Location and Mobility: A Shaping of Postcolonial Identity in Kiran Desai's novel The Inheritance of Loss

Background of the Study

With words of applause to the Kiran Desai’s novel The Inheritance of Loss (2006), Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City, states that its “a revelation in the possibilities of the novel […] vast in scope, from the peaks of the Himalayas to the immigrant quarters of New York; the gripping stories of people buffeted by winds of history, personal and political.” Whereas, The Publishers Weekly finds the text as deftly shuttling “between first and third worlds, illuminating the pain of exile, the ambiguities of post-colonialism and the blinding desire for a better life, when one person’s wealth means another’s poverty”. These views, even though, raise the issues of nations’ tragedies, human failings and the pain of exile causing ambiguities of post-colonial India; cannot fully address the novel's diverse identities of the characters unless it is discussed on the ground of location and movement. Therefore, this paper probes into the problem how location and mobility influence to shape identities embedded in local actions, global cultural landscapes in the postcolonial context and thereby enhances the search of existential identity.

Text and Context of Post-coloniality

A major feature of post-colonial 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). As Kiran Desai’s novel The Inheritance of Loss  strongly contextualizes a range of attributes of postcolonial issues drawing the mobile characters of the various locations, predominantly strives for relocating their diverse identities. Since the death of her parents under the wheels of a bus in Moscow where her father was studying to become an astronaut, Sai, the female protagonist, begins to live with her grandfather, an English-educated Indian judge and his cook at Cho Oyu in Kalimpong, a crumbling, isolated mansion built years before by a Scotsman. When the judge was to purchase the house, the Scotsman had said, “It is very isolated but the land has potential” for “quinine, sericulture, cardamom, orchids” (Desai 28). Nonetheless, “the Judge was not interested in agricultural possibilities” but he could live here “with the solace of being a foreigner in his own country” (29). In the case of the Judge “purchasing the house” gives a sense of locating himself and being a foreigner is a sense of displacement. As the characters in the book move through the various distances ranging from India, Nepal to America while they pursue hopes that inevitably elude them. In locating the postcolonial identities in the novel, Desai draws wide-spreading impacts of location and mobility of the characters resulting in from every contemporary international issue such as globalization, multiculturalism, economic inequality, fundamentalism, independent movement and violence. To mark such categories of identity the novelist has portrayed the characters that are mostly either exiles, eccentrics, or both possessing distinctive nature and culture owing to their life experiences of diaspora and hybridity. The novel opens with Sai, sitting on the veranda, and reading an article about “giant squid in an old National Geographic,” the judge who sits away at the corner with his chessboard “playing himself”; Mutt, the dog snoring gently under his chair and the Cook trying to light the damp wood inside the “cavernous kitchen.”

Amongst different remarkable handlings of post-colonial identities such as the use of English and sometimes Hindi language with mixture of various dialects by the characters and the narrator in the novel make rich cultural combination and dialectical blending of culture for “recognition” due to “racial and ethnic hybridization” (Alcoff 6). Hybridity has been a term to describe societies that emerge from contacts of European “explorers” and those “explored”. Instead of explaining these contacts as mere imposers of a major culture onto a minor culture, hybridity emphasizes their mutual intermingling. The judge and Sai are “estranged Indians” who converse in English for they know Hindi, a little. The judge's estrangement began as a student in England. He envied the English and despised Indians, slathering powder over his too brown skin, rejecting his peasant father; back in India, he could be hideously cruel to his wife, indirectly causing her death.

The Cook's son, Biju, meanwhile, lives miserably as an illegal alien in New York going from one job to another like “a fugitive on the run-no papers” (Desai 3), trying to locate himself. The judge has lost his place in India, where once he identified with the British rather than his own people. Sai has lost her parents (in Russia), her young love, and has not yet found herself. Biju is searching for his place in a new world that seems to have no niche for him. Due to immigration and migration, globalization and multiculturalism propagated by the waves of modernization, or the concept of colonial hangover, most of the characters struggle with their hybridized identity and the forces of modernization, and at the same time trying to maintain their “recognition that identity makes a difference” (Alcoff 8). For Alcoff, culture is one means of collecting together a group, even a weapon in the struggle for independence. In search of cultural/ethnic identity in the year of 1980s, some young Nepali-Indian activists (“unleashed Bruce Lee fans in their Amer ican T-shirts made-in-China-coming-in-via-Kathmandu?” 157) are fighting for their own state.

Due to the change of location which gives rise to the challenges all to face the same heart-wrenching questions that haunt the immigrant: Who am I? Where do I belong to? And how do I perform? Biju lives as a diasporic life of in-between-ness in America, wanders with hardships in order to get the Green Card but always remains with empty-handed and loss of fortune. Similarly, for many people from over the world who experience a diasporic life and possess hybrid identity “of unsettling, recombination, hybridization and cut-and-mix, in short, the process of cultural diaspora-ization” [sic] (Hall 94). As an impact of location the judge returned to India a changed man. He used to envy the English and detested Indians. He worked as being English with the passion of hatred and for what he would become; absolutely everyone, both English people and Indians, would despise him.  Such nature of living is known as “culturally uprooted, alienated, or more or less assimilated engages in a sociological battle in search of its identity” (Cabral 60).

Even though the characters like Judge, Sai, Father Booty, Uncle Potty, Mrs. Sen, Lola and Noni, at Cho Oyu and Mon Ami, who live together yet they fail to create a pleasant and accommodating atmosphere. They eccentrically behave each-other nevertheless they have formed an “imagined community” as Daniel Mato quotes to Benedict Anderson (282). While doing so, Kiran Desai's presentation of India is both the place that Biju (who is Indian) dreams of escaping and where Father Booty (who is not Indian) longs to remain. Due to the sense of displacement, Biju in New York is not immune from nostalgia. He can feel the pulse of the forest, smell the humid air, the green black lushness; he could imagine all its different textures, the plumage of banana, the stark spear of the cactus, the delicate gesture of ferns.

Such a mixture of behaviours and attributes that are shaped by postcoloniality can also be observed through Desai’s critique of the existing material and discursive conditions, as well as polyphonic multicultural diversity of its many subjects appear to be the source of struggle and inspiration as Biju remembers about “Colonial India, free India,” he finds “the tea was the same, but the romance was gone” (133); Biju and his friends drank tea and diligently they read the New York Times together, including the international news. They take Tikka masala, tandoori grill, navrattan vegetable curry, dal makhani, pappadu. Harish-Harry says, “Find your market. Study your market. Cater to your market.” Demand-supply. Indian-American point of agreement (145). In this course of cultural transformation that generally followed the ending of colonial mandates, rising immigration and economic liberation that they provide, in Linda Martin Acolf’s term, a “cultural space” and “ totalizing self” whereas Arjun Appadurai (1996) has called it due to “Global flows” of culture as “disjunctive” order employing a set of terms (ethnoscape, financescape, mediascape, technoscape, and ideoscape) to stress various streams or flows along which cultural material that might be seen to be moving across national boundaries. Whereas, a double movement of going forth and coming back of the characters would create a “circulatory regime” (Markovits 3) undergoing through crisscrossing circulatory flows. Appadurai examines the current epoch of globalization, which is characterized by the twin forces of mass migration and electronic mediation, and provides fresh ways of looking at popular consumption patterns, debates about multiculturalism, and ethnic violence. In addition, that disjuncture, he says, becomes “central to the politics of global culture.”

Cultural Hybridity

Even though, hybridity originates from the Latin hybrida, a term used technically for a cross between two different species, it also shows the connection between the racial/historical categories of the past and contemporary cultural discourses and whereby resulting in “a culture in its colonial operation becomes hybridized” (Young 159). Similarly, in The Inheritance of Loss, the exploitations of cultural hybridity remarkably abound in almost all the characters' activities in one way or another. For instance, the education that Sai was taught at St. Augustine’s Convent falls between the contradictions to follow hybridity across “Lochinvar and Tagore, economics and moral science, highland fling in tartan and Punjabi harvest dance in dhotis, national anthem in Bengali and an impenetrable Latin motto” (30). Gyan, an ethnic Nepalese, an immigrant, loves Sai in return – until he becomes swept up with a group of insurgents agitating for freedom movement from India and decides he needs to despise her and her bourgeois ways, thinking that individual “Happiness has a smaller location” (59) that is, in front of the wider (ethnic and regional) location. Jemubhai Popatlal Patel, who possesses Western and colonial hangover and behaves like a foreigner in his own country. He exists in the condition of nation-ness or nationlessness. Mrs. Rice on

Thornton Road

had taken to calling him “James.” His study at Fitzwilliam has grown in him a fertile soil to form solitude -- “The solitude became a habit, the habit became the man, and it crushed him into a shadow” (39). During on board, the Strathnaver on his way back, the judge used to sip beef tea and read “How to Speak Hindustani,” (119) since he had been posted to a part of India where he did not speak the language. Other precisely sketched Kalimpong characters include two elderly Anglophile Indian sisters – Lola and Noni who sip tea and read Jane Austen, safe within the confines of the estate they call Mon Ami, and a Swiss priest named Father Booty who keeps a dairy and dreams of teaching Indians to make cheese. 

When he was in Britain, the mind of Jemubhai used to grow stranger to himself, found his own skin odd-colored, his own accent peculiar because of the notion of hybridity that makes difference into sameness, and sameness into difference. According to Edward W. Said (2003), such things happen due to “the clash between culture and civilization” (334) between West and East. It is because of cultural fusion that creates confusion, as the Judge “forgot how to laugh, could barely manage to lift his lips in a smile […]” (40), since the rhetoric of hybridity, sometimes referred to as hybrid culture is fundamentally associated with the emergence of postcolonial discourse and its critiques of cultural imperialism. This second stage in the history of hybridity is characterized by literature and theory that focuses on the effects of mixture upon identity and culture. Key theorists in this realm are Homi K. Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Gayatri Spivak, Paul Gilroy, and among others whose works respond to the increasing multicultural awareness of the early nineteen nineties. Homi K. Bhabha’s essay “Interrogating Identity: The Post-colonial Prerogative” (1990) analyses the liminality of hybridity as a paradigm of colonial anxiety. His key argument is that “colonial hybridity, as a cultural form, produced ambivalence in the colonial masters and as such altered the authority of power”. And, we find out such paradigm of hybridity that abundantly attains culturally fertile place in The Inheritance of Loss, too, although it lacks the altered authority of power.

R. Radhakrishnan, another postcolonial critic, talks about the phenomenon of hybridity as a theme so dear to post-structuralist theories of “deferral, difference, and dissemination”. In the novel, Jemubhai shows strange behavior after his return from Cambridge; at Piphit, he “sat up, fidgeted, looked at the winged dinosaur, purple-beaked banana tree with the eye of one seeing it for the first time. He was a foreigner- a foreigner-every bit of him screamed” (166-67). Radhakrishnan notices the “crucial difference” that one discerns between metropolitan versions of hybridity and postcolonial versions in which, he says “the former are characterized by an intransitive and immanent sense of jouissance, the latter are expressions of extreme pain and agonizing dislocations” (Radhakrishnan 314). In the novel, European and American feel such a sense of jouissance as Father Booty and Uncle Potty fully enjoy even without any legal document. Father Booty was found to be residing in India for forty-five years “illegally [….] He knew he was a foreigner but had lost the notion that he was anything by an Indian foreigner […]” (220). But on the other hand, the characters like the Judge, Sai, Biju, Gyan and other are found struggling and living with the postcolonial versions of cultural hybridization even in their own authentic-country. Desai, through this representation, obviously wants us, hence, to explore the pain of the immigrant, and the unfairness of a world in which, “one side travels to be a servant, and the other side travels to be treated like a king.”

Besides this, the matter of irony is that Biju, Mr. Iype and others who live in America in search of identity (Green card and job) and talk about to kick out Indian-Nepalese, Bangladeshis, Afgans, Muslims, Tibetans, and Bhutanese from India. Lola and Noni who had a self-righteousness common to many Indian women of the English-speaking upper-educated background women who go out to mimosa brunches, eat their Dadi's roti with adept fingers, put on a sari or smacked on elastic shorts for aerobics, could say “Namaste, Kusum Auntie, aayiye, baethiye, khayiye!” (50). On the other hand, the movements of a group of  Monks who escaped from Tibet along the salt and wool trade routes had arrived in refugee status, and “Lhasa beauties dancing waltzes at the Gymkhana Ball, amazing the locals with their cosmopolitan style” (45). Desai presents many other agencies of cultural hybridization as Mrs. Sen blames Muslims who eat bacon and eggs for breakfast every morning and drink whiskey every evening. Moreover, they pretend one thing but do another-“[…] they drank, smoked, ate pork, visited prostitutes, and then denied it” (130). In Kalimpong haat Nepali women with golden nose rings dangling and Tibetan women with braids and prayer beads, and Lepcha medicine men all assemble at a place with diverse identities. Lola and Noni think of Sai as an orphan child of India’s failing romance with the Soviets.

Conclusion

Kiran Desai, in The Inheritance of Loss, predominantly employs the mixture and mishmash of cultures proliferated in local, national and global sphere. For instance, Sai, joins Father Booty and Uncle Potty at Mon Ami, with Vaseline smell and an odor of wet sheep and celebrates Christmas though she is not Christian originally nevertheless habituated to follow westernized customs and rituals because of the influence of metropolitan hybridized culture “she had the same accent and manners. She was a westernized Indian brought up by English nuns, an estranged Indian living in India”(210). According to Mike Featherstone (2003), the existence of a global culture in the restricted sense of “third cultures” affects a number of trans-societal institutions, local cultures and cultural producers.

In course of portrayal of love, longings and losses the characters and actions in The Inheritance of Loss move between national and international (transnational), local and global locations and movements to result in hybridized form of culture, that is, “Third culture”. This cultural hybridity, even though, leads to further controversial relations in the characters of the novel their longing is perhaps the thing that the characters in this novel do best. They long for identity, they long for love and they long for acceptance -- yet rarely are they skilled at locating aptly any of the above since postcolonial hybridity is, in Radhakrishnan words, “a frustrating search for constituency and a legitimate political identity.” This is a story of exiles at home and abroad, of families broken and fixed, of love both bitter and bittersweet but consequently leading towards constant existence.

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