Vikram’s Talking Points

The anglicized class in India is quite ridiculous. I had the pleasure of attending "Christmas celebrations" at the Delhi Gymkhana club a couple of years ago. You had hyper-thin girls loitering about in red leather pants; cackling aunties sipping "pegs" of Black Label and puffing Dunhills, young men in suits slow dancing with their portly dates to Bing Crosby’s "I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas." 

In the corner, a scintillant Christmas tree, tinselled to perfection, blessed the crowd.

There was pumpkin soup, well-garnished roasts, and a layout of puddings, some of which were probably last heard of in 1950s England.

It was Orientalism in reverse: Here, the supposedly authentic Indians were enacting a most unconscious mimicry. And this crowd, I might add, is the same one thats scoffs at the kitschy provinciality of Americans, (who, credit to the tribe, have at least invented a culture of their own).

The Man Booker Prize is open only to British and Commonwealth citizens and Indian-born Desai has yet to apply for a US passport, although she has lived in New York for 20 years.

"George Bush won once and he won the second time and I couldn’t bring myself to (apply)," Desai said late last month in an interview in Toronto as she voiced her disapproval of the president’s foreign policy.

"So I really owe George Bush my Booker, in an odd way. It’s really very funny." [Link]

A few thoughts on her book, The Inheritance of Loss:

I didn’t like it. In fact, I forced myself to finish the last 50 pages about a week after reading the first 300. (I was not expecting an exciting denouement.) The story revolves around a community of anglicized misfits and their interlocutors on the India-Nepal border, and wends its way occasionally to the subterranean New York of illegal immigrants. The anglicized folks live a content life, reading Trollope and simulating colonial Britain in the Himalayas, until their world is turned Upside Down by a Gorkha separatist movement roiling through the region.

Desai’s book is populated with characters thin with meaning. There is Sai - a young girl forced to decamp to her to her grandfather’s home when her parents are killed in a freak accident in Moscow; her grandfather - a bitter misanthrope who can find no love for anyone in his life save his dog; the son of the family cook - a failed New Yorker whose return to India reminds us that immigration basically sucks; the family cook - a feckless man whose life is forever bound to his son’s immigration to America; Sai’s Gorkha boyfriend, who scorns her for the separatist movement…and so many stereotypes skipping about in puddles of inconsequence.

They did not move me, and neither did the subtext. The hopelessness of -

the anglicized class,

separatist politics,

immigration to America,

globalization,

secularism,

the Indian state 

- is limned with such predictability as to render even a lugubrious reader completely unsympathetic. This is the Left frowning at the abyss; there is no redemption to be found here.

Desai delivers a clever phrase now and then, but with her disjointed style - where long sentences are killed off with one-liners, where descriptive prose is fractured by running social commentary - one is never quite on terra firma. After a while, it simply does not please. 

But what do I know? The Booker committee loved it. Perhaps it was time for another India novel to take the honor.

Bleh.