Inhabiting the British country house in India: The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
Inhabiting the British country house in India: The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

Summary/Abstract: Kiran Desai’s critically acclaimed novel, The Inheritance of Loss, intertwines narratives of the lives of three characters: the judge, haunted by his past, is joined by his granddaughter Sai in his house in north-eastern India, while the son of his cook is working illegally in America. Published in 2006, the novel has mostly been analysed in the light of diaspora studies and praised for its author’s questioning of the effects of globalisation and immigration when leaving home. Yet what is also worth examining is the way in which some of the characters of the novel, including the judge, inhabit their chosen homes as foreigners or, to be more specific, as surrogate Britons in their country of origin, creating a separate community of anglophiles. The “solace of being a foreigner in [their] own country” (29) is but one of their rewards in their attempts at mimicking a British way of life. If the houses of the novel are set in independent India, this article questions the extent to which they could be read as counterparts to the British country house, relating them to values of continuity, tradition and Englishness. While anglophile characters take the British country house as model for their own Indian houses, their nostalgia is for a British home they never knew or owned. Their experiences of immigration can only lead them to create a pastiche of an English country house, which relies on a mythified vision of England. Their acceptance of English values and social hierarchy turns them into foreigners in their own country, seemingly blurring the definitions of “home” and “abroad”. Their reliance on the model of the British country house further points to the ways in which The Inheritance of Loss parodies the genre of the English manor house novel and the way it relies on colonialist norms.

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