http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/books/review/12mishra.html?ex=1140584400&en=c9ae17e4decc7e17&ei=5070
February 12, 2006
'The Inheritance of Loss,' by Kiran Desai
Wounded by the West
Review by PANKAJ MISHRA
ALTHOUGH it focuses on the fate of a few powerless
individuals, Kiran Desai's extraordinary new novel
manages to explore, with intimacy and insight, just
about every contemporary international issue:
globalization, multiculturalism, economic inequality,
fundamentalism and terrorist violence. Despite being
set in the mid-1980's, it seems the best kind of
post-9/11 novel.
"The Inheritance of Loss" opens with a teenage Indian
girl, an orphan called Sai, living with her
Cambridge-educated Anglophile grandfather, a retired
judge, in the town of Kalimpong on the Indian side of
the Himalayas. Sai is romantically involved with her
math tutor, Gyan, the descendant of a Nepali Gurkha
mercenary, but he eventually recoils from her obvious
privilege and falls in with a group of ethnic Nepalese
insurgents. In a parallel narrative, we are shown the
life of Biju, the son of Sai's grandfather's cook, who
belongs to the "shadow class" of illegal immigrants in
New York and spends much of his time dodging the
authorities, moving from one ill-paid job to another.
What binds these seemingly disparate characters is a
shared historical legacy and a common experience of
impotence and humiliation. "Certain moves made long
ago had produced all of them," Desai writes, referring
to centuries of subjection by the economic and
cultural power of the West. But the beginnings of an
apparently leveled field in a late-20th-century global
economy serve merely to scratch those wounds rather
than heal them.
Almost all of Desai's characters have been stunted by
their encounters with the West. As a student, isolated
in racist England, the future judge feels "barely
human at all" and leaps "when touched on the arm as if
from an unbearable intimacy." Yet on his return to
India, he finds himself despising his apparently
backward Indian wife.
The judge is one of those "ridiculous Indians," as the
novel puts it, "who couldn't rid themselves of what
they had broken their souls to learn" and whose
Anglophilia can only turn into self-hatred. These
Indians are also an unwanted anachronism in
postcolonial India, where long-suppressed peoples have
begun to awaken to their dereliction, to express their
anger and despair. For some of Desai's characters,
including one of the judge's neighbors in Kalimpong,
this comes as a distinct shock: "Just when Lola had
thought it would continue, a hundred years like the
one past Trollope, BBC, a burst of hilarity at
Christmas all of a sudden, all that they had claimed
innocent, fun, funny, not really to matter, was proven
wrong."
There is no mistaking the literary influences on
Desai's exploration of postcolonial chaos and despair.
Early in the novel, she sets two Anglophilic Indian
women to discussing "A Bend in the River," V. S.
Naipaul's powerfully bleak novel about traditional
Africa's encounter with the modern world. Lola, whose
clothesline sags "under a load of Marks and Spencer's
panties," thinks Naipaul is "strange. Stuck in the
past. . . . He has not progressed. Colonial neurosis,
he's never freed himself from it." Lola goes on to
accuse Naipaul of ignoring the fact that there is a
"new England," a "completely cosmopolitan society"
where "chicken tikka masala has replaced fish and
chips as the No. 1 takeout dinner." As further
evidence, she mentions her own daughter, a newsreader
for BBC radio, who "doesn't have a chip on her
shoulder."
Desai takes a skeptical view of the West's
consumer-driven multiculturalism, noting the
"sanitized elegance" of Lola's daughter's
British-accented voice, which is "triumphant over any
horrors the world might thrust upon others." At such
moments, Desai seems far from writers like Zadie Smith
and Hari Kunzru, whose fiction takes a generally
optimistic view of what Salman Rushdie has called
"hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the
transformation that comes of new and unexpected
combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas,
politics, movies, songs."
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. "Profit," Desai
observes at one point, "could only be harvested in the
gap between nations, working one against the other."
This leaves most people in the postcolonial world with
only the promise of a shabby modernity modernity, as
Desai puts it, "in its meanest form, brand-new one
day, in ruin the next." Not surprisingly,
half-educated, uprooted men like Gyan gravitate to the
first available political cause in their search for a
better way. He joins what sounds like an ethnic
nationalist movement largely as an opportunity to vent
his rage and frustration. "Old hatreds are endlessly
retrievable," Desai reminds us, and they are "purer .
. . because the grief of the past was gone. Just the
fury remained, distilled, liberating."
Unlike Gyan, others try to escape. In scene after
scene depicting this process a boarding house in
England, derelict bungalows in Kalimpong,
immigrant-packed basements in New York Desai's novel
seems lit by a moral intelligence at once fierce and
tender. But no scene is more harrowing than the one in
which Biju joins a crowd of Indians scrambling to
reach the visa counter at the United States Embassy:
"Biggest pusher, first place; how self-contented and
smiling he was; he dusted himself off, presenting
himself with the exquisite manners of a cat. I'm
civilized, sir, ready for the U.S., I'm civilized,
mam. Biju noticed that his eyes, so alive to the
foreigners, looked back at his own countrymen and
women, immediately glazed over, and went dead."
Desai's prose has uncanny flexibility and poise. She
can describe the onset of the monsoon in the Himalayas
and a rat in the slums of Manhattan with equal skill.
She is also adept at using physical descriptions to
evoke complex states of mind, as when Biju gazes at a
park while celebrating the great luck of being granted
his American visa: "Raw sewage was being used to water
a patch of grass that was lush and stinking, grinning
brilliantly in the dusk."
Poor and lonely in New York, Biju eavesdrops on
businessmen eating steak and exulting over the wealth
to be gained in the new markets of Asia. Not
surprisingly, he eventually becomes "a man full to the
brim with a wish to live within a narrow purity." For
him, the city's endless possibilities for
self-invention become a source of pain. Though
"another part of him had expanded: his
self-consciousness, his self-pity," this awareness
only makes him long to fade into insignificance, to
return "to where he might relinquish this overrated
control over his own destiny."
Arriving back in India in the climactic scenes of the
novel, Biju is immediately engulfed by the local
eruptions of rage and frustration from which he had
been physically remote in New York. For him and the
others, Desai suggests, withdrawal or escape are no
longer possible. "Never again," Sai concludes, "could
she think there was but one narrative and that this
narrative belonged only to herself, that she might
create her own mean little happiness and live safely
within it."
Apart from this abstraction, Desai offers her
characters no possibility of growth or redemption.
Though relieved by much humor, "The Inheritance of
Loss" may strike many readers as offering an
unrelentingly bitter view. But then, as Orhan Pamuk
wrote soon after 9/11, people in the West are
"scarcely aware of this overwhelming feeling of
humiliation that is experienced by most of the world's
population," which "neither magical realistic novels
that endow poverty and foolishness with charm nor the
exoticism of popular travel literature manages to
fathom." This is the invisible emotional reality Desai
uncovers as she describes the lives of people fated to
experience modern life as a continuous affront to
their notions of order, dignity and justice. We do not
need to agree with this vision in order to marvel at
Desai's artistic power in expressing it.
Pankaj Mishra is the author of "An End to Suffering:
The Buddha in the World. " His latest book,
"Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India,
Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond," will be published this
spring.
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