Gender Relations In Kiran Desai's The Inheritance Of Loss

Great Essays
Abstract: Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss deals with multitude of interests, of which cross-cultural discord and symphony, gender relations and conflicts, political interests and Diaspora are foremost. This paper is concerned with searching for how social hierarchy, class and culture as well as political and social issues may infringe into gender relations and distort them. Desai’s intention may have been to put many aspects of gender relations within the course of a novel, which goes through twists and turns of events, and which offers a broad panorama of dissimilar cultural contexts, social interests and an assorted population of people living with different ideals, manners and thinking. This is how the novelist offers to study that …show more content…
Apart from the value and significance which the social system carries, there is yet another aspect of it that how does it act in bringing complexity into gender relations. Long rooted notions of order, justice, love and devotion are based on customized perceptions of universal human behaviour and theory of correctness applied to them, but in the modern world of shifting ideals these notions too are following a zigzag way. Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss follows the new current of gender relations which are being guided and controlled by the factors which exist outside the emotional sphere. It is the society, class and culture which are no less preponderant than inter- personal conflicts and problems. Sai, the female protagonist of the novel was always going through a personality clash with her grandfather who had agreed to take care of her. Jemubhai belongs to a generation when patriarchy dominated and patriarchal domination was accepted as a regular affair. His education and success in life had trained him for these things, and he would not admit those people into his house, or in his affections who did not need his standards, socially or financially. Sai shared these …show more content…
Sai does not approve of his policies because she felt that both she and likes of her would be losers. Even, when later in the novel Father Booty gets booked for using camera at a prohibited place, and is forced to leave India promptly, she accuses Gyan for being a sympathiser of the cause which troubled Father Booty. But, this does not prevent her from having a tepid romance with Gyan during the course of her tutorial. Since no man who was any better than Gyan came into her life, her relationship with Gyan also started warming up, and her interest in chap became more and more intense. When Sai, at this slightest opportunity, visits Gyan’s hut, she is taken aback by the miserable poverty and ignorance. The sight of misery upsets her so much that she rejects Gyan at that very moment, and decides to wean away from her girlish affections and fixations. Gyan suddenly becomes nothing in her heart. Not that he was anything much earlier, but now he was reduced to the level of a sub- human being. The idealism which attended the marriage of her parents, and which had made her mother revolt against Jemubhai disappears from her heart. She had taken after her parents and in her heart of hearts and had decided to be like that because the grandfather values success and money more than anything else. This inversion of values and change of heart inside Sai is something one would

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