The Inheritance Of Loss Analysis

Diasporic Consciousness in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss

Vijayalakshmi K.S

Assistant Professor, Department of English, Vels University, Chennai – 600 117

Abstract

Diasporic writing occupies a significant place between countries and cultures. It deals with the problems of alienation, displacement, existential rootlessness, nostalgia, quest for identity of the immigrants. As a diasporic writer, Kiran Desai exposes all of these ideas in her works. This paper intends to explore the ethnic consciousness of some characters in Kiran Desai’s novel The Inheritance of Loss who understand the fact that they can never establish their identity in an alien land and finally become conscious of their origins and roots. The immigrants face identity

She very powerfully expresses the feeling of rootlessness that has started in the colonial times. She also depicts how this sense of loss has been inherited to the succeeding generation and how it has robbed their lives of the very pleasure of human existence. She also brings home the point of how the struggle for existence in the era of globalization alienates the people.

The novel throws light on the problems and plight of the Indians going abroad. Indian labourers by their hard work play a crucial role in making west beautiful and developed. The novel reveals the social and political history of India by exploring the hopes of Biju and his father. The novel stresses on the multicultural

But hardly are able to locate where they belong to since postcolonial hybridity is, in the words of Radhakrishnan, “a frustrating search for constituency and a legitimate political identity. They have developed a sense of loss, though in different degrees. The characters are all victims of the so called postcolonial dilemmas. However, eventually it is in Biju that the reader finds some hope of ‘true’ happiness in his supposedly reunion with his father. It is pertinent that the novel opens with a poetic description of a serene and peaceful landscape dominated by the awe inspiring beauty of Kanchenjunga in the North East Himalaya.” (51). Probably Desai wants to say that life, in spite of all its sufferings and problems are worth living and one should always learn from mistakes. One is often attracted by the material prosperity and comforts that the west seems to offer. But, in spite of the backwardness, poverty and illiteracy in one’s own land; one can probably derive a sense of belonging and identity in one’s own land only. Uprooting from one’s own land and re-rooting in an alien land is a painful process and Desai had successfully delineated the dilemmas faced by her characters in their longing to find hope in a foreign