Mother And Daughter Comparison Essay

This paper brings out the comparison of mother and daughter. Kiran Desai has inherited both the experience and the way of writing from her mother. She created literary history by becoming the youngest ever woman to win the prestigious Man Booker Prize for her book The Inheritance of Loss at the age of thirty five-a career stirring event for any budding novelist, because it is an honour that has eluded her celebrated mother, who has been a finalist three times for the prize. The chairperson of the judges, Hermione Lee is of the opinion that Kiran Desai’s novel is a magnificent one full of wisdom; comedy and political intelligence and is also clear that Kiran Desai has learnt from her mother’s work because both write about the Indian communities

While her mother had to learn how to teach in a different country, she struggled with learning to write. To Kiran, her own victory and her mother’s loss only prove, “how silly prizes are”. Discussing racism, she notes that there is an underlying racism to the comment, “Another Indian writer”, she asserts. Writing political controversy needs much experience. Kiran Desai is proud of her mother and admits that she owed a huge debt to her. Her prize-winning novel is like her mother’s “it feels like a family endeavour.” She said that her mother really understood her pain while she wrote The Inheritance of Loss for eight hard years. Her mother’s life was a lonely one. She understood what she was going through and she was trying to be a companion and not allow her to be disheartened. One feels that Kiran has not conceptualized the characters clearly. She seems to be echoing a similar situation in Anita Desai’s novel Fire on the Mountain, where Nanda Kaul’s lonely life is disturbed by the arrival of her great grand-daughter Raka. Like her own great grandmother, she wanted only one thing to be left alone. Nanda realizes that “Raka was the finished, perfect model of brave, flawed experiment” (47). In The Inheritance of Loss, the judge realizes that Sai “….was more his kin than he thought. There was something familiar about her; she had the same accent and

In the fourth decade of her writing fiction (the mature phase) she convincingly used symbols to convey the thoughts more effectively. Fasting Feasting (2000) is one such novel by her, which deals with the condition of women particularly in India as well as women in general. The novel deals with the different themes like oppression, suppression and escape. Every woman in the book is virtually oppressed in some or other way. The title Fasting Feasting presents a vast gap between two cultures and societies: the one is Indian and other American. Fasting symbolizes India, a deprived, unhappy and tragic country whereas feasting symbolizes America, a country of abundance. The main protagonist Uma in India and Arun in America perceive the individual character of the fasting and feasting in their respective parts of the novel. To understand the novel and the character Anita Desai very beautifully makes a comparative study of both the cultures through the way they view food and recognize their own