Postcolonial Theory and Practice

FATIMA JINNAH WOMEN UNIVERSITY

“The Inheritance of Loss” by Kiran

Submitted to : Dr. Saman Saif

“The Inheritance Loss”: A Postcolonial Theoretical Analysis

When talking of the characters in The Inheritance of Loss, and of her own life, Desai says, "The
characters of my story are entirely fictional, but these journeys of Sai’s grandparents as well as my
own provided insight into what it means to travel between East and West and it is this I wanted to
capture. The fact that I live this particular life is no accident. It was my inheritance." (Interview with
BBC, radio)
Another of her aims was to write about, "What happens when you take people from a poor country and
place them in a wealthy 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 and a political
sphere, over time?" As she says, "These are old themes that continue to be relevant in today's world,
the past informing the present, the present revealing the past." As a diasporic writer Desai presents the
characters who fail to assimilate new culture or give up their original culture in totality or become an
ad-mixture of two distinct cultures.
The major themes running throughout this novel are ones closely related to colonialism and the effects
of post-colonialism: the loss of identity and the way it travels through generations as a sense of loss.
The novel also talks about Exile, Immigration, Diasporic displacement and Globalization. How people
from the Third World move to developed countries for making some money face prejudices from
multicultural societies living abroad. They never feel at home in a foreign land, and emptiness prevails
through their consciousness.
The Inheritance of Loss is set partly in Indian city Kalimpong of West Bengal and partly in the USA in
New York with some flashbacks from England. Desai describes it as a book that "tries to capture what
it means to live between East and West and what it means to be an immigrant," and goes on to say that
it also explores at a deeper level, "what happens when a Western element is introduced into a country
that is not of the West" - which happened during the British colonial days in India, and is happening
again with India's new relationship with the States.

One of the major features of postcolonial texts is the concern with place and displacement, shifting of
location and resulting in “the crisis of identity into being” (Bill Ashcroft and et al., 47).Often, the
protagonist of a postcolonial work will find himself/herself in a struggle to establish an identity;
feeling conflicted between two cultures – one his own native culture and the other an alien culture.
Therefore, a central theme in post-colonial writing is the transformation of the native into something
other than himself – a Westernized native/ a hybrid, or at least one who is in a crisis regarding his/her
own cultural identity. Here, there is always a tension between wanting to belong to the new society yet
wanting to retain the culture of the old one. The characters in Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss are in
such dilemmas. The novel addresses these issues in a direct and poignant way. It is not merely a matter
of adapting to a new environment, or adjusting to new customs, or learning a new language. It is much
more profound, a displacement far-reaching, an agonizing process of alienation and psychological
dislocation which may create an imbalance that can greatly affect a person’s feelings, thoughts and
ideas.

The novel is set against the backdrop of the agitation for Gorkhaland in the north eastern hills of
Darjeeling, close to the borderland with Nepal. There are stories within stories depicted in numerous
vignettes. Set in 1980s, the novel gives a graphic account of a cross section of Indian society in

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characters like Jemubhai Patel, a former judge, his teenaged granddaughter Sai and their cook Nandu,
who live in a house Cho Oyu in the north East Indian town Kalimpong, Biju, the cook’s son, Gyan,
Saeed, Harish-Harry and the two sisters, Lolita and Nonita. All these figures are the inheritors of loss,
in terms of dislocation of place, wealth, progress and love.

Colonialism, Immigration and Western exposure transformed their ‘native’ identity into something
quite different. Caught between two worlds, the characters negotiate a new social space; caught
between two cultures and often two languages, the writer also negotiates a new literary space. They are
all haunted by questions like who are they and where do they belong? Desai’s novel takes place in the
post-colonial India, an India still tied to the Western world. The novel shows how colonialism affects
cultures and societies through generations and that’s why the characters of this novel are in a state of
constant psychological turmoil searching for an identity torn between two cultures, of which one seems
to be superior to the other Euro-centrically.

Starting with post-colonial identity crisis, we see Jemubhai Patel, a retired judge, an embittered person
who often lives in the past. When he was a young man, he was sent to Cambridge by his family to
study law. But in England, he was ridiculed for his accent and looks. Young English girls held their
nose as he passed insisting he reeked of curry, this rejection fuelled in his soul, a shame and a dislike
for his heritage, his culture and the color of his skin. “He retreated into a solitude that grew in weight”.
Jemubhai always idealized the British as superior and civilized, he always looked at the portrait of
Queen Victoria with awe when he was in school and aspired to be like them. The psyche behind this
“mimicking” is trying to be like the colonizer. After colonization it has become difficult to identify and
separate the culture of colonizer and the colonized. The British intrusion into the government,
education, cultural values and daily lives of the subjects was so complete; e.g. the use of English in
schools, universities, government offices and homes shows the residual effects of colonization. The
way the British hegemonically commanded influence, and treated Indian natives as inferior made
people like Jemubhai imitate them and try to be like them; “he even ate his chapattis with a fork and
knife” and lived like a “foreigner in his own country”. That’s because he could not identify with his
native culture, and was torn between East and West. He found his own wife so unsophisticated
according to Western standards of mannerisms, that he sent her back to her father’s home and
disowned her. Though he went through humiliations and discrimination in England, he became a fake
person living a lie all his life. He liked Sai for her Western outlook on things. This brings us to the
Postcolonial theory of “Eurocentrism”, the attitude of using European culture as a standard to which all
other cultures are negatively contrasted.

An example of Eurocentrism is a specific form of “othering” called “Orientalism”, which was a theory
proposed by Edward Said (1978). Orientalism is an invention of the West, by contrast to which it has
been able to define itself positively. The First World has always looked down upon the Third World as
inferior, uncultured, barbaric and irrational. Desai says in her novel that “Profit could only be
harvested in the gap between nations, working one against the other. They were damning the third-
world for being third-world.”. Sai also comments that the picture the West gives of Indians in their
literature is not even remotely close to truth, its distorted and grotesque. The natives of India were
always the “other” for the British Empire, and this caused people to either mimic the British trying to
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be their equal, or assimilate their culture, mannerism and language to become a hybrid. Jemubhai is an
example of the “mimicry”, about which Homi Bhabha says that mimicry can be a subversive tool
because in its slippage––in its production of imitators rather than real “Englishmen”––the power of the
colonizer is undermined. This ambivalence suggests that the civilizing mission just does not work
because it only allows for Anglicization, not the total transformation of “natives” into “Englishmen.”
Colonized can use it to subvert the colonizer. This becomes clearer he asserts, when placed between
“the demand for identity” and “change”; mimicry represents an ironic compromise. Lola and Noni who
live and eat like the West, wear Marks & Spencer are also examples of mimicry, they find Westerners
superior and worth immiating. They keep their ties with the west, and show off about knowing all
about western mannerisms and cuisisnes.

The third world has been programmed to see itself as inferior for generations. Thus a colonial subject
is always conscious of his status of an inferior non-white race. This phenomenon is also called “double
consciousness”, this consciousness has forced many to migrate to First World countries, colonization is
thus behind diasporic living and immigration. The colonial subject has an unstable sense of self,
vacillating between culture of colonizer and its indigenous culture. Jemubhai keeps “powdering his
face” on the outside to imitate being a white man, while his mind is at war with itself trying to decide
where he belongs. Homi Bhabha calls this “unhomliness”; it’s not the same as ‘homeless’. Being
‘unhomed’ is to feel not at home even in your own home; because one’s cultural identity crisis has
made him a psychological refugee.

Although colonizers retreated and left the lands they invaded, they left behind a deeply embedded
cultural colonization. Thus the ex-colonized experienced psychological inheritance of a negative self
image and alienation from their own indigenous culture, which had been forbidden for so long that
much pre-colonial culture was lost. Sai, Jemubhai’s granddaughter grew up at a convent in post-
colonial India, though she was never exposed to colonialism, she still is an anglicized ‘hybrid’, living a
westernized life style. In the convent she learned that “cake was better than laddoos, fork spoon knife
better than hands, sipping the blood of Christ and consuming a wafer of his body was better than
garlanding a phallic symbol with marigolds. English was better than Hindi”. Thus Sai assimilated
western culture and language, to become an admixture of East and West. She was taught and raised by
those who deemed themselves as superior and civilized. Thus her postcolonial identity is dynamic,
she’s a constantly evolving hybrid of native and colonial cultures. Hybridity according to Homi
Bhabha is “a consequence of the inability to reclaim the past”; it’s a way of survival in a colonized
world. It’s a positive and essential phenomenon which favours ‘change’ in order to survive in a
shrinking world, which itself is becoming culturally hybrid every day. There’s no such thing as a “pure
past” or “pure culture” according to Said, who calls every nation a mixture of migrant cultures of
history. Her desire to achieve a kind of emotional bond with her grandfather, the retired Judge, also
fails, for he himself is displaced emotionally and physically- the tension between wanting to belong to
his own native land and a foreign culture, the usual post-colonial dilemma. The first evening when Sai
was at Cho Oyu at her grandfather’s home “she had a fearful feeling of having entered a space so big it
reached both backward and forward”. Desai often uses such binary opposites like arrivals and
departures move in and move out, hope and hopelessness as part of the postcolonial dilemma.

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In the case of Gyan, it is dislocation from Nepal that makes him a foreigner in India, which is not his
native land. Exposing the socio-political conflict in Kalimpong Desai narrates the insurgency activities
where the Indian Nepalese demanded a separate state for themselves during the 1980s. The Gorkha
National Liberation Front has been formed mainly by the Indian Nepalese youth who are fed up with
their minority status in a place where they are in the majority, “They want their own country or at least
their own state in which to manage their own affairs”. Their main grievance is that though they and
their forefathers have sacrificed a lot for India they have been treated in the country as slaves. The
Gorkhas consider it their birthright to fight for a separate homeland. Frantz Fanon in “Wretched of the
Earth” mentions that only a bloody revolution can bring a change in country, where subjugation and
cruelty prevails, and that’s why Gyan decides to be a rebel to get his rights and freedom back from the
exploitive Indian Authority. They still remember how the British Army and later the Indian Army had
used the brave Gorkha soldiers for their selfish ends. They didn’t own the tea gardens they worked on,
they were not given good jobs like native Indians being a minority in India and they lived in poverty.
Spivak talks of such a minority as “Sabaltern”, because it’s doubly marginalized as being poor and as
being slave of a prejudiced superior race. Gyan cannot voice his misery in such a country where
racism, class and social status are standards of acceptance into mainstream mobility. Their socio-
economic condition didn’t improve since they became a part of Indan province. India being the
Governing power exploited their labour and marginalized them as non-indian. Under British rule they
were colonized, but after India got independent Gorkhas faced “neocolonialism” of many kinds, being
a minority they became a colony under Indian Government, and an underprivileged class and caste in a
society’s social hierarchy. Trinh T. Min-ha says in his essay “No Master Territories”, that we can
never get rid of colonization, because of cultural and societal discriminations, there are classes within a
society and minorities within every country that feel marginalized one way or the other. When one
master leaves, man becomes slave to so many other masters within his own country, where there is a
center, there’s a margin too. Cultural marginalization is the process whereby various groups are
excluded from access to and participation in the dominant culture. It includes concepts as mainstream,
minority, and "other," deals with questions of representation in the broadest sense, encompassing not
just the visual but also the social and psychological aspects of cultural identity. Gyan comes from a
different ethnic culture and background, and is going through identity crisis when he has to decide
between Sai’s love and love for his own nation, his hatred of western culture which he sees in Sai and
his poverty stricken jobless life. “It suddenly became clear why he had no money and no real job had
come his way, why he couldn’t fly to college in America, why he was ashamed to let anyone see his
home.” Gyan can only identify himself with Nepalese and he’s displaced by being part of India rather
than Nepal.

During colonization, the British developed only that area of India that was rich in resources and could
benefit them in some way, thus whole of India was not uniformly developed. Decolonization caused
India to go through an abrupt economic depression, and poor people from underdeveloped areas of
India had to migrate to other developed countries to earn a living. Biju is one such character from the
novel, son of a poor cook who somehow manages to get a tourist visa to USA. Biju joining a crowd of
Indians scrambling to reach the visa counter at the U.S Embassy is one of the most harrowing scenes in
the novel. He tells people on the visa counter that he’s “civilized” enough to go to USA. But his

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dreams shatter when he gets humiliating treatment from the white Americans who call him “a brown
curry-smelling reptile”. However, in the end, Biju becomes an illegal immigrant in New York, does
odd jobs to survive: “Biju changed jobs like a fugitive on the run”. The irony is that his father, the cook
in the Judge’s house thinks that he is doing well and is proud of the fact that his son is in America. “He
works for the Americans; the cook had reported the content of the letter to everyone in the market”.
But, for Biju America is a world of frustration and hopelessness. He was taken to America as a
mechanic; but he ends up as a waiter in a restaurant, he gets to live with cockroaches and rats. Finally
Saeed, a Black Muslim hires him as a baker in his café, and tells Biju to wait until he has gathered
money and attained a green card. Biju realizes that America isn’t a land of opportunity, India was
much better where he at least worked with own kind and didn’t feel humiliated for being brown and
Indian. America and England are First World countries who will always look down upon Third World,
which was previously colonized for being uncivilized and barbaric and remains an “Orient” for the
white man. Biju displays the despair of all the immigrants, who live a diasporic life away from their
homeland, who live as second class citizens abroad and are agonized by a state psychological exile.
Looking at hens always reminds him of his village, “Every now and then Biju saw it scratching in a
homey manner in the dirt and felt a pang for village life”.

Biju’s heart remains in India, he misses his father and family ties even when he’s earning dollars,
Edward Said in his essay “The Mind of Winter” says that “The achievements of any exile are
permanently undermined by his or her sense of loss”. His father boasts about his son being a manager
in foreign land, but is unaware how Biju is tormented each day by his status of an immigrant who’s
discriminated for his colour, his nationality and his accent. On the contrary, his friend Saeed has a
carefree life. He has not much affected by the agonies of an immigrant. While Biju is a lost man in the
new world, Saeed is very adaptable and leads a life of ease without any qualms. Biju's longing for
home is continuous while Saeed never thinks of leaving America as he successfully assimilates foreign
culture to survive there. Then we also see the frustration of Harish-Harry who has settled in USA but
his children are getting Americanized and tell him off on his face, his daughter speaks to him
insultingly saying she’s not his slave, and that he shouldn’t expect her to clean his ass. This is a good
example of those immigrants who for earning a living have to see their generation losing ties with
indigenous culture and traditions. The sense of loss never goes away, and remains with these
characters as part of their displaced living.

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References

Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths G., and Tiffin H., (1989). The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in
Post-Colonial Literatures. New York: Routledge.

Bhabha, Homi K., (1994) The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge.

Bhabha, Homi K., (1994) “Of Mimicry and Man: The ambivalence of Colonial Discourse”: In The
Location of Culture. (pp. 85-92)

Desai, K., (2006). Inheritance of Loss. New York: Grove press.

Desai, K., “Kiran Desai - The Inheritance of Loss.” Interview by Harriett Gilbert. World Book Club.
BBC. London, 12 June 2013. Radio.

Said, Edward W., (1994) Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf.

Said, Edward W., (1984, Sep). Mind of Winter: Reflection on life in Exile. Harper's Magazine, 269,
pp. 439.

Said, Edward W., (1995). Orientalism. London: Penguin Books.

Spivak, Gayatri C., (1998) “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed.
Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: University of Illinois. (pp. 271-313).

Minh-ha, Trinh T., (1989) Woman, Native, Other: Writing, Postcoloniality and Feminism.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

(1990). Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture Paperback. F., Russell, G., Martha, T.,
Minh-ha, C., West (Eds.) Massachusets: The MIT Press.

Minha, T. T. (2006). No Master Territories. In B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths & H. Tiffin (Eds.), The Post-
colonial Studies Reader (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge.