NON SERVIAM: REFUSAL OF TRANSLATING CULTURES IN KIRAN DESAI’S THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS

Abstract

Kiran Desai’s most appraised novel The Inheritance of Loss, is generally acknowledged as an
“immigrant novel” (Das 2009: 62), “intelligently postcolonial” (Moseley 2008: 295), dealing with
the issues of class, race, and ethnicity. It moves back and forth between Kalimpong, in the
northeastern Himalayas, and New York, the desperate realm of the illegal immigrants
populating the grubby basement kitchens of its restaurants, “knitting varied moods and
textures” (Hiremath 2007: 2). The sharp and gloomy, not at all heartening, manner of tackling
with such issues confers Desai’s novel its particularity on the stage of postcolonial writing.
As Mishra puts it,
Desai seems far from writers like Zadie Smith and Hari Kunzru, whose fiction takes a
generally optimistic view of what Salman Rushdie has called ‘hybridity, impurity,
intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human
beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs’ (Mishra 2006).