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What it argues
The Inheritance of Loss unfolds in two interweaving strands set in the late 1980s. In the Himalayan town of Kalimpong, a retired judge named Jemubhai Patel lives a rancorous retirement with his orphaned granddaughter Sai and their cook. Jemubhai was educated in England, and that education warped him — he returned to India with a deep contempt for the country he came from and a contempt for himself that followed from it. When the region becomes caught up in the Gorkhaland insurgency — a violent movement for ethnic Nepali self-determination — his comfortable disengagement becomes impossible. The second strand follows the cook's son, Biju, who is in New York without documentation, cycling through restaurant kitchens and rooming houses in a city that can barely see him.
The novel is about the inheritance of colonialism — the psychological damage done not only by direct oppression but by the aspiration to belong to the world of the oppressor. Jemubhai's self-hatred, his treatment of his wife, his studied Anglicization, are all understood as effects of this distortion. The cook's faith in education and migration as escape routes is shown as another version of the same fantasy: the belief that somewhere else, you will finally be seen and valued. Biju's New York is a city of immigration's underside, not its mythology.
What it gets right
- 1.
The novel's central argument is that colonialism's most lasting damage is psychological: the colonized learn to see themselves through the colonizer's eyes, and cannot unlearn it.
- 2.
Jemubhai represents a generation that gained access to the world of power only by betraying its own identity, and the bitterness of that bargain saturates everything he does.
- 3.
Biju's New York strand demolishes the immigration narrative of transformation and arrival. His invisibility in a wealthy city is the immigrant experience the mythology erases.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Kiran Desai was born in Delhi in 1971 and grew up in India, England, and the United States. Her debut novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, appeared in 1998. The Inheritance of Loss, published in 2006, won the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, making Desai the youngest woman to win the Booker at the time. Her mother, Anita Desai, is also a celebrated novelist and has been shortlisted for the Booker three times. Desai lives in New York.
