Caracteristici ale literaturii postcoloniale n romanul

Kiran Desai Motenitoarea trmului pierdut

Postcolonialism is a set of theories in philosophy, film, political sciences

and literature that deal with the cultural legacy of colonial rule. Postcolonial literature is
a body of literary writing that responds to the intellectual discourse of European
colonization of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. Postcolonial literature addresses the
problems and consequences of the de-colonization of a country and of a nation,
especially the political and cultural independence of formerly subjugated colonial
peoples.
The Inheritance of Loss is the second novel by Indian author Kiran
Desai. It was first published in 2006. It won a number of awards, including the Man
Booker Prize for that year, the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award in 2007, and
the 2006 Vodafone Crossword Book Award. It was written over a period of seven years
after her first book, the critically acclaimed Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard.
Among its main themes are migration, living between two worlds, and between past and
present. This second novel by Kiran Desai drips with the theme of colonial mentality of
ignoring one's cultural roots and looking over the fence to seemingly greener pastures of
other cultures. It is a story of exiles at home and abroad, of families broken and fixed,
of love both bitter and bittersweet.
The story is centered on two main characters: Biju and Sai. Biju is an
illegal Indian immigrant living in the United States, son of a cook who works for Sai's
grandfather. Sai is a girl living in mountainous Kalimpong with her maternal
grandfather Jemubhai, the cook and a dog named Mutt. Desai switches the narration
between both points of view. The action of the novel takes place in 1986.
The exotic location is one of the main features of postcolonial literature.
Set in Postcolonial India, The Inheritance of Loss vividly highlights a number of
issues, which are of interest in the world today, major issues like globalisation,

economic

inequality,

postcolonialism,

marginality,

immigration,

racism,

fundamentalism, terrorism and nationalism are harmonized into comparatively minor

issues of personal gains and losses. The novel shows how this impact is passed from one
generation to the other. The novel is set in Kalimpong and New York, as we alternate
between two continents. Kalimpong is a town near Darjeeling, which is in the
northernmost eastern point of India. It is bordered by Sikkim, Nepal and Bhutan. The
book is written in the third person omniscient. The narrator knows everything that all
the characters are feeling and often switches from their thoughts and straight into
dialog. Since the book takes place in two different settings, it was important for the
narrator to know everything about the characters and portray the feelings and thoughts
to the readers to give the necessary closeness and physical and emotional distance that
they were feeling.
Postcolonial literature often focuses on race relations and the effects of
racism and usually indicts white or colonial societies. The theme of race is one of the
major issues in The Inheritance of Loss. All nations and ethnic groups of people
represented in The Inheritance of Loss are important as to give a full picture of the
issues of race and ethnicity and the challenges of a postcolonial and multicultural
society. The considerable division between Sai and Gyan is both ethnic and racial.
Through the main characters in The Inheritance of Loss, in particular Jemubhai, Desai
shows how discrimination due to race can influence and wound, and in some cases, even
destroy the human mind. The experiences of Jemubhai also expand the theme of race
into a universal subject. As a parallel to his personal experiences, the reader recognizes
a pattern of white, imperial superiority and power and how people from colonized
countries are not accepted or welcomed into the western world. In the same way as
Jemubhai is discriminated against due to his dark skin and Third World origins, the
white Europeans continually prove their superiority in a universal perspective. The
whites have gained power and dominance, and they demand to be treated with respect
and dignity. On a universal level this leads to poverty, humiliation and discrimination of
people from colonized countries. The issue of race is vividly described in the case of
Biju. During his stay in New York, the reader meets people from the whole world.
Through this shift between India and America, Desai is able to draw attention to
important differences between the East and the West. Biju is the son of the cook at Cho

Oyu, and as a young man he leaves for New York in order to secure the future for
himself and his father. His efforts to get a tourist visa for the United States have been
both challenging and humiliating for him, and he is well aware that his only possibility
is to stay and work illegally. people from India wanting permanent resident status in
America are being discriminated against due to their race and nationality. In a larger and
more general perspective, it could also be claimed that westernized countries
discriminate against people from Third World countries by not accepting larger quotas.
In postcolonial literature, memory and nostalgia are crucial. Biju becomes
very nostalgic when he thinks of his childhood back in his village in India. The Jamuna
River and the men traveling downstream on inflated buffalo skins bring nostalgic
feelings in him. He remembers his grandmother and how she crossed on market trips
into towns and back, with a sack of rice on her head. The judges story is mostly told
through his memory and brought on by his interaction with his granddaughter, Sai and
her math tutor and lover Gyan. In flashback, he tries to contrast his native Indian scene
with that of his stay in England. But the difference is that his attitude is one of
ambivalence. By purchasing a house, the judge shows his des ire to settle in his own
country but feeling like a foreigner in his own country shows his sense of alienation.
Loss in Desai's novel is something that evokes nostalgia and pain but is also deemed
necessary. It appears in her descriptions of the immigrant experience, the raucous
Gorkha demand for a homeland, and also the growing love between Sai and Gyan, that
is tinged with hope and a fleeting innocence.
Language is one of the central concerns of postcolonial literatures. A
writers encounter with the word is the expression of it through his language. The
language is the crystallization of his experience, something that breathes of his being as
a signature of his presence and or existence. Like other postcolonial writers, Desai also
plays with the language, using local Hindi dialects and the so-called (Hi)nglish. The
writer uses the multi levelled meanings of metaphors to capture the essentials of her
characters in new thoughts and feelings. She often uses clichs and Indian stereotypes
that have also been promoted by the Hindi cinema. Her use of Hindi language and songs
and mention of Indian actors give a touch of authenticity to the characters. She uses
both gentle (Namaste, Dhanyawad, Shukria) and sometimes vulgar (bhenchoots)

colloquial, vernacular expressions in Hindi. Postcolonial writers often take this liberty
to have the flexibility of using the English language according to the situations where
their characters are put in. The English language is the place where writers can and must
work out the problems that confront emerging recently independent colonies: a colonial
language to reflect the postcolonial experience. Desai uses rich, mannered, even cutesy
language to delineate a bleak universe.
The term hybridity is an important concept in postcolonial theory. It
refers to the integration of two different cultures. Even though, hybridity is a term used
technically for a cross between two different species, it also shows the connection
between the racial/historical categories of the past and contemporary cultural discourses
and whereby resulting in a culture in its colonial operation becomes hybridized. Similarly,
in The Inheritance of Loss, the exploitations of cultural hybridity remarkably abound in
almost all the characters' activities in one way or another. For instance, the education that
Sai was taught at St. Augustines Convent falls between the contradictions to follow
hybridity across Lochinvar and Tagore, economics and moral science, highland fling in
tartan and Punjabi harvest dance in dhotis, national anthem in Bengali and an
impenetrable Latin motto. When he was in Britain, the mind of Jemubhai used to grow
stranger to himself, found his own skin odd-colored, his own accent peculiar because of
the notion of hybridity that makes difference into sameness, and sameness into difference.
Such things happen due to the clash between culture and civilization between West and
East. It is because of cultural fusion that creates confusion. The rhetoric of hybridity,
sometimes referred to as hybrid culture is fundamentally associated with the emergence of
postcolonial discourse and its critiques of cultural imperialism. In the novel, Jemubhai
shows strange behavior after his return from Cambridge: at Piphit, he sat up, fidgeted,
looked at the winged dinosaur, purple-beaked banana tree with the eye of one seeing it for
the first time. He was a foreigner- a foreigner-every bit of him screamed. It is noticeable
the crucial difference that one discerns between metropolitan versions of hybridity and
postcolonial versions in which, the former are characterized by an intransitive and
immanent sense of joy, while the latter are expressions of extreme pain and agonizing
dislocations. The cultural hybridity leads to further controversial relations in the
characters of the novel their longing is perhaps the thing that the characters in this novel
do best.

All the characters in The Inheritance of Loss long for identity, for love
and acceptance in an alien land. But they hardly are able to locate where they belong to
since postcolonial hybridity is a frustrating search for constituency and a legitimate
political identity. They have developed a sense of loss, though in different degrees. The
characters are all victims of the so called postcolonial dilemmas. Some of the distinct
features of the postcolonial novel that are found in The Inheritance of Loss are: the
exotic location, the theme of racism, memory and nostalgia, the specific language and the
concept of hybridity.

Bibliografie:
The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (1995), B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths, and T. Tiffin, Eds.
London: Routledge
Post-colonial literature (2001), Christopher O'Reilly, Cambridge University Press