Prof. Modestino | Howard University

Week 11 March 30th, April 1.

6 min read

The Inheritance of Loss

Kiran Desai (2006)

Background and Opening Chapters

Today’s Plan — 50 Minutes

| Time | Section |

|------|---------|

| 0–10 min | Kiran Desai: biography and literary context |

| 10–20 min | Kalimpong, colonialism, Gorkhaland |

| 20–30 min | Novel structure and themes |

| 30–42 min | Close reading: Chapters 1–2 |

| 42–50 min | Discussion |

I. Kiran Desai

Biography

  • Born 1971, New Delhi

  • Daughter of novelist Anita Desai (three-time Booker shortlist)

  • Left India at 14; England, then the US

  • MFAs at Hollins and Columbia

Career

  • First novel: Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998)

  • The Inheritance of Loss took seven years to write

  • Won the Man Booker Prize (2006)

  • Won the National Book Critics Circle Award (2007)

  • Youngest woman to win the Booker at that time

Autobiographical Roots

  • Attended a convent school in Kalimpong, where her family had a summer home

  • Her grandfather went from India to Cambridge and became a judge — like the novel’s judge

  • She grew up with a family cook she was close to

  • Not autobiography, but drawn from a world she knows firsthand

Controversy in Kalimpong

  • Protests and threats of book-burning upon publication

  • Objections to her portrayal of the Nepali-speaking majority

  • Desai defended the novelist’s right not to render any group heroically

  • A question we will return to in discussion

Literary Context

  • Tradition of postcolonial fiction: Naipaul, Rushdie, Anita Desai

  • Characters in the novel discuss and criticize Naipaul’s A Bend in the River

  • Desai’s project: colonialism mutating into globalization

  • Mishra (NYT): addresses inequality, fundamentalism, and political violence simultaneously

II. Historical Background

Kalimpong

  • Hill station in sub-Himalayan West Bengal, ~4,000 ft

  • In view of Kanchenjunga (third-highest peak in the world)

  • Ethnically mixed: Gorkhas, Lepchas, Bhutias, Bengalis

  • Developed under British rule for tea and trade with Tibet

Colonial Infrastructure

  • British built schools, missionary institutions, hill-station homes

  • Cho Oyu, the judge’s house, was built by a Scotsman

  • The house itself embodies the colonial legacy the novel interrogates

The Judge and the ICS

  • Indian Civil Service: administrative backbone of British India

  • Entry via exams at Cambridge or Oxford

  • Indians gained authority at the cost of cultural alienation

  • The judge goes to Cambridge in 1939, funded by his wife’s dowry

  • Returns ashamed of India; eats chapatis with a fork

The Gorkhaland Movement

  • Gorkhas: Indian citizens of Nepali descent, majority in Darjeeling/Kalimpong

  • Demanded separation from Bengali-dominated West Bengal since 1907

  • 1980: Subhash Ghisingh founds the GNLF

  • 1986: armed rebellion; over 1,200 killed by 1988

July 27, 1986

  • Police fire on protesters at the Kalimpong Mela Ground

  • Protesters had gathered to burn copies of the Indo-Nepal Treaty

  • At least 13 killed

  • 1988: Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council accord — compromise, not statehood

Why This History Matters

  • The GNLF insurgency drives the plot, not decoration

  • Novel opens with GNLF boys robbing the judge’s guns

  • Novel climaxes at the treaty burning

  • Desai asks: what conditions produced the insurgency?

III. The Novel’s Architecture

Dual Narrative

  • Kalimpong, 1986: the judge, Sai, the cook, Gyan, the GNLF

  • Flashbacks: the judge at Cambridge and in the ICS

  • New York, 1980s: Biju, the cook’s son, undocumented in restaurant kitchens

  • The two storylines do not physically meet until the final pages

Themes (1)

  • Colonialism as internalized damage — the judge absorbs British values and despises his origins

  • Migration and disillusionment — Biju discovers America is a basement full of rats

  • Class and servitude — the cook has no name in the novel

Themes (2)

  • Identity — every character caught between cultural worlds, inhabiting none

  • Loss — not a single catastrophe but an inherited condition passed across generations

  • The title is the thesis: what you inherit is damage

Narrative Technique

  • Third-person, but shifts between characters within chapters

  • Non-linear: flashbacks flow into the present without markers

  • Tone mixes comedy with cruelty; Desai does not soften one with the other

The Epigraph

  • Borges, “Boast of Quietness” — on ancestry and accumulated identity

  • Inheritance in the title is not financial

  • It is what you cannot choose and cannot escape

IV. Chapters 1–2

Ch. 1 — The Veranda

  • 1986, Cho Oyu, mist over Kanchenjunga

  • Sai reads National Geographic on giant squid (isolation metaphor)

  • The judge plays chess against himself

  • The cook lights damp wood to make tea

  • Colonial aspiration as daily ritual in a decaying house

Ch. 1 — Sai

  • Waiting for Gyan, her math tutor and romantic interest

  • Raised in convent schools, disconnected from her heritage

  • Imagination shaped by English-language magazines and travelogues

Ch. 1 — The Robbery

  • Three GNLF boys emerge from the mist, demand hunting rifles

  • They imagine themselves as movie protagonists

  • The judge cannot speak Nepali; the boys sneer

  • Colonial hunting rifles become tools of anti-colonial rebellion

Ch. 1 — The Cook

  • Defined by his absent son Biju in America

  • Boasts Biju cooks “Angrezi khana” — assumes high status

  • Reality: Biju at a hot dog stand, undocumented, disposable

  • Letters cross in transit, each building a fiction for the other

Ch. 2 — The Police

  • Judge sends cook to report the robbery

  • Police humiliate the cook instead of investigating

  • Search his hut, read his letters, expose his poverty

  • Sai sees his two photographs — stiff, serious, poor

Ch. 2 — The House

  • Cho Oyu built by a Scotsman with local labor

  • He believed the location could elevate the human spirit

  • Desai: the price for such romance was paid by others

  • Judge inherited it; cook maintains it; GNLF invades it

Ch. 2 — How Sai Arrived

  • Parents died abroad (father was a space scientist)

  • Nuns found the judge as emergency contact; shipped Sai to Kalimpong

  • No organic connection to her grandfather or the place

  • Her Anglophilia came through institutions, his through ambition

What the Opening Establishes

  • A household structured by colonial inheritance

  • A political crisis that will crack those structures open

  • Characters performing identities not their own:

  - The judge: Englishness

  - The cook: father of a successful emigrant

  - Sai: cosmopolitan reader

  - GNLF boys: revolutionary heroism

V. Discussion

Discussion Questions (1)

  1. Why open with the robbery rather than the judge’s backstory? What does this structural choice do?

  2. The cook has no name. What does it mean to narrate someone’s inner life while denying him that?

Discussion Questions (2)

  1. How many layers of dispossession does Cho Oyu contain?

  2. Desai said her portrayal was sympathetic. Kalimpong disagreed. What obligations does a novelist have to the communities she depicts?

Key Terms

| Term | Definition |

|------|------------|

| Postcolonialism | Effects of colonization after formal independence |

| GNLF | Gorkha National Liberation Front, 1980–1988 |

| ICS | Indian Civil Service under British rule |

| Colonial mimicry | Bhabha: colonized adopt colonizer’s culture |

| Kalimpong | Hill station in West Bengal; novel’s Indian setting |

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