A Postcolonial Interpretation Of The Inheritance Of Loss

The youngest woman winner of Booker Prize in 2006, Kiran Desai surprised the world with her second novel The Inheritance of Loss, which took her eight years to complete. As an Indian-American writer, she masters first-hand materials about India and America. And The Inheritance of Loss is just such a work which draws on her experiences both in India and America.Set partly in India and partly in the USA, The Inheritance of Loss explores with uncommon intimacy and insight some of the very pertinent issues of today's globalized world. It deals with, on the one hand, the loss of individual identity and the struggle for self-determination of an ethnic group that results from postcolonial despair and sense of deprivation and that uproots a settled order of life and leads to displacement, exile and loss. On the other hand, it explores the irresistible desire for modernity leading to migration, the discontents of globalization, multiculturalism, economic inequality, the pain of exile and the anxiety of being a foreigner.An important theme of the novel is the colonial influence in modern India. It tries to capture what it means to live between East and West and what it means to be an immigrant. It explores, at a deeper level, the consequences of the introduction of a western element into a non-western country, which happened during the British colonial period in India, and is happening again with India's improved relationship with America from the last decade of the 20th century. Its aim is to examine what happens when a person from a poor and undeveloped country migrates to a rich and developed one:"How does the imbalance between these two worlds change a person's thinking and feeling? How do these changes manifest themselves in a personal sphere, a political sphere, over time?"These are, however, not new themes but old ones which continue to be relevant in today's fast-changing globalized world, where the past informs the present and the present unveils the past.This thesis is a tentative attempt at a postcolonial study of The Inheritance of Loss with the focus on two issues: white cultural hegemony and identity. In the long course, the west is defined as organic, masculine, democratic and reasonable while the orient is silent, feminine, lascivious and backward.The western cultures come to be seen as the norm; they are seen as universal ideologies, perceived to benefit everyone while only really benefiting the ruling class. So the western countries tries to export their culture, including political system, religion, values, modes of thinking to the eastern countries continuously after the independence of the eastern countries. Such kind of cultural invasion is imperceptible and subconscious. The aim is to make the eastern countries be assimilated into their cultural system and to establish their rule in the whole world. In the influence of this cultural hegemony, the colonized people gradually internalize the belief that their own culture is inferior and adopt the dominate culture, which leads to their loss of identity. So their identities become problems because of their alienation from their culture, ethnicity and language. They become foreigners in their own country, such as the judge Jemubhai, Sai, Noni and Lola, some of the characters in The Inheritance of Loss. Being an Indian, Jemubhai develops a profound respect for the English culture and feels ashamed of his culture and tradition. But his Anglophile only leaves him a mimic man whose allegiance was firmly directed to the colonial authorities and culture, and a mere shadow of his native self. Thus his conscious and prolonged endeavor to be like the masters leads to a sense of inferiority and cultural uprootedness and leaves him bereft of vitality, merit and dignity, which are his racial inheritance. The judge's tragedy proves undoubtedly that the colonized cannot accept the value system of the dominant white culture at the cost of cutting from their native culture. Only rooted in their own culture, can the colonized find their true place and identity? Kiran Desai's novel seems to suggest that these Anglicized Indians, who are alienated from their culture and the people around them, are an"unwanted anachronism in postcolonial India. And decolonization is imperative under the situation although they may encounter some difficulties such as the embarrassment of their identity and people's unconsciousness of nationality.