Arghya Singh
Ph. D. Research Scholar
Ranchi
University
Jharkhand,
India
Abstract:
The present paper examines popular Indian diasporic
writer Kiran Desai’s Man Booker Prize winning novel The Inheritance of Loss from a Marxist perspective and also offers
a critique of how viewing texts and discourses through this lens often
obliterating questions of gender, caste, problematic of the nation, and so on
while preoccupying itself with issues of economy and production. The paper
endeavours to synthesize critical engagement with the story along with
engagement with the issues in assigning the tool of Marxist critical inquiry.
The paper also examines how far has the privileged position of the author of
the novel, Kiran Desai, in the global caste and class system impacted the
presentation of specific subjects such as women’s bodies in public spaces,
ideas about nation and nationalism etc.
Keywords: Class, Community, Displacement, Globalisation,
Identity, Marxist, Migration
Anita Desai in her popular novel The Inheritance of Loss has made an extension of her idea of
temporal fixity of the condition of the powerless and underprivileged masses
and the tool employed by her effectively is the Marxist philosophy. The very
epigraph of Desai’s The Inheritance of
Loss bears the Marxist undertone. The epigraph of the novel is taken from
the poem “Boast of Quietness” composed by Jorge Luis Borges who was vehemently
opposed to Marxism and Communism on the ground that the State must never be
more powerful and privileged than the individual. A cursory look of the poem is
enough to understand that the poem ensues in interrogating the urban-rural
division in which people from cities are presented as highly active and busy.
The epigraph can also be gone through as a critique of the metropolis keeping
up hegemony over knowledge production and putting down of history, subjugating
the narratives and suppressed voices of those on the margins – the subalterns.
What Borges presents to us is an elaborate analysis on the infinite and
timelessness of the human condition. It gives rise to an utter sense of despair
and hopelessness and foreshadows the forces of history repeating themselves to
iterate the same motives of domination and power by one community of people
over the other, with very little room for the dominated class to set themselves
free from this historical cycle and alter their social and material condition,
denying them to eternal powerlessness. It is however, noteworthy that such
presentation of human existence ends up universalizing the experiences of men –
rural, urban, peasant or proletariat – and totally obliterates the realities of
men’s lives.
The novel unfolds its action with the
introduction of Judge, Sai and Mutt, the judge’s beloved dog inhabiting the
living room of Cho Oyu, the bungalow built by a Scotsman and later bought by
the judge with the prospect of living like a “foreigner in his own country”
(Desai 29). The cook is brought to us somewhere in the dark kitchen in the
back, busy with her attempt to light a fire for cooking. Right from the introductory
chapter of the novel, Desai concentrates on identifying two of the main
characters by their profession – the first on is the judge, Jemubhai Patel, and
the other one is the cook, Panna Lal. Interestingly enough, even though this
nomenclature found its basis on profession is well kept up throughout the book,
the judge is now and then referred to by his given name in several occasions in
the story, but the cook’s name makes its appearance only once. The same is also
true in the case of the judge’s wife, Bela aka Nimi, whose name hardly finds
mention in the whole story. Bela/Nimi struggles to speak. She is a subaltern.
We hardly see her speaking except when she challenges the judge’s authority and
addresses him a fool, leading to her getting hit and subsequently forsaken by
her husband. Here it becomes evident how Desai has ingeniously posited the
obscurity with which the powerless fades into the societal surface. In the
globalised capitalistic world, the have-nots and the subjugated are actually
looked upon as non-entities.
After having been undergone a long series of
adventures and misadventures by most of the characters crowding the text, the
climax comes to us unaltered in the actual condition of the Judge or the cook,
excluding that the Judge loses his precious dog Mutt, and the cook reunites
with his son, Biju. However, their position in society hardly changes. Even
Biju’s arrival from America brings about no prospect for the cook’s future to
ameliorate as Biju is robbed of all his earnings and savings on his way to
Kalimpong and is even left unclad on his back. As Desai propagates through one
of Sai’s musings, “certain moves made long ago had produced all of them: Sai,
judge, Mutt, cook” (199) in climatic order of importance as mentioned in the
social strata of class and caste and it seems to them almost impossible to get
rid of their fate as destined by the value structure or hierarchy of society.
Almost all the characters Sai, judge, the
cook, Gyan, Biju, Noni, Lola, Father Booty, Uncle Potty and even minor
characters like Mrs. Sen, the Afghan Princesses, Budhoo the watchman etc. are
presented anchorless or without root in
a state of transit between living in a place and being eligible to make claims
on it. The GNLF or the Gorkha National Liberation Front movement that works as
the backdrop of the book also is drawn on issues of ownership of, and belonging
to, a land. Sai is presented as a foil to the GNLF agitators as a cosmopolitan
citizen of the world, whereas her imaginative and literary wanderings show her
a universal human subject, although this universe to which Sai is presented to
belong is only made up of the West or global North. Her evenings spent with
Lola, Noni, Uncle Potty and Father Booty lead her to look upon “how music,
alcohol, and friendship together could create a grand civilization” (223).
However, it is the common location of class that unites together this community
of people and ties them up in camaraderie. As is surfaced all through the book,
people who do not experience and share a
common community eventually get distanced, as in the situations of the judge
and his former friend Bose, who has confronted disfavor among the powerful
elite of former British civil servants and has fallen from grace, thus losing
his prestige and pension, thereby falling in the hierarchies of class and
wealth; Sai and Gyan who see their relationship stagnating due to the existent
class division between them; Sai and the cook understanding the pretentious and
tenuousness nature of their friendship since they inhibit markedly hierarchical
class positions; Noni and Lola constantly dispiriting their maid Kesang from
sharing personal information with them as “it was important to draw the lines
properly between classes or it harmed everyone on both sides of the great
divide” (67). The minimal dialogue taken place between the judge and the cook
is constrained within instructions about the duties of the cook and his
responses to the judge on being spoken to. The cook was fourteen years old when
he had started to live up with the judge but in spite of being together for
decades, the class division between them has kept them distancing, aloof and
even impersonal. Class also tells upon the way the cook looks upon his
relationship with the judge:
He has been brought up in a society where the
English have been those with privilege, wealth and power. Coloured by this,
along with his low self-esteem, he feels less successful than his father: “A
severe comedown, he thought, from his father, who had served white men only”
(63). These feelings of the cook also illustrate the racial aspects of class,
and how the issues of race and class are linked together. (Lone, 2008)
Gyan is the math tutor of Sai and has a
special love and concern for the village near Kalimpong where he lives. When he
has to turn up Sai to teach her, Gyan has to pass a long and arduous journey
leaving his lower class location and only then does he makes his entry into the
upper class environs of Cho Oyu. Even though, in spite of his education,
ambition and pursuit of the profession of teaching which is looked upon as
‘noble’ and worthy of respect, Gyan is accepted in low esteem by the judge due
to his lower class position. On the other hand, when Sai sets out to look for
Gyan she journeys backwards not only in terms of class location, but also in
temporal sense, to a place that is in the past to the time that she occupies.
In this way, the class location that people occupy ascertains them in a
temporal stasis that is very difficult to step out.
Contrasting these two journeys with Biju’s journey
indicates that even after physical mobility, class mobility is not afforded to
him. On the other hand, when the judge journeyed to England, he was able to
travel upwards in the class hierarchy as a result of that journey. What is
interesting in the judge’s case however is that his journey took place in a
world that was less globalised and he also had the privilege of a
business-minded middle class upward mobile father and a huge dowry from his
marriage to Bela/Nimi. This leads one to come into conclusion that class
mobility is, in most cases, afforded only to those who already occupy the
middle or upper rungs of the economic ladder.
In any Marxist analysis, the framework of
examination is by and large predicated upon distinction of class. While a
useful and effective tool in the contemporary global capitalistic setting,
preoccupation with an investigation of class domination and forces of
production furnishes the global canvas mistakenly homogeneous and only focuses on
economic frame works, forces of production, and their impacts while wholly
disregarding variegated facts of culture, caste, race, gender, region, religion, ethnicity, and so forth. A
Marxist viewpoint of society rising out of a casteless Western epistemological
discourse is always permeated with such cognitive violence. While looking upon
the global impacts of capitalism and consumerism, the labour of women, be it
the market or reproductive labour at home, is wholly ignored in any reading of
this novel. Most of the characters functioning ‘feminine’ labour of cooking,
cleaning, serving, tending etc. are men, viz., the cook and Biju, and even in
spite of being exploited, they are paid financial compensation for that work.
One should note here too that men belonging to upper class are not presented
doing these works anywhere in the story. The character of Mrs. Sen is brought
to us as peddling goods on a motorbike in the market and thereby giving rise to
the image of a self-reliant woman who is wholly self-made. This kind of
depiction invisibilises, depreciates and devalues the reproductive labour that
most of the women have to perform inside the exploitative patriarchal setting
within the four walls of domesticity.
Biju’s situation inhibiting as an illegal immigrant
in America is but a miniscule portrayal of the vast global labour migration
occurring ostensibly because of globalization, in which “one side travels to be
a servant and the other side travels to live like a king” (Desai 269). This
globalization is nothing but neo-colonialism through which technologically
progressed and rich and prosperous nations, previously part of the imperial
Empire, seek to stretch their ever-growing markets through skilful practices of
market-domination and control. “For the sake of this expansion, these nations
create market and labour conditions wherein poor lesser advanced countries –
which are former colonies – whose economic and resource deprivation stems from
their colonized history, have to either choose to submit to these market
conditions or face domination and suppression through economic sanctions and
political control” (Kohn, 2014). Globalization thus, apart from being hailed as “the
initiator of the world system into that of a “global village” is also theorised
to be dismantling the authority of the nation-state and a capitalistic economic
system heralded by mega-corporations and trans-national organisations is taking
its place” (Kellner, 2002).
Kiran Desai thus depicts the Nation-State as
“a place of refuge and of departure for larger spaces” (Sabo, 2012) without contextually placing its position in the
globalised network of capitalism and neo-imperialism. After such a critical
observation and reading of the novel through a Marxist lens, the need for an
intersectional study in delving into the variegated realities and social
practices that supply the fictionalized lives of postcolonial subjects in an
increasingly market-driven, globalized world appears very clear. Locating the
characters’ inter-personal clashes and journeys initially on class locations
foregrounds the working of the market-economy but effectively obliterates the
role of gender, caste, citizenship and ethnicity as working factors that moulds
and tells upon the lived shared experiences of postcolonial subjects.
Works
Cited
Desai, Kiran. The
Inheritance of Loss. Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006.
Kellner, Douglas. "Theorizing Globalization." Sociological Theory 20.3 (2002):
285-305.
Kohn, Margaret. Spring 2014. 21 October 2016
<<http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/colonialism/>>.
Lone, Sissel Marie. "Race, Gender
and Class in The Inheritance of Loss and Brick Lane A comparative study."
Spring 2008. www.duo.uio.no. 21 October, 2016
<https://www.duo.uio.no/bitstream/handle/10852/25539/Masterxthesis.pdf?sequence=1>.
Sabo, Oana. "Disjunctures and diaspora in Kiran Desai's
The Inheritance of Loss." The
Journal of Commonwealth Literature (2012).