66 pages • 2 hours read
The Inheritance of Loss
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Themes
Half-Lives: Fractured Identities in a Postcolonial World
The primary cast of characters in The Inheritance of Loss can be divided into two groups: those who have adopted Western cultural practices and those who struggle to maintain their native identity amid a changing culture. At the Gandhi Cafe, Biju and his coworkers despise the “haalf ’n’ haf” (164) Indian students attempting to impress their American friends with spicy food. Characters like Biju see westernized Indians as inauthentic and culturally treacherous, whereas the westernized tend to see themselves as worldly and sophisticated. However, they wear Western elitism without enjoying its highest privileges and tend to become spiteful of Indians occupying lower stations.
The judge makes a long series of choices designed to separate himself from the appearance, speech, and customs of his native people, preferring the ways of the English despite how they mistreat him. These choices leave him spiteful of Indians and fearful of the English, and consequently deeply isolated from others and himself. The judge recognizes Sai’s similarities with him when she arrives at Cho Oyu: “There was something familiar about her; she had the same accent and manners. She was a westernized Indian brought up by English nuns, an estranged Indian living in India” (230). To a lesser extent than her grandfather, Sai makes little attempt to ground herself in Kalimpong’s culture and is outraged when The Indian Gentleman’s Guide to Etiquette tells her to “have the courage to show that you are not ashamed of being an Indian” (218).
Biju and Gyan, in contrast, hold fast to traditional values. As Biju observes people with divided allegiances in America, he asks, “Would he, like Harish-Harry, manufacture a fake version of himself and using what he had created as clues, understand himself backward?” (293). Exposed to an endless array of people from around the world, Biju reclaims his Indian identity with newfound conviction as “a man full to the brim with a wish to live within a narrow purity” (152). He flies home to India, where he feels again like “a baby on his mother’s lap” (329), returning to himself at last.
Like Biju, Gyan seeks an authenticity he cannot seem to find in the modern comforts of Cho Oyu or his romance with Sai. His turn comes after marching with the GNLF, when he “half played, half lived a part” (176) until he seizes the “authentic” conviction of his fellow Nepali. Later he reveals he was only half-playing a part after all, and he adopts heroism of a different kind by trying to recover Mutt for Sai’s sake.
Migration, Displacement, and Oppression
Countries, states, and territories all blend together throughout The Inheritance of Loss. National identities exist in flux in the novel:
“A great amount of warring, betraying, bartering had occurred; between Nepal, England, Tibet, India, Sikkim, Bhutan; Darjeeling stolen from here, Kalimpong plucked from there—despite, ah, despite the mist charging down like a dragon, dissolving, undoing, making ridiculous the drawing of borders” (10).
Kalimpong and New York, the primary settings, are filled with people from somewhere else, provoking hostility from locals and resistance of many kinds from migrants. Biju lives in constant terror about his undocumented status in America. In his restaurant work, he meets people from countries around the world where Indians have relocated. He learns that “[i]n Madagascar, if they could, they would throw them out. In Nigeria, if they could, they would throw them out. In China, they hate them” (86).
Kalimpong locals like Lola express a similar distaste for the Nepali, who foment a rebellion due to their systematic subjugation in India. Their protests demand a province specifically for Gorkha people, “to manage our own affairs” (175). Lola meditates on her home country, its definition more arbitrary than it might appear: “She thought of India as a concept, a hope, or a desire. How often could you attack it before it crumbled? To undo something took practice; it was a dark art and they were perfecting it” (259). By taking territory for themselves, the Nepali would change India, but India is always changing. Expecting it to remain static means ignoring its turbulent history.
When Biju and Mr. Iype speak about the GNLF, this highlights the irony of criticizing migrants. Mr. Iype says, “They should kick the bastards back to Nepal […] why are they sitting in our country?” (250). When Biju asks, “Why are we sitting here?” (250), Mr. Iype shamelessly replies, “This country is different […] Without us what would they do?” (251). Mr. Iype understands that the powerful—be it the British or Harish-Harry—require the powerless to build their empires. Migration, then, often benefits those who resist it most.
The War for Love and Hate
Characters’ relationships teem with intense love and intense hatred, paralleling allegiances and conflicts between people groups. Sai and Gyan, members of warring ethnic groups, vacillate from love to hatred and back as the GNLF uprising unsettles their senses of self. Sai considers that love “must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in the lack, not the contentment. Love was the ache, the anticipation, the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself” (3). Uncle Potty learned similar lessons through the love affairs of his youth, preferring “a sad romance” filled with loss to “any simple bovine happiness” (275). As Sai and Gyan learn each other’s bodies, their movements mirror the mapping and remapping of nations, as reflected in the geography around them.
Biju and his father, the cook, ache to be reunited while they live so far apart, their love also defined by loss. Biju fears visiting Kalimpong again only to find “that the love was gone; for affection was only a habit after all, and people, they forgot, or they became accustomed to its absence” (255).
Likewise, private hatreds between characters speak to larger antipathies between ethnic groups, countries, and cultures. Lola, considering the splintering of Indian territory, compares it to “wrecking a marriage” (259). Like the Indians and the Nepali, the judge and Nimi “tapped into a limitless bitterness” that carried them “beyond the parameters of what any individual is normally capable of feeling. They belonged to this emotion more than to themselves, experienced rage with enough muscle in it for entire nations coupled in hate” (190). This abusive relationship, Desai asserts, is made of the same stuff as war. Indeed, the judge’s murderous hatred is “its own creature; it rose and burned out, reappeared of its own accord, and in her he sought only its justification, its perfection” (335). This hatred mirrors that of the GNLF militants and police, who clash in a bloody, bitter conflict late in the novel.
Finding One’s Place in History
Even when the characters do not, the narrator understands the inevitable repetition of history and the nature of universal experience. A few characters, however, take moments of postmodern awareness to consider their places in history. Sai meditates on her personal history after fighting with Gyan: “This was the history that sustained her: the family that never cared, the lover who forgot” (290). As he observes the GNLF demonstration, Gyan considers a broader “history being wrought, its wheels churning under him, for the men were behaving as if they were being featured in a documentary of war, and Gyan could not help but look on the scene already from the angle of nostalgia” (173). He steps into adulthood as he makes the choice to join the GNLF, entering “the compelling pull of history” (176).
Gyan’s initial skepticism about joining the GNLF is somewhat justified, however, as history indeed repeats itself and conflict never ceases. The burning of the Indo-Nepal Treaty and the ensuing outbreak of violence capture this difficult truth: “This was how history moved, the slow build, the quick burn, and in an incoherence, the leaping both backward and forward, swallowing the young into old hate” (303). Crawling away from this incident, the cook remembers the pleasant town of Kalimpong, “this place where he had resided secure in the knowledge that this was basically a civilized place where there was room for them all” (306). His long history in this town is challenged by one horrific afternoon, which rewrites his past forever.
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