As the literary world waits on November 10 to find out whether Kiran Desai will win the Booker Prize for her novel Sonia and Sunny’s unitI feel compelled to return to the work that first awarded her the prize, and placed her within global literary discourse nearly twenty years ago. The Inheritance of Loss remains a diagnostic text. It makes visible a range of psychological reactions within the postcolonial Indian subject, which we often register intuitively but do not always verbalize.
The narrative moves between a mossy colonial bungalow in Kalimpong and the seedy restaurant lanes of New York City. Both geography are intentional. The first is the remaining architecture of the empire. The other is the contemporary architecture of universal desire. In Kalimpong live Jimobhai Patel, a retired judge whose Cambridge education taught him to associate English with civilization and Hindi with incompetence, and Sai, his granddaughter, who has grown up within English knowledge. Across the world, in New York, Bijou works in restaurant kitchens, moving between precarious jobs because his work is unprotected and his presence is informal.
Heritage of the Raj
the The argument of the novel It lies in this structural juxtaposition. The colonial classification system does not dissolve when material rule ends. It simply transfers to taste, speech and breath.
The GamePay path is the clearest expression of this. At Cambridge, he was rejected for smelling like Indian food, ridiculed for his accent, and his body itself was noted as something wrong with him. This humiliation turns into self-rejection. When he returns to India, he applies the same hierarchy to other Indians. He internalized the logic of empire so completely that he became the instrument of its continuation.
This pattern is not strange to me. In an international school environment in Mumbai, I witnessed small slights happen without anyone calling them outright. The raised eyebrow when a classmate’s “v” slips in place of the “w.” The tone changes quickly as the teacher approaches. The slightly awkward silence when hearing a parent’s English accent. I did this editing myself, not consciously, but instinctively. Desai gave me a conceptual framework to see that these gestures are not neutral. They are evidence of the classification system that still operates beneath the surface of global India.
The brown man’s dilemma
Kiran Desai’s second novel, Inheritance of Loss, written over a period of seven years, won the 2006 Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award among other awards. (Image: Amazon.in)
The Peugeot arc shows a contemporary version of the same logic. He believes America will grant consequences. However, in New York he remains invisible, unstable, and exploited. He recognizes that Western geography does not automatically transform the brown body into a valuable body. If the novel is a comparative device, Bijou is the refutation of that persistent fantasy that escape lies in going to the West. Desai explains that colonialism manifests itself through globalization.
Sai reminded me of something I had quietly realized in myself. She is not hostile to her Indian identity. It simply encounters the world first through English texts, English history, English ideas, and only then through Indian texts. So English seems like neutral ground, and Hindi seems like a later ‘addition’. This is what Desai accurately portrays. It shows how colonialism today operates through a system of exposure rather than force. If what a young person is introduced to first is Western knowledge, what he inherits second can feel somehow derivative.
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This is why Inheritance of loss The matter remains intellectually urgent in 2025. India today is not an unsafe nation for young judges. It is a country that builds space missions, hosts the world’s largest digital payments lines, and is treated as a crucial node in the global economy. However, prestige calculations remain tied to Western endorsement. Consumers still cite foreign cultural references to signal their seriousness. Skin-lightening creams continue to be sold because paleness is still considered an aspirational capital and not just pigmentation.
Desai’s novel makes this cognitive economy legible.
So it’s fitting that in the week of the new Poker announcement, we look back at the book that first introduced Desai to the world. The Legacy of Loss is not nostalgia, but a conceptual tool. He names the invisible hierarchies that continue to construct belonging in supposedly postcolonial India. Its importance lies in the fact that the empire’s most durable infrastructure is not built on land, but on perception.
(The writer is a student in Mumbai)
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(marks for translation) Kiran Desai
