Cultural Dislocation and Politics in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss

Abstract

Kiran Desai’s fiction reveals a multi-dimensional analysis of the local custom, migrancy, postcolonial tensions, and diasporic life. Kiran Desai also examines how some of these interrelationships include and sometimes divide seemingly distant characters and settings. The tension in her writing comes from the struggle of colonial experience, family expectations, and the contemporary struggles of belonging that authorize and compromise the tension between assimilation and resistance in pursuit of personal and national identity. Desai manifests this tension at its full peak in The Inheritance of Loss. The novel generates some reflection on colonialism’s legacies and the processes of globalization that shape individual lives, particularly those who live on the margins of society due to socioeconomic classics or geographies. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak notes that this novel arguably becomes a vehicle for “letting the subaltern speak,” depicting the lives of those who must forge some identities amidst the dire conditions of imposed identity through global cultural narratives. In The Inheritance of Loss, Desai interrogates the neoliberal globalization and cultural imperialism that compromise her characters’ fragmented identities and emotional integrity. The novel demonstrates the study of cultural dislocation and identity crisis resulting from globalization. The characters Biju and Sai symbolize people’s diasporic and cross-cultural journeys today. Desai creates a narrative space where personal identity is vulnerable, contested, and altered by social and political environments. Her characters almost always seem confused and alienated, showing the psychological damage of migration and cultural dislocation.