The Inheritance of Loss

Product Information

While through much of The Inheritance of Loss, the reader learns the past stories of the characters and how they came to be together, it should not be forgotten where they are. The experience of leaving India forced both the judge and Biju to confront their sense of identity in a way they never questioned when in India, but did they really need to leave the country to have that experience? The Himalayan foothills where the judge now lives is a landscape, a climate and a culture not easily recognisable as what most people think of as ‘Indian’, nor are the ethnicities that populate it. There, the characters are also in the midst of an armed insurgency whose recruits are fighting with the aim of realising their own country. The Judge and Biju’s experiences outside of India made them consider their identity and what it meant to them for the first time but perhaps only in terms of non-Indians and a foreign environment. For the Judge and Biju, the question of who is an Indian is perhaps less confronting but more uncertain within India. But from Gyan’s perspective, there must be an answer to the question since it appears to exclude him. The elusiveness of the answer is moot.

Desai touches upon many different issues throughout the book such as, globalisation, multiculturalism, inequality and the different forms of love. The owner of the house is a retired Judge, Justice Jemubhai Patel. His father had run a successful business procuring false witnesses for court cases. When Jemu’s intelligence becomes apparent at school, his education is given priority. Both father and son dream of his entering the Civil Service, of gaming the judicial system from above and below. But unable to afford a university education in England, his father seeks a bride for his son with a dowry large enough to fund it. In 1939, aged twenty and just a month married to a fourteen-year-old wife, he made the long journey from India to Cambridge to study.a b Italie, Hillel (9 March 2007). "Desai's 'Inheritance' Wins Book Critics Circle Award". The Washington Post . Retrieved 23 August 2013. Kiran Desai (1 December 2007). The Inheritance of Loss. Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. pp.29–. ISBN 978-1-55584-591-9.

All the rage in the story is the miscegenation between Sai Mistry and Gyan . I found their mutual understanding ridiculous, but their relationship could be symbolic , for Sai is Indian and Gyan; Nepalese.The story centres around the lives of Biju and Sai. Biju is an Indian living in the United States illegally, son of a cook who works for Sai's grandfather. Sai is an orphan living in mountainous Kalimpong with her maternal grandfather Jemubhai Patel, the cook, and a dog named Mutt. Her mother was a Gujarati and her father a Zoroastrian orphan himself. [4] Author Desai alternates the narration between these two points of view. The action of the novel takes place in 1986. The quotation uses irony to highlight how ludicrous and arbitrary the nuns' cultural biases are. Catholic theology argues that during holy communion, believers literally consume the body and blood of Jesus Christ, a ritual that sounds cannibalistic and primitive. However, the nuns still insist their religious traditions are more "civilized" since some Hindu traditions invoke sexual imagery. Natasha Walter found it a "grim" novel, highlighting "how individuals are always failing to communicate". [5] The Observer found some excellent comic set-pieces amid the grimness. [6] The New York Times claimed Desai "manages to explore, with intimacy and insight, just about every contemporary international issue: globalization, multiculturalism, economic inequality, fundamentalism and terrorist violence." [7] classes are like animals. She claims that they use the street as a toilet and have no shame. Consequently, Sai feels she is of a higher, elite class.