The difference between a traveller and a migrant is defined in terms of power hierarchy and level of dependence between the guest and the host society. This is also remarked upon in The Inheritance of Loss, when the man selling Biju his return ticket to India, is trying to convince him that he is making a mistake in going back. To him, it is “still a world ... where one side travels to be a servant, and the other side travels to be treated like a king” (295). Biju is not a traveller who can …show more content…
In India almost nobody would be able to afford this rice, and you had to travel around the world to be able to eat such things where they were cheap enough that you could gobble them down without being rich; and when you got home to the place where they grew, you couldn’t afford them anymore (209).
The Inheritance of Lossis a tale of losses and predicaments of immigrants in an alien land with the conflicting Indian identities in colonial India and in postcolonial period of globalizations. Kiran Desai has rocked the world with her realistic and sensitive writing about an illusionary dream of globalization.
The novel delineates the stories of Indian elite class of life and of these people’s efforts to acquire with modernity and the stories of illegal immigrants in a modern center of globalized economy and politics. The problem of migration always