Kiran Desai's The Inheritance Of Loss

In this Major Project, I’m going to throw light on the rigidity prevalent in the Indian class system in context of Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss.

INTRODUCTION

The novel, The Inheritance of Loss, opines with an Indian teenager, an orphan girl named, Sai. She lives with her Cambridge-educated Anglophile grandfather, Jemubhai Popatlal Patel. He is a retired judge. They reside in the town of Kalimpong on the Indian side of the Himalayas. Sai is deeply in love with Gyan, her maths tutor. Gyan is a descendant of a Nepali Gurkha mercenary. But he recoils from her obvious privilege and falls in with a group of ethnic Nepalese insurgents.

Also, the plot showcases the life of Biju. He is the son of Jemubhai’s cook. He belongs to the “shadow class”

Her hometown is in Chandigarh. She was born to the celebrated novelist Anita Desai. Kiran Desai spent the initial years of her life in Delhi, Pune and Mumbai. She studied in the Cathedral and John Connon School. She left India at the teenage age of 14, when her family moved to England for a year and then to the United States. She spent some time at Bennington College, Hollins University and Columbia University, studying creative writing. She is a permanent resident of the United States. There are not many details available about her personal life, like her mother. Then, she left Columbia for several years to write her first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998). This book is about a young man in provincial India. He abandons an easy post-office job and begins living in a guava tree. There he makes oracular pronouncements to locals. The locals hail him as a prophet. This is so because they are unaware of the fact that he knows of their lives from having read their mail. The novel drew wide critical praise. She also received a 1998 Betty Trask Prize from the British Society of Authors. She got educated in India, England and the United States. She till today continues to divide her time between places, with mixed results like the characters in this novel, The Inheritance of