What Does Loss Mean In Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance Of Loss?

As the title of The Inheritance of Loss indicates, the story is about "loss". So the fundamental question is:what is lost for the characters in post-colonial India? Most of the critics or reviewers have looked into the causes of loss, while a few others have answered this basic question without an in-depth or systematic analysis. My thesis is to answer this question by exploring all the colorful characters and their relations. The central protagonist Jemubhai as a solitary misanthrope is the most prominent interpretation of "loss", and thus his story, as well as his relations with the peripheral characters, is studied in great detail. Then I propose that the loss of life (death), the loss of integrity (alienation) and the loss of root (rootlessness) are the answer to "what is lost", or the core of "loss". Firstly, in elaborating the loss of life (death), the metaphorical death of Jemubhai the most significant character is especially looked into, as well as the death of his wife. Then, to confirm integrity as what’s lost for people in historical changes, again, Jemubhai and his relations with other minor characters are analyzed. The fact that Jemubhai is alienated from human world and even from himself is almost self-evident throughout the novel. Thirdly, by digging into the stories of diasporas, the paper verifies that rootlessness is another composition in "loss", and is the ordinary state of the two different kinds of diasporas delineated in the novel—the exploited, illegal immigrants in New York City and an aging, elitist cluster of Indians who settled after retirement in a hill town. Unlike most critical responses which view globalization or multiculturalism either in the positive or "celebratory" light, my thesis attempts to develop a new perspective by looking into what has exactly been lost.