Multicultural Perspective: A Study in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss

Abstract

The present paper endeavors to analyze the Multicultural perspectives in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006). In this novel, she explores colonial neurosis, multiculturalism, racial discrimination, changing human relations, postcolonial chaos and shares the burden of inferiority in the third world migrants. Multiculturalism is an important characteristic found in this novel. Desai presents a cynical view of multiculturalism which is confined to the Western metropolis. Most of Desai’s characters display a constant obsession with western thought. Jemubhai Patel, a living artifact of colonialism, his granddaughter Sai, middle class and westernized, a foreigner in a way to her own culture and country of origin and there is Biju, the cook’s son, one of the numerous illegal immigrants in New York, serving in various restaurants, in the hope of securing a Green Card. All these desperate characters have been diminished when they encounter the West. They are in a “to be or not to be†position as they struggle to embrace the new culture and at the same time distancing themselves from their own culture too. Though they try to assimilate and are willing to accept the diversity of new culture, what they finally receive is humiliation and negation. There arises identity crisis which most of the Indian struggling despite Post-colonial reactions in which endeavor to vigor to native culture and its values.