Inheritance Of Loss By Kiran Desai

This book depicts the national and cultural status of the immigrant mother, who is able to preserve the traditions of her Indian heritage that connect her to her homeland. Ensuring a successful future for her American-born children is coordinated with the privilege of being an American citizen. Ashima yearns for her homeland and her family that she left behind when

Running parallel with the story set in India we are also able to follow the vicissitudes of Biju, the son of cook. He is struggling to realize the American dream as a migrant in New York. The Inheritance of Loss has been extremely highly praised as a representative book. The novel focuses confusion, hopelessness, ethno-racial and chronological relationships between people from dissimilar backgrounds and cultures. Kiran Desai is intensely interested in India- the India of 1980s which sincerely explores the varied picture. Desai examines the whole thing from beginning to end the ‘lens of being Indian,’ without that point of view she acknowledged that she cannot write. The novel, The Inheritance of Loss is a novel of merciless bitterness and hopelessness. The novel presents its characters as eventually weak human beings struggling in look for of their individuality. It shows the feeling of being trapped between two continents that infuses The Inheritance of Loss — a story replete with unhappiness over

Furthermore, Gandhi spent years in London as a student of law, where he further explored vegetarianism and began his “intellectual awakening, his moral maturation and the opening of his mind to spiritual questions” (34) and concerned himself with politics. Gandhi then went on to South Africa from 1893 to 1914 where many Indians were residing. Arnold recounts his various anti-racism strategies, and reveals how Gandhi acquired his title as the mahatma or “great soul”. South Africa is also where he began his non-violent methods of dealing with racial discrimination laws and Hind Swaraj, which is “Indian self rule”, against the British. He fought for the rights of Indians in Africa, especially against General Smuts’ plans “of stopping their immigration to South Africa”(60) using satyagraha, “truth force or struggle for truth”, campaigns. But these campaigns did not work to the full degree, as there was still “anti-Indian prejudice” (60).

A hero is not only someone with superpowers but can be anyone. It can be anyone like you or me. A hero is someone who is willing to stand up for other people. The book, A Lesson Before Dying, takes place in Louisiana and is about an innocent Black man convicted and sent to the electric chair. In the story there are real people that Ernest Gaines alludes to. Ernest Gaines makes an allusion to Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson. Beside these two, Mamie Till also stepped up and was audacious. They were all fearless and gave hope to many other people because of what they were doing. These heroes took a stand against society and changed the world for everyone.

She explains her thesis by stating “Others who write stories of migration often talk of arrival at a new place as a loss of communal memory and the erosion of an original culture. I want to talk of arrival as a gain,” (360). The key points of the text include Mukherjee describing her transition between Calcutta and the United States, and what it means to be and American and how culture influences that aspect. The information in the text is significant; the people of America are a part of a melting pot, sometimes it is hard for them to find the distinction between American culture and their own. The information in Mukherjee’s story is clear and specific, unbiased, and is relevant to the purpose of the story. I believe Mukherjee has achieved her purpose of informing her audience about cultural differences; she presents certain strengths and weaknesses within the text.

The dominant idiom of Indian writing today is firmly entrenched in pain, anxiety of displacement, nostalgia, yearning to belong to roots, and so on. Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss are two such novels that explore the tragedy of man on several levels using different perspectives. Both the novels are about averted culture-clash tragedies, homogeneity vs. heterogeneity, and about Indian sensibilities.

The heat wave of the summer of 1952, Djinda wiped her hands against her dress. Her mother would kill her, it was dirty and the pink had faded. Her feet were bare and she hurried across the burning sand toward the small house her father had built. They’d both compromised each of their cultures; her father could do whatever he wanted that involved his culture but as long as he built her mother a house. This had been before she was born; her mother had also wanted to go to the hospital for her birth but had compromised to let the women of her husband’s tribe in there with her – much to the doctor’s protests.

A person’s heritage and cultural identity may be lost when moving to a new country where the culture is different and other cultures are not easily accepted. In the short story “Hindus”, Bharati Mukherjee uses setting, characters and the plot to discuss what it is like to lose your cultural identity while being a visible minority in America. Mukherjee uses the plot to describe the events that take place in the main characters life that lead her to realize how different the culture and life is in the America’s. She also uses the characters as a way of demonstrating how moving away from one’s culture and heritage can change a person’s perspective and ways of thinking. Mukerjee also uses setting in her story to identity the physical differences in culture between living in India and America. Alike the setting and characters, the plot helps describe the loss of culture with a sequence of events.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo is a documented version of life in a Mumbai slum. The “story” revolves around the life, death, and hope in the undercity of Annawadi. The book thrusts the reader into the hidden worlds behind the lavish living of the rich and into the lives of people that are impossible to forget. Originally published February 7th, 2012 by Random House in New York, Katherine Boo writes about the apparent economic inequality occurring in the Mumbai undercity. This telling of life in a slum provides a distinct look into the social and economic injustice that determines the way these people live their lives. The book highlights the struggle of those in Annawadi as well as the Indian people as a whole. Terror and the global recession shake the city and the rising tensions over religion, caste, gender, power, and jealousy take a violent turn. Behind the Beautiful Forevers is beautifully written and does a superb job of opening eyes to the brutal and unforgiving world of Annawadi.

“Death. The only thing inevitable in life”, Colleen Hoover, an American author, simply summarized our greatest fear in words that once read, cannot be forgotten. It’s the journey that counts, it’s how you live that counts and till your last breath bringing pride to the country you were born in and eventually to the rest of the world. What scares me the most is not that we are mortals,but the deeds that we do aren’t. Everything I do in this moment will change something in what is to come. The worst part is that as John Donne once said, “No man is an island” everything I do will affect someone in my life. Therefore a ripple will reach the people I care about and the things I care about. It is this weight that I refer to as responsibility. This

This quote is an example of how in Indian society, even a distant relative can exert life-changing influence on a person. On the contrary, in the Patton’s family life there seems to be no influence coming from extended family members. The limited time frame in which Arun lives with the Pattons does not provide extensive insight of the family’s life. Because of this particular way that Desai chose to write about the Pattons, the reader is led to believe that affiliations with extended family are inexistent in the American family’s household.

Every aspect of life is controlled by an individual’s body and mind. Whether subconsciously or intentionally, the human brain and body is responsible for the way someone’s life is going to be lived, down to the most minute detail. What the Body Knows, by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, is a story about a woman named Aparna who has a baby and then becomes traumatically ill. She goes into a mental state of extreme despair at the beginning due to physical pain and being separated from her newborn child. She is only saved due to touching the surgeon that saved her life.

The varying ways of life in India and North America are put to the test in two stories, “The Management of Grief” and “Interpreter of Maladies”. Both contain different viewpoints and illustrations of life in two different countries and the people that live in them. America seems to be more modernized while their 'homeland', India, is full of strict guidelines and traditions that reflect in their beliefs on marriage, culture, and family.

In her short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri depicts various scenarios of Indian immigrants moving to and living in the United States. A particularly salient theme discussed throughout is the issue of assimilation vs. integration. Though the terms are often considered interchangeable, in this book assimilation argues for adoption of American culture. Conversely, integration advocates for the coexistence of foreign and American customs and allows immigrants to establish a sense of home away from their original countries. The story entitled, “The Third and Final Continent” specifically recounts a young Indian man’s experience trying to establish himself in Cambridge, Massachusetts after living in London. Prior to his immigration, the narrator had his marriage arranged by his family in Calcutta, and much of the story illustrates the narrator’s apprehension for his wife, Mala’s arrival from India. Recognizing that food is a significant aspect of most cultures, Lahiri uses it as a motif to indicate the transformation of the narrator’s cultural status in the United States. Through food, she ultimately asserts the possibility of positive integration, rather than just assimilation, into American society.

Among the nine stories in this collection, seven stories attempt to explore the fears and trauma of Indian immigrants in America who oscillate between cultural polarities. These people struggle to hold firm their ‘centre’- their family and values - in the Western society which constantly contradicts and challenges the culture they had once inherited from their forefathers. The other two stories are set in Bengal and probes into the predicament of two hapless Bengali women, one of whom is an orphan and the other, cut off from her family owing to political reasons.