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Journalism of Courage
As the literary world waits to see on November 10 whether Kiran Desai will be awarded the Booker Prize for her novel The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, I find myself compelled to return to the work that first won her the award—situating her within global literary discourse almost twenty years ago. The Inheritance of Loss remains a diagnostic text. It makes legible a set of psychological reflexes within the Indian postcolonial self that we often register intuitively but do not always verbalise.
The narrative moves between a moss-eaten colonial bungalow in Kalimpong and the undocumented restaurant corridors of New York City. The two geographies are deliberate. One is the leftover architecture of the Empire. The other is the contemporary architecture of global desire. In Kalimpong live Jemubhai Patel, a retired judge whose Cambridge education taught him to associate Englishness with civilisation and Indianness with inadequacy, and Sai, his granddaughter, who has grown up inside English epistemes. Across the world, in New York, Biju works in restaurant kitchens, cycling between unstable jobs because his labour is unprotected and his presence is unofficial.
The novel’s argument lies in this structural juxtaposition. The colonial ranking system does not dissolve when physical rule ends. It simply relocates into taste, speech, and psyche.
Jemubhai’s trajectory is the clearest articulation of this. In Cambridge, he is rejected for smelling of Indian food, mocked for his accent, and observed as though his body itself is an incorrect object. That humiliation hardens into self rejection. When he returns to India, he applies that same hierarchy to other Indians. He has internalised the logic of empire so thoroughly that he becomes the instrument of its continuation.
This pattern is not foreign to me. In the environment of an international school in Mumbai, I have watched micro humiliations occur without anybody explicitly naming them. The raised eyebrow when a classmate’s “v” slips out instead of “w.” The quick dialect shifts when a teacher approaches. The slightly embarrassed silence when a parent’s accented English is overheard. I have done this editing myself, not consciously, but instinctively. Desai gave me a conceptual frame to see that these gestures are not neutral. They are evidence of a ranking system that still operates under the surface of cosmopolitan India.
Biju’s arc demonstrates a contemporary variant of the same logic. He believes that America will confer consequence. Yet in New York he remains invisible, precarious and exploited. He realises that Western geography does not automatically transform a brown body into a valued one. If the novel is a comparative instrument, then Biju is the rebuttal to that persistent fantasy that escape lies in going West. Desai shows that colonialism manifests through globalisation.
Sai reminded me of something I recognised quietly in myself. She is not hostile to her Indian identity. She simply encounters the world first through English texts, English histories, English ideas, and only later through Indian ones. Therefore Englishness feels like the neutral ground and Indianness feels like a later “addition.” That is what Desai captures precisely. She shows how coloniality today operates through order of exposure rather than force. If what a young person meets first is Western knowledge, then what is inherited second can feel somehow derivative.
This is why The Inheritance of Loss remains intellectually urgent in 2025. India today is not the insecure nation of the judge’s youth. It is a country that builds space missions, hosts the largest digital payments rails in the world, and is treated as a crucial node in the global economy. Yet the calculus of prestige continues to be indexed to Western endorsement. Consumers still cite foreign cultural references to signal seriousness. Skin lightening creams continue to sell because paleness is still coded as aspirational capital rather than simply pigmentation.
Desai’s novel renders this cognitive economy legible.
It is therefore appropriate that in the week of a new Booker announcement, we look again at the book that first introduced Desai to the world. The Inheritance of Loss is not nostalgia but a conceptual instrument. It names the invisible hierarchies that continue to structure belonging in a supposedly postcolonial India. Its relevance lies in the fact that the most durable infrastructure of empire is not built into territory, but perception.
(The writer is a student in Mumbai)
