treated suspiciously in spite of his honest efforts to lay foundations of indigenous industries; where thousands of Indians enter America as illegal immigrants-in the eyes of their families, they are the heroes, but in reality, they sleep with mice on the kitchen floors of restaurants or in squalid suburbs of