This is the manuscript version of a chapter that was accepted for publication and appeared in print in 2014. Please cite the published version, rather than this manuscript. Details are as follows: Allington, D. (2014) ‘Kiran Desai’s The inheritance of loss and the troubled symbolic production of a Man Booker prizewinner’. In: Dwivedi, O.P. and Lau, L. (eds.) Indian Writing in English and the global literary marketplace. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 119-139. Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss and the Troubled Symbolic Production of a Man Booker Prize Winner Daniel Allington Kiran Desai’s second novel, The Inheritance of Loss, was published by Penguin subsidiaries in India and North America in January 2006, and seven months later in the UK by Hamish Hamilton, a Penguin imprint. That same year, it won the Man Booker Prize, the UK’s most prestigious literary award, as well as the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award, one of the three most prestigious literary prizes in the USA. However, the book also became subject to protests in the Indian town where it was partly set. These events provide an ideal opportunity for scholars to do what Sarah Brouillette argues they have too rarely done, and examine ‘the specific interconnections between the content of literary work and the circuits through which texts pass as they are produced and consumed’.1 In this chapter, I shall therefore focus on selected episodes from the novel’s production and reception in order to provide a rich picture of its place in the global cultural economy, and to attempt to understand the complex and conflicted position into which a literary novel positioned as ‘Indian’ must enter if it is to be accepted by the readers for whom such novels are, to use Pierre Bourdieu’s phrase, ‘objectively destined’.2 My starting point is Bourdieu’s analysis of cultural value as a form of belief produced through the cumulative judgements of participants in the ‘field of cultural production’, including writers, critics, publishers and (although this last group were under-emphasized by Bourdieu) prize committee members.3 One of the most important features distinguishing fiction from painting is its dependence (material if not symbolic) on sales to an audience beyond the field of cultural production. Popular fiction appeals directly to such a readership by furnishing it with likeable characters and entertaining plot lines in a prose style designed not to attract attention to itself;4 furnishing their readers with the opposite, literary novels and other forms of ‘legitimate’ culture rely on public-facing institutions for disseminating value beyond the field – that is, persuading individuals outside the field to adopt belief produced within the field. Only a consecrated minority of literary novels, referred to as ‘the canon’, can ever receive this special treatment, which is the ultimate prize for which literary authors and movements vie. Thus, the following statement from Salman Rushdie may reveal more than it intends:
Perhaps it does seem, to some ‘home’ [i.e. Indian] commentators, that a canon [of IWE] is being foisted on them from outside. The perspective from the West is rather different. Here, what seems to be the case is that Western publishers and critics have been growing gradually more and more excited by the voices emerging from India ... It feels as if the East is imposing itself on the West, rather than the other way around.5 From Rushdie’s perspective, the canonization of a small group of British-educated literary writers of Indian origin (‘the East’ in his account) was their own achievement and a victory over those writers of ‘Western’ origin with whom he understands them to compete for the canonizing approval of Western critics and publishers. However, from the perspective of someone outside the literary field, canons are always foisted, through public-facing cultural institutions such as schools, publishers and literary prizes. And that is of particular importance to India, because the institutions disseminating belief in the value of English literature have a colonial history and a nature shaped by the class structure of British and American society and by the globalized capitalist economy – with all that these things have entailed for India in other spheres of life.6
The (Man) Booker Prize and the Indian English novel In the story of the international success of a group of Anglophone, Indian-born and eminently literary novelists, a major role has been played by Britain’s foremost literary award, the Booker Prize (latterly, the Man Booker Prize). Luke Strongman’s critical survey of the award’s twentieth-century winners shows that Booker Prize-winning novels evidence (on the textual level) ‘a process of negotiation by individual writers of the changing relations among nations, tribes, and cultures in the aftermath of empire’7 – and because the Booker is open to authors not only from Britain itself, but from throughout the Commonwealth, it has been possible for these ‘individual writers’ to include people born in British colonies and former colonies, including India. Indeed, arguably the most publicly visible winner of the prize remains Midnight’s Children (1980) by the Indian-born Salman Rushdie. This novel of Indian decolonization won not only the 1981 Booker Prize, but also the special Booker of Bookers, awarded only in 1993, and the Best of the Booker Prize, awarded only in 2008 and chosen by popular vote from a shortlist selected by an expert panel. And since the breakthrough moment represented by Midnight’s Children, Indian-born authors have frequently won or been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, often with works directly critical of British colonialism. For all these reasons, ‘[n]arratives surrounding the Booker Prize’ have, as Claire Squires argues, ‘emphasized [the] Booker’s role in foregrounding, promoting, and celebrating diasporic writers’ such that ‘the prestige bestowed on [diasporic] writers reflects back to the Booker, which then represents itself as progressive in its consecration of non-white and/or postcolonial authors’.8 Yet the prize itself is essentially colonial. While the (Man) Booker Prize accords individuals born (although not necessarily educated or resident) in Commonwealth nations (most of which are former British colonies) the right to author valued works of literature, the production of the value of those works remains controlled by a British institution, the (Man) Booker Prize itself. Thus, even while texts apparently critical of British imperialism and colonialism have been promoted by the prize, the prize functions beneath the surface as an instrument in the furtherance of quasi-imperial and paracolonial relations between Britain and its former colonies. This is part of a trend described by James F. English:
As British, European, American, and multinational cultural and philanthropic institutions have turned, however belatedly, to the task of identifying artists from the postcolonial nations for inclusion in their purportedly global pantheons ... the effort has followed a course analogous to that of foreign investment of financial capital. Viewed on the one hand as a necessity for the postcolonial world and an ethical obligation on the part of the major powers ... the investment of foreign symbolic capital in emergent symbolic markets has been seen on the other hand as a means of sustaining less overtly and directly the old patterns of imperial control over symbolic economies and hence over cultural practice itself.9
This analysis has particular force when applied to the (Man) Booker Prize. The Booker Prize was launched in 1968 with funding from Booker, McConnell Ltd, a food shipping and wholesaling company that had for decades run the sugar industry in the British colony of Guyana, and had developed an interest in literature after purchasing the rights to the works of some of the most popular British authors, including Agatha Christie and Ian Fleming. The company was purchased in 2000 by the British supermarket company Iceland, which sold off its literary assets and withdrew from sponsorship of the prize, which was then relaunched in 2002 as the Man Booker Prize, with funding from Man Group plc: as of the time of writing the world’s largest hedge fund manager.10 Since the outset, the Man Booker Prize has thus been directly and materially reliant on colonialism and globalization, in that it has served as part of what would now be called a ‘corporate responsibility’ programme, first for a firm of actual colonialists (a point famously highlighted in John Berger’s outraged acceptance speech of 1972), and later for a multibillion-pound financial speculator (a point that we shall see did not escape Desai). As such, it plays a key role in a system wherein institutions based in what Rushdie calls ‘the West’ (effectively, London and New York) control access to worldwide literary markets, and sometimes provide such access to writers born in what he calls ‘the East’ (that is, South Asia). Tracking translated editions and their sales across European markets, Kovač and Wischenbart find that the Man Booker Prize is not only able to enhance an author’s international impact: it also has the power – apparently uniquely among European prizes – to launch the international career of a previously unknown author.11 The symbolic capital that it generates frequently serves to advance the careers of authors from outside Britain (such as Desai), but if that were not the case, it would be likely to have less impact: a competition in which (say) Indian and Australian authors were unable to take part would receive far less coverage in the Indian and Australian media. It is because the (Man) Booker Prize has been open to authors from beyond the country in which it is administrated and awarded that it can attract such global attention; Desai’s receipt of the Man Booker Prize generated far more international news coverage than her receipt of the National Book Critics Circle Award, for example. Nevertheless, it hardly needs to be pointed out that British authors benefit from this arrangement more frequently than any others: in the 20 years from 1993 to 2013, the Booker was won by nine British authors, as against one South African author, three authors from each of India and Ireland, and two authors from each of Canada and Australia. That authors from any Commonwealth nation may win Britain’s most important literary prize has thus been a paradoxical factor in the continued fame of British authors throughout (and beyond) the Commonwealth. Moreover, even where the winners are not British authors, they often remain British publishers: for example, the author of The Gathering is Irish but its first publisher was Jonathan Cape, the author of Disgrace is South African but its first publisher was Secker & Warburg, the author of Vernon God Little is Australian but its first publisher was Faber and Faber, and so on. As for The Inheritance of Loss, it was published internationally by subsidiaries and imprints of the Penguin Group, a conglomerate headquartered in London. Furthermore, it should not be thought that only the winner benefits from the huge volume of publicity surrounding the prize: mere shortlisting apparently raised British sales of The Inheritance of Loss to 500 per week,12 a very respectable rate of sale for a literary novel in hardback. Whichever authors and publishers benefit from longlisting, shortlisting and eventual victory each year, the (Man) Booker process also represents an assertion of the global supremacy of the literary tastes of the British establishment, with the judges always being drawn from the upper ranks of British society, representatives of British arts, journalism, broadcasting, academia and even politics forming the majority. Thus, it is unsurprising that it should have played a role in promoting a highly literary brand of Indian writing that can in most respects be regarded as a product of the British cultural industries,13 in stark contrast to the English-language popular fiction that has been so successfully produced within India itself since the 1990s.14 Given its role in promoting Britain’s cultural industries around the world, the prize can certainly be regarded as an instrument of British ‘soft power’.15 And indeed, it is not unknown for those involved to have a history of exercising more conventional forms of power on Britain’s behalf: for example, the chair of the judging panel that gave the prize to Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) was Sir Michael Portillo (latterly a journalist and broadcaster, but from 1995–1997 the UK Secretary of State for Defence) and the chair of the panel that gave it to Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending (2011) was Dame Stella Rimington (latterly an author of spy thrillers, but from 1993–1996 the Director-General of the British secret service, MI5). In 2006, the year that The Inheritance of Loss was victorious, only two of the six shortlisted authors were British (three if one counts M. J. Hyland, who was born in Britain and is now resident there once more). However, the panel of judges consisted of a British academic, two British authors, a British critic, and an Irish actress and theatre director who had worked extensively in Britain and been awarded honorary membership of the Order of the British Empire. Even though the prize was not awarded to a British author that year, then, it remained a victory for the cultural authority of the British elite. As a ‘post-Rushdie’ novel, The Inheritance of Loss can be seen as to some extent a product of the Booker institution even before it had won. With his flamboyantly brilliant prose and overt multicultural politics, Rushdie – whose oeuvre has been described as ‘the most obvious (and obviously marketed) exemplar’ of IWE16 – provided a sort of template for international expectations of what Indian writing would be like: a very literary template, whose literariness was closely related to the ostentatious display of its multicultural identity, such that – to repeat Rushdie’s own oft-quoted defence of The Satanic Verses (1988) – diasporic and postcolonial writing in English becomes, after Rushdie’s debut, above all a celebration of ‘hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs’.17 As Strongman notes, this ‘pluralism’ is, in Rushdie’s works, represented as characteristic not only of the multicultural world containing a postcolonial India, but also of India itself in all its diversity – that is, as something intrinsically Indian and yet at the same time the most glorious characteristic of postmodern global culture.18 The overwhelming influence of Rushdie’s novels as a template for ‘postcolonial’ writing can be seen in the work of such writers as Monica Ali and Zadie Smith, both of whom – like Kiran Desai – received public endorsements from Rushdie at the beginning of their careers, and both of whom have been shortlisted for the Man Booker.19 While The Inheritance of Loss breaks with the traditions established by Rushdie in its apparent rejection of multiculturalism (a point to which I shall return below), it retains clear stylistic traces of his influence (a point that did not escape reviewers). Furthermore, The Inheritance of Loss follows virtually all Indian novels of the post-Rushdie school with regard to what Rashmi Sadana has described as their focus ‘on how Western readerships might understand the political and social conditions of the so-called third world ... promoti[ng] ... a literary axis that posits knowledge of and from India flowing to Western metropoles’.20 The composition of The Inheritance of Loss Although Kiran Desai’s first novel, the comedic and strongly Rushdieinfluenced Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998), was very successful in the USA, many Indian critics attacked it for presenting India as an entertainingly exotic spectacle for Western consumption,21 criticisms that Sadana suggests Desai took on board in writing The Inheritance of Loss, a novel that consequently ‘“won” ... both ... by being taken more seriously for writing about the plight of immigrant workers in a harsh, globalized world and by going on to win the 2006 Man Booker Prize’.22 One can thus argue that while Desai’s second book was distinguished from her first in part by closer alignment with the aforementioned ‘axis’ of ‘knowledge of and from India flowing to Western metropoles’, it was also distinguished by the ambition to carry out this implicitly educational mission in a way that would meet with the approval of the Indian literary establishment. If this can be accepted, the book had two primary intended audiences: one in the West and another in India, where the former is structured as the target of the book’s address and as a naïve recipient of the knowledge it conveys, and the latter as an observer and sophisticated critic of that communicative situation. This is different from the ‘double coding for different audiences’ that Kumkum Sangari perceptively discerns in Midnight’s Children,23 since it is a matter not of addressing two audiences, but of addressing one audience in the consciousness that another audience is judging one’s address to the first. One might draw an analogy with a classroom in which a teacher imparts knowledge to her pupils and a schools inspector assesses the quality of her teaching – except that in this case, praise or blame from the pupils will echo throughout the world, while the inspector’s authority is much more limited in scope. The primary narrative of The Inheritance of Loss takes place in Kalimpong in Darjeeling, although many of the events depicted are set elsewhere, especially in New York. The narrative present is contemporaneous with the Gorkhaland rebellion of the 1980s, though some of the novel’s most significant events take place in the last days of the Raj. Continuities between these settings and the events that occur within them are used to suggest parallels between India’s former relationship with Britain and its new relationship with America, as well as between India’s former place in the British Empire and Darjeeling’s place in postcolonial India. The book’s many narratives are unified by the figure of Jemubhai Popatlal Patel, a man of the smallholder caste from Gujarat who becomes a judge and – in his desire to emulate the British, whom he both idolizes and resents – retires to a house in Kalimpong, which he purchases from a departing Scottish colonist. Through flashbacks, we learn how the young Jemubhai won a scholarship enabling him to study in Britain, and how his vastly increased status was owed both to five years of racial humiliation as a student at Cambridge University and to Britain’s managed decolonization of India (an ironic turn of fortune for the son of a man who made a living by procuring false witnesses). For all his apparent success, Jemubhai is consumed by bitterness, hating his fellow people for not being British, and knowing that he has become one of ‘those ridiculous Indians who couldn’t rid themselves of what they had broken their souls to learn’.24 Because Jemubhai is the closest thing the book has to a villain, it is particularly significant that Desai has repeatedly associated him with her own grandfather25 – one of the clearest signals that (as I shall argue below) the book is to be read primarily as Desai’s critique of elite Indians like herself, and of their complicity in the exploitation and mistreatment of non-elite Indians, both in India and abroad. The novel illustrates this complicity time and again, but perhaps nowhere more directly than in this character’s recollection of how, as a student, he had witnessed the beating and humiliation of an Indian boy, ‘no doubt someone just like himself’, by ‘a crowd of jeering red-faced men’, yet had simply ‘turned and fled, run up to his rented room and stayed there’.26 After mercilessly tormenting, repeatedly raping, and eventually causing the death of his Gujarati wife (betrothed to him in exchange for her father’s financing his studies), ‘the judge’ (for that is how he is referred to in those sections of the book describing events following his return from the UK) withdraws from life. He is eventually joined by his orphan granddaughter, Sai: ‘more his kin than he had thought imaginable ... a westernized Indian brought up by English nuns, an estranged Indian living in India’.27 Alongside these three and the granddaughter’s impoverished Nepali tutor and sweetheart, Gyan, the book’s main character is the cook’s beloved son, Biju, an illegal immigrant working for a pittance in the shadow economy of New York. Numerous minor characters enable Desai to explore the novel’s themes of wealth, poverty, and the inescapable web of colonial and paracolonial relationships: India and the UK, India and the USA, Gorkhaland and India. In Kalimpong, these characters include Lola and Noni, Bengali members of a decaying anglophone (and anglophile) elite who find, amid the uprising, that ‘[t]he wealth that seemed to protect them like a blanket was the very thing that left them exposed’.28 In New York, they include three accountancy students to whom Biju delivers Chinese food by bicycle. These ‘Indian women of the English-speaking upper-educated’ – the bitterly ironic term by which Desai refers to what is (unmistakeably) her own class – who can ‘say “Namaste, Kusum Auntie, aayiye, baethiye, khayiye!” as easily as “Shit!”’29 are the novel’s sole representatives of the ‘hybridity’ celebrated by the post-Rushdie school’s multicultural tradition (see earlier). Privileged and self-righteous creatures, they are able to mistake a service encounter with a starving illegal immigrant for a mythic ‘meeting between Indians abroad of different classes and languages, rich and poor, north and south, top caste bottom caste’,30 but their intermingling of languages and cultures appears to be nothing more than a form of consumerism, and their supreme cultural confidence is only a function of their wealth: Biju is alienated by their condescension, but can avenge himself afterwards only by wolf-whistling through their security-barred window.31 Everyone else who straddles cultures is as conflicted and apparently miserable as the judge himself – for example Harish-Harry, proprietor of an Indian restaurant in New York and ruthless exploiter of illegal Indian kitchen labour, who ‘tried to be loyal to so many things that he himself couldn’t tell which one of his selves was the authentic, if any’ – or his customers, the ‘“haalf ’n’ haf” crowd’ of ‘Indian students coming in with American friends, one accent one side of the mouth, another the other side ... downgrading sometimes all the way to Hindi to show one another ... [that] it was not they pretending to be other than who and what they were’.32 This represents a significant break with the optimism of the postRushdie school of writing: a break carried further in the book’s refusal of any sort of redemption for its cast of isolated, impotent and often self-deceiving characters. Such innovations may explain the difficulties that Desai experienced in publishing the book, despite the success of its lighter, more amusing predecessor and the cachet that her surname already held thanks to the literary fame of her mother: ‘A lot of people said it was the most perverse, horrible book they’d ever read,’ Desai stated, going on to describe the process of finding a publisher as ‘a year of fighting ... just fighting, fighting, fighting’.33 During this period, a ‘famous female editor from the New Yorker magazine’ apparently described The Inheritance of Loss as ‘the worst book [she] ha[d] ever read in [her] life’.34 A book written in anticipation of its Indian reception necessarily created problems for itself in reaching a world market, by deviating to some extent from the pattern laid down by Rushdie and proven successful over what had (by then) been two and a half decades of bestselling postcolonial and diasporic writing in English. On the other hand, once it had reached the market, its deviations from formulas may have been recognized as ‘original’ and thus contributed to its success: positive reviews, especially outside India, focused on the book’s bitter realism,35 with some specifically identifying this as an admirable point of departure from Rushdie’s style.36 The symbolic production of The Inheritance of Loss A handful of reviews appeared pre-publication, in 2005. What appears to have been the very first was extremely positive, describing the novel as ‘stunning’, and praising Desai’s ability to move ‘between first and third worlds, illuminating the pain of exile, the ambiguities of post-colonialism and the blinding desire for a “better life,” when one person’s wealth means another’s poverty’.37 It was, however, followed by a more negative response that drew unfavourable comparisons with Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, and asserted that Desai ‘fails to get readers to connect and identify with the characters, much less care for them’.38 These viewpoints can be seen as expressive of evaluative criteria associated with ‘legitimate’ (i.e. ‘literary’) and ‘popular’ cultural positions respectively. A third review was perhaps the most revealing, in that it described the book as ‘[l]ess a compelling narrative than a rich stew of ironies and contradictions’.39 This is a highly positive comment from a viewpoint aligned with ‘legitimate’ culture, in relation to which relatively little value would attach to a ‘compelling narrative’ as compared to the ‘ironies and contradictions’ that have been celebrated since the New Criticism as the very essence of what is best in literature. From a more popular viewpoint, it would have been a damning criticism.40 After publication, The Inheritance of Loss went on to be received with virtually unmitigated enthusiasm in the press, with no negative reviews appearing in major American, British or Indian newspapers. In India and North America, reviews – overflowing with praise – focused both on the novel’s ability to communicate truths about India and on the exceptional beauty of its prose style. For the Hindustan Times, ‘Desai’s prose is one of the delights of this novel. But it is far from being the only one ... it is impossible to overemphasize the flawlessness with which Desai captures the rhythm and grace of life in this hill town. Or the manner in which her cast of characters is perfectly etched’.41 For India Today, this ‘delightfully original book’ was the proof that Desai had ‘a talent all her own, a set of skills too large for the slight but charming tale of an ordinary wastrel turned accidental godman’.42 The author Pankaj Mishra wrote an extremely positive review for the New York Times in which he took pains to introduce the book to an American audience, explaining that while it might seem ‘unrelentingly bitter’ to Western readers, this was because of its commitment to representing the viewpoint of ‘most of the world’s population’.43 Reviewers also praised the book for revealing a ‘New York ... as caught up in class, caste and racial tensions as Kalimpong’, with ‘the privileged exploiting the desperate’ no less in the former than in the latter.44 British reviews were comparatively slow in appearing, due to the book’s later publication in the UK and to Desai’s lack of profile in the country. However, The Inheritance of Loss was mentioned – always positively – in round-up articles of new or forthcoming fiction, including a repeat endorsement from Pankaj Mishra and a new endorsement from novelist Lionel Shriver.45 Its appearance on the shelves of UK bookshops occurred almost simultaneously with the publication of the Man Booker longlist, so that the initial story was that the virtually unknown daughter of the famous Anita Desai – three times a nominee but never the winner – had now also been longlisted.46 Kiran Desai was considered an outside chance for the prize, but reviews – invariably positive – soon started to appear in national newspapers.47 These were similar in tone to the Indian and North American newspaper reviews, focusing on the beauty of the prose and the realism of Desai’s depiction of the conditions faced by Indians under the systems of colonialism and globalization. Desai expressed ambivalence about the Man Booker Prize right up until the moment when she received it – ‘You’re somehow saying Yes to the Empire and Yes to the hedge fund’, she said on one occasion48 – but was pragmatic enough not to turn it down. (This should not be interpreted cynically: when a book has taken seven years to write and a year to publish, one can hardly afford to bite the hand that feeds; and if a book expresses political convictions, its author must quite naturally seek publicity.) Shortly after The Inheritance of Loss was published in Australia, where it was again well received in the press,49 its unexpected Man Booker victory was world news, reported internationally in dozens of major publications. Receipt of the National Book Critics Circle Award cemented the novel’s status as a literary success. The Inheritance of Loss beyond the literary field As the previous section suggests, discourse on the novel within India’s English-language press appears to have been praiseful of its veracity – at least until the autumn of 2006. In October, for example, an article in the Hindustan Times stated that ‘[t]he novel is political, often angrily so, and its details are quite accurate’.50 However, publicity generated by Desai’s Man Booker Prize win greatly expanded awareness of the book within India, including in Kalimpong itself, and on 2 November of that year, reports of protests and threatened book burnings in Kalimpong appeared in the Indian and British press.51 These reports quoted attacks on Desai and her work from local professionals:
‘The Kalimpong of her book is ... a reflection of her recent sixmonth stint at the hill station,’ argues a section of readers. ‘She remained insulated from the local community and was fed coffee table gossip. And a very wrong picture,’ [social worker Bharat Mani] Pradhan alleged. ... Sections of the book, she says, have painted the hills in wrong communal colours – straining the mosaic of peace and harmony. Lawyer and amateur writer Anmol Prasad says the book ‘shows her depressing distaste for Kalimpong. She has projected the Gorkhas and the hill people as transient interlopers of this beautiful land. In its own quiet way, it is racist.’52
Agitation was short-lived, the proposed book burning appears not to have taken place and the protests were soon forgotten by the international press: a reference to them remained on the book’s Wikipedia page from 2 November 2006 to 27 April 2010, and (quite possibly for that reason alone) they were recalled in the introduction to an online book club discussion run by the UK’s Guardian newspaper, but otherwise it was soon as if they had never happened.53 Although (as we shall see) these protests relied on misrepresentations of The Inheritance of Loss, it can be argued that they were directed not only against the book, but against those who praised it for an authenticity that they were incapable of judging; in this, a parallel can perhaps be drawn with controversy surrounding Monica Ali’s Man Booker-nominated debut, Brick Lane (2003), which was also threatened with burning.54 It has been observed that ‘reviewers and commentators who praised [Brick Lane] often did so on the basis of the access it ostensibly allowed them to a set of real experiences with which they would have otherwise remained unfamiliar’.55 Because the guarantee of these experiences’ reality was the author’s ethnic identity – as in novelist and Man Booker judge D. J. Taylor’s lazy claim that ‘as a Bangladeshi, [Ali] presumably knows a good deal about [Brick Lane]’56 – it was impossible to rule out the possibility that ‘[t]he middle-class intelligentsia ha[d] been suckered by one of [its] own because she has an exotic foreign name’.57 The accusation of such writerly exploitation of critical ignorance is made in an article on The Inheritance of Loss in the news magazine Himal Southasian:
Desai is fortunate in two ways. First, because she is an Indian woman, and this enables a claim to authenticity for which every writer of fiction clamours. Second, she has chosen to write about a marginalized community that has not spoken much for itself through Indian English-language fiction. But … [t]he marginalized ‘subaltern’ in this case neither speaks for itself, nor does the writer choose to speak for it.58
This portrayal of Desai is reminiscent of the terms in which she herself represents the three fictional accountancy students: holding forth on topics of which they understand little and yet being thought ‘remarkable’ because of naïve Western ideas about Indian women.59 Yet this is unfair. The Kalimpong sections of the book are primarily about Indians of Desai’s own class (note the association between her grandfather and the judge), whose perspectives are (no less than those of the students) held up for critique; if ‘[t]he whole town is made strange’ as the above-quoted social worker put it in conversation with a different journalist,60 that is because it is (mostly, although not solely) seen through the eyes of privileged English-speaking Indians who are (contrary to the Kalimpong lawyer’s already quoted assertion) presented as the real interlopers: as one of the book’s first Indian reviewers wrote, Desai’s strategy was to ‘put [the reader] in the position of the settler who knows the language of privilege better than the local tongue, whose crime is to love the landscape and the mountains passionately while retaining the distance of the outsider’.61 However, for Chaturvedi and others who attacked the book, the narrative’s closeness to the cruel judge and his childish granddaughter, and the strangeness of the townspeople in their eyes, were expressions of the author’s love of the former and hatred of the latter:
It is easy for the reader to feel sorry for Father Booty, the Swiss dairy man who is forced to leave Kalimpong, or for Sai, whose first romance is shattered, or for the two Anglophile sisters whose beautiful house is ransacked. But the poor father and daughter-in-law, who come to the judge on their knees, are seen through the eyes of Sai, who is returning after a bitter quarrel with her lover. The poor pair, squatting in a corner, appears as an object of pity and irritating persistence, a result of their helplessness and vulnerability. People presented as the majority are thus constantly marginalised.62
The ‘poor father and daughter-in-law’ are indeed seen through Sai’s unempathetic eyes, but her view of them is unambiguously presented as childish, petulant and wrong: ‘She was in no mood to be kind. If the gods had favoured her, she might, but now, no, she would show them that if they did this to her, she would unleash evil on the earth’.63 And the pair are also presented to the reader through the eyes of the omniscient narrator, who understands their situation as that of people ‘who walked the line ... between being robbed (who would listen to them if they went to the police?) and being hunted by the police as scapegoats for the crimes of others’.64 Moreover, when the book’s tables are turned – as, for example, in the occasional episodes narrated from the point of view of Sai’s Nepali tutor Gyan, who yearns ‘to get a proper job and leave that fussy pair, Sai and her grandfather with the fake English accent and the face powdered pink and white over dark brown’65 – it becomes clear that the narrative’s general focus on Sai and her grandfather does not equate to alignment with their values. There are also episodes in which the history of the local people is represented with great care, as in the poignant tale of Gyan’s family, who left Nepal to work on a tea plantation in Darjeeling, then raised generations of men to be killed or crippled in the British army before turning to the safer career of teaching.66 And while the Gorkhaland uprising is not glorified, the grievances motivating it are presented as legitimate.67 Refutations such as the above rely, as Bethan Benwell, James Procter, and Gemma Robinson have argued, on a highly specialized form of textual engagement characterized by ‘“cover-to-cover” reading’ and by ‘the reader[’s] making theoretical distinctions between narrator, author, and character’ as well as sometimes ‘reading “ironically” and dispassionately’.68 It is for consumption through such a mode of reading that ‘literary’ novels like The Inheritance of Loss are designed, and it would not be reasonable to hold their authors responsible for the meanings they may acquire when read otherwise. Still, this very fact should remind us of the distance between the book’s intended audience and some of the social groups represented within it. So while it is false to say that Desai chose not to speak for the marginalized inhabitants of Kalimpong, it is certainly true that the globalization of IWE has given such people no opportunity to speak for themselves, except – or rather, even – when they (or people claiming to act on their behalf) have allegedly threatened to burn one of its products. Without resorting to highly selective and decontextualized quotations from the book, it is impossible to find in it anything that might reasonably be construed as offensive to Indians of Nepali ancestry.69 However, the real problem is outside the text, in the context within which its value was produced: that is, a literary field populated by an elite from which the general population of India (and, for that matter, the rest of the world, including the USA and the UK) is largely excluded. That there has been, as Rushdie asserts, ‘a genuine attempt’ on the part of English-using Indian writers to transcend their elite position by imaginatively ‘encompass[ing] as many Indian realities as possible’70 does not mitigate that problem. It only makes it more obvious. Conclusion As Brouillette has argued, ‘the association between an author and a national authenticity is often an excessive burden within specifically postcolonial literatures, taken on as a partial requirement of the cosmopolitan function of those literatures’.71 The Inheritance of Loss is distinguished by its unusually strong focus on a readership within the nation from which the author’s appearance of postcolonial authenticity derives: a focus that appears to have played a key role in its composition, perhaps sharpening the author’s critique of the very class of Indians from which novelists such as herself are drawn. Clearly sensitive to the problematics of this seeming authenticity, Desai has suggested that she has no right to ‘Modern India’ as a subject because she ‘left’ the country, and has asserted that it is for this reason that The Inheritance of Loss is ‘really made up’ only ‘of half-stories, or quarter-stories’.72 Thus, while she does attempt to represent Indian realities other than those of her own class, she does so in a fragmentary, conspicuously non-encompassing way, simultaneously critiquing the blindness to those same realities of the ‘English-speaking upper-educated’ to which she belongs: denying the reader an apparently full representation and simultaneously providing an explanation for that denial. Many commentators have noted a possible identification between Desai (a judge’s granddaughter) and Sai (the judge’s granddaughter). Yet superficial biographical similarities between the two only hint at a deeper connection. No mere stand-in for the specific Indian writer Kiran Desai, Sai can be taken to represent globalized Indian writing as seen from India itself: ‘She who could speak no language but English and pidgin Hindi, she who could not converse with anyone outside her tiny social stratum.’73 Those who found the book offensive may have decontextualized its content to the point at which Desai can scarcely be held responsible for their feelings – but by reminding us of their alienation from the production of English literature, they have perhaps provided the key to the truest reading of all. Notes 1. Sarah Brouillette (2007) Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 176–177. 2. Pierre Bourdieu (1993) ‘The production of belief: Contribution to an economy of symbolic goods’, in The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, trans. Richard Nice, Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 115. 3. Bourdieu, ‘The production of belief’; for a detailed analysis of cultural prizes, see James F. English (2005) The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 4. For literature review and further discussion, see Daniel Allington (2011) ‘“It actually painted a picture of the village and the sea and the bottom of the sea”: Reading groups, cultural legitimacy, and “description” in narrative (with particular reference to John Steinbeck’s The Pearl)’, Language and Literature, 20: 317–332. 5. Salman Rushdie (1997) ‘Introduction’, in Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West (eds), Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing 1947–1997, London: Vintage, p. xii. 6. For discussion, see David Johnson (2012) ‘English literary canons’, in Ann Hewings and Caroline Tagg (eds) The Politics of English: Conflict, Competition, Co-existence, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 179–206; Daniel Allington, ‘English and global media’, in Hewings and Tagg, The Politics of English, pp. 219–245. 7. Luke Strongman (2002) The Booker Prize and the Legacy of Empire, Cross / Cultures, 54, Amsterdam: Rodopi, p. 237. 8. Claire Squires (2012) ‘Too much Rushdie, not enough romance? The UK publishing industry and BME (black minority ethnic) readership’, in Bethan Benwell, James Procter and Gemma Robinson (eds), Postcolonial Audiences: Readers, Viewers, and Reception, New York: Routledge, p. 100. 9. English, The Economy of Prestige, pp. 297–298. 10. Jesse Westbrook (2013) ‘Man Group slides as AHL decline leads UBS to cut tating’, Bloomberg, 5 June, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-05/ man-tumbles-as-ahl-performance-leads-ubs-to-cut-rating-on-stock.html (accessed 19 June 2013). 11. Miha Kovač and Rudiger Wischenbart, Diversity Report 2010: Literary Translation in Current European Book Markets. An Analysis of Authors, Languages, and Flows, http://www.wischenbart.com/upload/DiversityReport_2010.pdf (accessed June 2014). 12. Sunday Times (2006) ‘A passage from india to a literary goldmine’, Sunday Times, 15 October, p. 19. 13. Paul Delany (2002) Literature, Money, and the Market: From Trollope to Amis, Houndmills: Palgrave, p. 187; Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace, p. 83. 14. See Pooja Sinha (2013) Contemporary Indian English Genre Fiction: Conventions and Contexts in the Marketplace, unpublished thesis. 15. This concept was proposed by Joseph S. Nye (2004) Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, New York: Public Affairs. 16. Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace, p. 88. 17. Salman Rushdie (1991) ‘In good faith’, in Imaginary Homelands:Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991, London: Granta, p. 394). 18. Strongman, The Booker Prize and the Legacy of Empire, p. 115. 19. Praise from Rushdie was used in marketing Ali and Smith’s first novels; an extract from Desai’s was anthologized in Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West (1997) Mirrorword: 50 Years of Indian Writing 1947–1997, New York: Henry Holt. 20. Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace, p. 156–157. 21. Rashmi Sadana (2012) English Heart, Hindi Heartland: The Political Life of Literature in India, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 162. 22. Ibid., p. 162. 23. Kumkum Sangari (1987) ‘The politics of the possible’, Cultural Critique, 7, p. 176. 24. Kiran Desai (2007) The Inheritance of Loss, Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 205. 25. Hindustan Times (2006) ‘Inheriting the write legacy’, Hindustan Times, 1 October; Kiran Desai (2009) ‘Guardian Book Club: Week Three: Kiran Desai on writing The Inheritance of Loss’, The Guardian 13 November, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/nov/14/inheritance-loss-desaibook-club (accessed 5 April 2014). 26. Desai, The Inheritance of Loss, p. 209. 27. Ibid., p. 210. 28. Ibid., p. 242. 29. Ibid., p. 50. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., p. 51. 32. Ibid., p. 148. 33. Quoted in Simon Houpt (2006) ‘Questions a writer can’t avoid: Kiran Desai’s dark novel on immigration was greeted with anger’, The Globe and Mail, 10 October, section The Globe Review, p. R1. 34. Dwight Garner (2006) ‘Inside the list’, The New York Times, October 29, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/29/books/review/29tbr.html? adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1403546718-mh1y2TMhl4Gg6KnmyW7stQ (accessed June 2014). 35. See in particular Pankaj Mishra (2006) ‘Wounded by the West’, The New York Times, 12 February, section 7, p. 11. 36. Marjorie Kehe (2006) ‘Hearts in search of home’, Christian Science Monitor, 24 January, p. 13; Natasha Walter (2006) ‘Mutt and the maths tutor: Natasha Walter greets an impressive novel that has caught the attention of the Booker judges’, The Guardian, 26 August, section Guardian Review, p. 14; David Sexton (2006) ‘Crossing of cultures brings exoticism that has a prized appeal’, Evening Standard, 11 October, p. 11; Desai’s realism is associated with a wider trend in IWE by Alannah Hopkin (2006) ‘Anglophiles adrift in modern India’, Irish Times Weekend, 2 September, p. 11. 37. Publishers Weekly (2005) ‘The Inheritance of Loss’, Publishers Weekly Reviews, 24 October, p. 34. 38. Marika Zemke (2005) ‘The Inheritance of Loss’, Library Journal Reviews, 1 November, p. 63. 39. Kirkus Reviews (2005) ‘The Inheritance of Loss’, Kirkus Reviews, 1 October, p. 39. 40. For more on the different evaluative criteria applied to popular fiction and ‘serious’ literature, see Daniel Allington (2011) ‘Distinction, intentions, and the consumption of fiction: Negotiating cultural legitimacy in a gay reading group’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 14: 137–142. 41. Hindustan Times (2006) ‘Exile and the kingdom’, Hindustan Times, 28 January. 42. Nilanjana S. Roy (2006) ‘Mists of Kalimpong: In her richly imagined second novel, Kiran Desai interrogates the ideas of identity and entitlement’, India Today, 23 January, p. 86; the allusion is to Desai’s first book. 43. Mishra, ‘Wounded by the West’, p. 11; the statement interpolates a quotation from Orhan Pamuk. 44. Omar Majeed (2006) ‘In both East and West, the privileged exploit the desperate’, The Gazette, 4 March, section Weekend, p. J5. 45. Lionel Shriver (2006) ‘No place like home’, Financial Times, 12 May; Melissa McClements (2006) ‘Read your way around the world: Wherever you’re going this summer, you can escape to any destination with our guide to the best of the year’s fiction and non-fiction’, Financial Times, 17 June, section Weekend Magazine, p. 28; Monica Ali and others (2006), ‘Sunny spells: Philip Roth for “pre-death pleasure”; Jilly Cooper for wicked escapism; Seamus Heaney for poems by the pool; or there’s a book about container shipping... Writers and critics recommend the best holiday reads’, The Guardian, 17 June, section Guardian Review, p. 4. 46. See for example Nigel Reynolds (2006) ‘New generation take on veterans in 19-strong list for Booker Prize’, Daily Telegraph, 15 August, p. 9. 47. See for example Walter, ‘Mutt and the maths tutor’; Sarah Hughes (2006) ‘Uncle Potty and other guides to the truth’, Observer, 3 September, section Observer Review Books, p. 25; Aamer Hussein (2006) ‘Maps of the heart’, Independent, 8 September, section Features, p. 22. 48. Quoted in Houpt, ‘Questions a writer can’t avoid’; Desai’s reference to ‘the Empire’ alludes to the requirement of Commonwealth residency or citizenship. 49. See Soumya Bhattacharya (2006) ‘Lonely inheritance of Midnight’s Children’, Sydney Morning Herald, 7 October, section Spectrum: Books, p. 35; Lucy Clark (2006) ‘Exotic characters at odds with the world’, Sunday Telegraph, 5 November, section Features: Books Insider, p. 107; though also see Stephen Matchett (2006) ‘Prizewinning flops’, Weekend Australian, 18 November, section Review, p. 40 for a populist and arguably nationalist critique (the judges had chosen Desai’s book over two by authors regarded as Australian). 50. Aditi Khanna and Nabanita Sircar (2006) ‘A winning inheritance’, India Today, 23 October, p. 110. 51. See Hindustan Times (2006) ‘“Inheritance” bequeaths bitterness’, Hindustan Times, 2 November); Randeep Ramesh (2006) ‘Book-burning threat over town’s portrayal in Booker-winning novel: Protesters object to Desai’s “condescending” writing: Indians of Nepalese descent “seen as criminals”’, The Guardian, 2 November, p. 23. 52. Hindustan Times, ‘“Inheritance” bequeaths bitterness’. 53. Sam Jordison (2009) ‘Guardian Book Club: The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai’, 6 November. An interesting discussion developed between Jordison and a commenter who had been born in Darjeeling, indicating that for some people, the controversy remained very much alive. 54. For analysis of the production and reception of this work, see Sarah Brouillette (2009) ‘Literature and gentrification on Brick Lane’, Criticism, 51: 425–449; also Bethan Benwell, James Procter and Gemma Robinson (2011) ‘Not reading Brick Lane’, New Formations, 73: 90–116, who discuss the abandoned burning of the book on p. 100. 55. Brouillette, ‘Literature and gentrification on Brick Lane’, p. 440. 56. Quoted in Patrick Sawer (2003) ‘Brick Lane novel is an insult to us, say Bangladeshis’, Evening Standard, 3 December, p. A9. Ali’s mother is British and her father, though Bangladeshi, belongs to a different ethnic group than that which is represented in her novel and associated with Brick Lane itself. 57. David Curtis (2003) ‘Letter to the Guardian’, 6 December, http://www. theguardian.com/theguardian/2003/dec/06/guardianletters3 (accessed June 2014). 58. Namrata Chaturvedi (2006) ‘The inheritance of stereotype’, Himal Southasian, http://old.himalmag.com/himal-feed/39/1486-The-inheritance-of-stereo type.html (accessed June 2014). 59. Desai, The Inheritance of Loss, p. 50. 60. Ramesh, ‘Book-burning threat over town’s portrayal in Booker-winning novel’, p. 23. 61. Roy, ‘Mists of Kalimpong’, p. 86. 62. Chaturvedi, ‘The Inheritance of Stereotype’. 63. Desai, The Inheritance of Loss, p. 264. 64. Ibid., p. 282. 65. Ibid., p. 176. 66. Ibid., p. 141–143. 67. Ibid., p. 158–160. 68. Benwell, Procter and Robinson, ‘Not reading Brick Lane’, p. 105. 69. Benwell, Procter and Robinson, ‘Not reading Brick Lane’, pp. 104–105 show how ‘[a] selective or “partial” reading’ was used to support at least one commentator’s ‘judgement of [Brick Lane’s] treatment’ of members of his or her ethnic group (on pp. 105–107, they show that more careful and sophisticated readings were also used by those who protested against the book). 70. Rushdie, ‘Introduction’, p. xii. 71. Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace, p. 177. 72. Boyd Tonkin (2006) ‘Daughter of the diaspora: Kiran Desai took the Man Booker Prize with a novel that captures a world of people, and of cultures, forever on the move’, Arts & Book Review, 13 October, p. 20. 73. Desai, The Inheritance of Loss, p. 176.