The Theme of Alienation in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss

Abstract

The theme of alienation has been recurrent in the Indian English fiction. It has become a major concern for post-modern writers and Kiran Desai, daughter of Anita Desai is no exception. She has explored this contemporary issue in her second novel The Inheritance of Loss for which she took eight long years to complete. The various themes which are intertwined in the novel The Inheritance of Loss are globalization, multiculturalism, insurgency, poverty, isolation and issues related to loss of identity. The author Kiran Desai exposes powerfully the ill-effects of globalization and liberalization which profess to create wealth and improve the quality of life; but in reality widen the gulf between the rich and the poor. She powerfully delineates how the sense of 'loss' has started with Jemubhai Patel, the Judge who vainly attempts to become an Anglicized person and gets alienated in the process in the colonial period. This loss has been inherited to the next generations and epitomized in Sai, the Judge's granddaughter. Her efforts to recuperate from the sense of rootlessness by having a relation with Gyan, the Nepali are severely impeded by the political turmoil caused by Gorkhaland movement. On the other hand, Desai tries to capture what it means to live
between East and West and what it means to be an immigrant through the character of Biju, the Cook's son.