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dyno8426 's review for:
The Inheritance of Loss
by Kiran Desai
As a generation of Indian citizens which has grown up in the adolescent years of globalisation, we are aware of how integral elements of foreign culture and identity are in our day to day existence. From brands and products, to cultural symbols, to the template of dreams have strong forces of lifestyles, like American consumerism, influenced and continue to shape our existence. But this is not just happening post the seeds of globalisation sowing. India's present is shaped by its colonial and imperialist past. We cannot deny the effect it had in directing the course of Indian economical and social development. Whether the aggregation of effects is for good or bad is what this book talks about - through its characters which act as fulcra about how people in an independent India did not simply revert to a "free" state of mind but went through an identity confusion. The story revolves around the sampled experiences of how lives of post-1950 India's and how they coped with defining what their role was in the after-effects of free India.
The thematic keystone connecting all the characters are their different attitudes towards what foreign culture meant for them. Their attitudes defined changes towards their own lifestyle, their pursuits and even the fundamental sense of right and wrong. In controlling not just India but creating a "Commonwealth" repository for themselves had proved their technological superiority. Colonial people like Indians had to acknowledge it, adjust to its presence before they could imagine an identity separate from it. To me, it appears as a macrocosmic versions of how a superior, competing, foreign identity causes a reaction in ours. Upon realising the lack of egotistic satisfaction due to the impossibility of victory over our enemy, we are faced with two choices - acceptance or denial. Acceptance will usually cause a comparison of the kind which asks us to compensate for what we are missing, in covering up for our flaws and imbibing the strengths of our ideological enemy. Denial on the other hand would probably trigger frustration, hostility and a resolution to advertise the irreconcilability of our ideological polarity. Acceptance will create a feeling of worship and a desire to be identified in the same colours as our challenger. Denial, on the other hand, will try to create a false sense of superiority and demand isolation of some sort to forget about the undermining gap between establishing any real superiority. But human nature is a culture of convenient contradictions and here also, between the two logical extremes lies the humane spectrum of choices, something which our characters here so poignantly portray through their overreaching-but-always-falling-short lives.
Jemubhai Patel is a judge who has studied in England and despite seeing the perceived inferiority of his Indian status, leans towards the accepting side and wants to be identified as an outlier from the backwardness that he despises in his native origins. He accrues resentment towards his indigenous identity and does everything to isolate himself from signals which remind him of his humble origins. The cook that the judge employs is another such specimen who identifies the potential of what everything outside India has to offer and associates a make-believe opportunistic existence out of his humble reach. His satisfaction and capacity to dream lives only through his son, Biju, who is the wanderer in the more modern, more charming American dream. The cook is ready to accept the sad limitations of what he every will be only through the future that he conjures up for his son thousand kilometres away and the obvious lack of realism that it causes. Biju on the other hand is existing in a contradictory plane of how he is living and how he wants to live. He resents the foreign culture which has so much to offer but he somehow is unable to reach and grab hold of it. And he resent his native culture which has its meagreness and infantile developmental confusion to offer up for grabs and which he escaped. He is unable to let go of parts of his identity that he values preciously like an artefact which one knows values nothing in reality but has immense significance due to one's choice to preserving it. Sai, the judge's granddaughter, and other people she is friends with are examples of the adoring kind which values the promises and lifestyle of foreigners for what it's worth. Their identity is magnetised by all those symbols of modernity and their life a pursuit to distinguish themselves by adopting what they feel is clearly superior. Like Jemubhai, they derive a personal satisfaction in differentiating elements of their own identity and their privilege in doing so. Finally, Gyan represents the other hostile reactionary who latches on to the convenient blame that associates one's plight to the existence of the superior culture. He also conveniently accepts the advantages that the other side has to offer and has to be mobilised by some sort of collective identity and individual guilt which comes when betraying fragments of one's original identity. There are many things to love about this book - its quotable gems, the juxtaposition of the beautiful and the ugly, the grand feeling of sorrow which is only rendered by powerful books, its above mentioned tragedy of intertwined fates, and probably most powerfully, this consistency about how other cultures have influenced and defined trends in Indian choices and identities from before we even arrived.
The thematic keystone connecting all the characters are their different attitudes towards what foreign culture meant for them. Their attitudes defined changes towards their own lifestyle, their pursuits and even the fundamental sense of right and wrong. In controlling not just India but creating a "Commonwealth" repository for themselves had proved their technological superiority. Colonial people like Indians had to acknowledge it, adjust to its presence before they could imagine an identity separate from it. To me, it appears as a macrocosmic versions of how a superior, competing, foreign identity causes a reaction in ours. Upon realising the lack of egotistic satisfaction due to the impossibility of victory over our enemy, we are faced with two choices - acceptance or denial. Acceptance will usually cause a comparison of the kind which asks us to compensate for what we are missing, in covering up for our flaws and imbibing the strengths of our ideological enemy. Denial on the other hand would probably trigger frustration, hostility and a resolution to advertise the irreconcilability of our ideological polarity. Acceptance will create a feeling of worship and a desire to be identified in the same colours as our challenger. Denial, on the other hand, will try to create a false sense of superiority and demand isolation of some sort to forget about the undermining gap between establishing any real superiority. But human nature is a culture of convenient contradictions and here also, between the two logical extremes lies the humane spectrum of choices, something which our characters here so poignantly portray through their overreaching-but-always-falling-short lives.
Jemubhai Patel is a judge who has studied in England and despite seeing the perceived inferiority of his Indian status, leans towards the accepting side and wants to be identified as an outlier from the backwardness that he despises in his native origins. He accrues resentment towards his indigenous identity and does everything to isolate himself from signals which remind him of his humble origins. The cook that the judge employs is another such specimen who identifies the potential of what everything outside India has to offer and associates a make-believe opportunistic existence out of his humble reach. His satisfaction and capacity to dream lives only through his son, Biju, who is the wanderer in the more modern, more charming American dream. The cook is ready to accept the sad limitations of what he every will be only through the future that he conjures up for his son thousand kilometres away and the obvious lack of realism that it causes. Biju on the other hand is existing in a contradictory plane of how he is living and how he wants to live. He resents the foreign culture which has so much to offer but he somehow is unable to reach and grab hold of it. And he resent his native culture which has its meagreness and infantile developmental confusion to offer up for grabs and which he escaped. He is unable to let go of parts of his identity that he values preciously like an artefact which one knows values nothing in reality but has immense significance due to one's choice to preserving it. Sai, the judge's granddaughter, and other people she is friends with are examples of the adoring kind which values the promises and lifestyle of foreigners for what it's worth. Their identity is magnetised by all those symbols of modernity and their life a pursuit to distinguish themselves by adopting what they feel is clearly superior. Like Jemubhai, they derive a personal satisfaction in differentiating elements of their own identity and their privilege in doing so. Finally, Gyan represents the other hostile reactionary who latches on to the convenient blame that associates one's plight to the existence of the superior culture. He also conveniently accepts the advantages that the other side has to offer and has to be mobilised by some sort of collective identity and individual guilt which comes when betraying fragments of one's original identity. There are many things to love about this book - its quotable gems, the juxtaposition of the beautiful and the ugly, the grand feeling of sorrow which is only rendered by powerful books, its above mentioned tragedy of intertwined fates, and probably most powerfully, this consistency about how other cultures have influenced and defined trends in Indian choices and identities from before we even arrived.