Kiran Desai’s portrayal of British rule over India: investigating colonialism and coloniality in the inheritance of loss

Abstract

This article proposes a study of the novel The Inheritance of Loss (2006), by contemporary Indian-born writer Kiran Desai, by exploring some of the practices of colonialism and coloniality depicted in the novel. The Inheritance of Loss is a non-linear narrative, organized in fragments, that portrays the lives of Indian characters that belong to different generations and backgrounds. This paper aims at analyzing passages from the first decades of the 20^th century that picture the British rule over India, some of the practices of colonialism introduced by the colonizers and the coloniality that permeates the Anglicized Indian character Jemubhai Patel in the novel. This paper emphasizes a fundamental strategy of colonialism used by the British rule in India which was the introduction of the English language and culture in that country. Homi Bhabha (1994), Gauri Viswanathan (1995), Elleke Boehmer (2005), Aníbal Quijano (2007), Walter D. Mignolo (2012), Robert J. C. Young (2015) are part of the theoretical framework that supports the article.