Kiran Desai - Just Buffalo Literary Center

Kiran Desai grew up in an India where books were precious, and because they
brought the world, were read intensely. She was born in September 1971 and
raised in a New Delhi apartment with her mother, the noted writer Anita Desai,
her businessman father, Ashvin, and three older siblings. Her mother’s mother
was German and her maternal grandfather was an exile from what is now Bangladesh.
Her father’s family was from the northwest Indian state of Gujarat; in one
of many echoes between Desai’s book and life, her paternal grandfather left for
an education in England and returned as a civil service judge.
More echoes: Desai’s family had a house in Kalimpong named Chomioma after a
mountain in Tibet (Cho Oyu is also a Tibetan peak), and Desai briefly attended
a convent school in the Himalayan foothills. Her aunt, a doctor, still lives in
Kalimpong in a mansion last owned by a blind English woman, Desai has said,
who “died completely eaten by maggots in her big brass bed, abandoned by her
servants.”
At 15, Desai left India with her mother when Anita was invited to teach literature
first in England, then at Mount Holyoke College and the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology. “We went through that whole odd immigrant thing together,”
Desai has said. “She had to learn how to drive, learn how to get a phone; I had to
go to high school, she had to go and teach.”
Desai went to high school in Amherst, Massachusetts, then went to Bennington
College in Vermont. She intended to be a scientist, until she took a creative
writing class as a diversion, and found it a revelation. In part, it allowed her to
recognize an identity she’d been missing since she left New Delhi. “When I first
went away, I was far from any Indian context,” she has said. With immigration,
“suddenly all your references are gone, your language is gone. Even the English
you speak is formal and curbed.”
She went to a writing program at Hollins College in Virginia and began her first
novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, about a shiftless middle-class man who
climbs up into a guava tree and is mistaken for a guru. She got a master’s degree
at Columbia University, but took two years off to finish her first book. Hullabaloo
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was well received by critics in the West, but Indian critics chastised her for pandering
to Western readers with a lighthearted book that features drunken monkeys
and monsoons.
Desai took the next seven years to write The Inheritance of Loss, which explores
the most serious of topics: immigration, repressive systems of class and government,
violent insurgency, isolation and identity. She has called it, though, “just
a family story.” “There was this realization that what my generation was going
through in America was the same as what my grandparents had gone through in
the UK decades earlier,” she has said. “Nothing had changed.”
She ranged the world while writing it, composing some of it at her mother’s
home in Cold Spring, New York, other parts in a borrowed house in Kalimpong,
and others on long trips to Mexico with her mother. When it was published in
2006, it won the Man Booker Prize (an honor three of her mother’s books had
been nominated to but never won). At 35, she was the youngest woman ever to
win the prize. But she doesn’t think her age makes her more or less remarkable.
“I know a writing career goes up, goes down to its own rhythm — some are
welcomed books, others despised books, but that’s the public side. The important
thing is the journey of thought, of experimentation. I feel very much at the
beginning of that process.”
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India Focus:
Nepalese in india
Immigration touches each of the characters in The Inheritance of Loss and often
becomes a question of belonging. The judge, educated in England about English
laws, returns to India only three years before the country’s independence from
Britain in 1947. He feels like a foreigner in England and at home. Noni and Lola
cling to Western culture in a house named Mon Ami (French for “my friend”)
and locate the “quintessence” of England in their British-made underwear. Father
Booty, a Swiss missionary priest, is deported from India after living there for more
than two decades because he neglected to renew his papers. Sai’s parents move to
Russia. Biju is an undocumented worker in America. The Nepalese people, who
made up 95 percent of the population around Kalimpong and Darjeeling in the
mid-1980s when the novel is set, are legally considered foreigners even though
they are Indian-born.
INDIA
WEST BENGAL
The thread of the Napalese people’s belonging shapes the present-day setting of
the novel (the year 1986), when the Gorkha National Liberation Front’s strikes
and protests led to violence. Although the GNLF was formed as a political party
in 1980, its demands for an independent Gorkhaland state (separate from West
Bengal, but still part of India) peaked between 1986 and 1988. During those
years, more than 200 people were killed in fighting.
The Nepalese population in West Bengal began to grow in the middle of the
19th century under British rule. Gorkhas (a term for Nepalese people) became an
integral part of the area’s tea economy and crucial members of the Indian army.
A 1950 treaty between Nepal and India allowed for a porous border between
the two countries, and enabled citizens from each country to live and work in
the other. It also meant that people of Nepalese descent living in India were
not officially considered Indian citizens. Although Gorkhas were promised an
autonomous state and recognition of their language by West Bengal’s Marxist
government several times after 1950, they were never given that autonomy.
In 1986, states neighboring West Bengal, forced “foreigners” including Indianborn
Nepalese to leave because of ethnic tensions. When the evicted Napelese
tried to move to West Bengal, they were sent instead back “home” to Nepal.
The GNLF seized the moment to push for an autonomous state, which would
recognize them as Indian citizens and guarantee they would never be dispossessed
of their lands. The movement involved demonstrations and general strikes,
including clashes with police that left several dead. In July 2006, 15 people,
including women and children, were killed after police opened fire at a banned
rally (a moment recreated in The Inheritance of Loss).
Violence also erupted in tea gardens, where more than 80,000 Nepalese worked.
British press reports at the time noted workers on both sides fought with khukris
(traditional Gorkha knives), spears, lathis (bamboo poles) and iron rods. The
Nepalese worker’s strikes caused tea garden owners to lose millions of dollars but,
in a response that resonates in Desai’s novel, the GNLF leader said the solution
was simple: “If the planters want peace, they’d better support the campaign for
Gorkhaland,” he said. “Otherwise their interests will be harmed.”
In 1988, the GNLF and the West Bengal government agreed to create an
autonomous hill district, though not an autonomous state. They created
the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council, which controlled the area’s economic
development programs, education, and culture.
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QUESTIONS
1. Describe the physical state of Cho Oyu. Compare it (a house named after
one of Nepal’s highest mountains) to Mon Ami (a house named after the French
words for “my friend”). Who lives/ has lived in each house What does its state
say about its occupants What does it imply about the larger condition of the
country
2. Who takes Mutt and why
3. How does Sai and Gyan’s relationship begin and end It is often described in
chapters that precede or follow descriptions of the judge’s marriage. How do the
two relationships compare
4. Why are the Napalese in Kalimpong fighting What do they stand to gain
What is the cost of the insurgency
5. Describe some of the journeys people take in the novel—the judge to England,
Father Booty to India, Biju to America, Sai’s parents to Moscow and then
outerspace. What are the limits of travel Does anyone’s journey work out well
What do the travelers hope to find Why, at the end of the book, does Sai resolve
to leave
kitchens Do unlikely alliances also take place Does class or race play a more
important role in determining who works where and in what position
9. Desai writes that “a great amount of warring, betraying, bartering had occurred”
over the geographical region where the novel is set “despite the mist
charging down like a dragon, dissolving, undoing, making ridiculous the drawing
of borders.” Where else in the book does the environment seem to ignore or
overcome efforts to define and control the region What point does this theme
reinforce
10. The novel opens with Sai reading an article about giant squid—creatures
with a “solitude so profound they might never encounter another of their tribe.”
What tone does this set for the rest of the book Who has a similar solitude
11. We are told Biju brings the “habit of hate” to America, but nearly all the
novel’s characters exhibit a similar hate and prejudice at sometime. Describe the
emotional and physical violence in the novel. What does it have to do with an
inheritance of loss
6. In England, the judge “found he began to be mistaken for something he
wasn’t—a man of dignity. This accidental poise became more important than
any other thing.” How does the judge’s accidental dignity shape the rest of his
life Who else uses an idea of dignity to define themselves and their relationship
to others
7. Compare the difference between the rich and poor in America and the rich
and poor in Kalimpong.
8. Biju finds there is “a whole world in the basement kitchens of New York.”
How do the animosities between nations play out between immigrants in those
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JUST BUFFALO PRESENTS:
Works by Kiran Desai
Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (Anchor, 1999)
Additional Resources
Barton, Laura. “A Passage from India.” The Guardian. 12 Oct. 2006. http://books.
guardian.co.uk/manbooker2006/story/0,,1920237,00.html
“Exclusive Interview with Kiran Desai.”
http://www.themanbookerprize.com/perspective/qanda/40
“What Does it Mean to be an Immigrant” Rediff. 30 Jan. 2006.
http://in.rediff.com/news/2006/jan/30inter1.htm
“Critical Mass: Kiran Desai Q&A.”
http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/2006/10/kiran-desai-q.html
Major funding for Babel Provided by:
Kulman, Linda. “Book Tour: Kiran Desai Reads The Inheritance of Loss.”
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.phpstoryId=10662383
Lyall, Sarah. “A Cross-Cultural Saga Wins the Booker Prize.” The New York Times.
11 Oct. 2006.
Pilkington, Ed. “Saturday: Interview: A Hullabaloo.” The Guardian. 16 Sept. 2006.
Smith, Dinitia. “A Writer Looks to her History and Reaps an Award.” The New York
Times. 26 Oct. 2006.
BABEL is sponsored by:
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