Romance and Revolution: A Study of Gyan and Sai's Relationship in Kiran Desai's "The Inheritance of Loss"

Author

Saptarshi Das

Abstract

 This dissertation seeks to explore the budding romance between Gyan and Sai in Kiran Desai's Booker winning 2006 novel "The Inheritance of Loss". The dissertation examines why and how this romance begins, how it develops, and what leads to a rift between two young lovers. It is a process which takes into account the psychological, historical as well as political aspect of their relationship. The dissertation argues that Gyan and Sai belong to two different historical spaces. Sai has a reclusive existence at Cho Oyu – which is cut off from the historical momentum of the time. Gyan is slowly drawn into the vortex of GNLF movement which sees history being shaped.

This dissertation rests on three theoretical planks: Dipesh Chakrabarty's idea of the "waiting room of history", Benedict Anderson's theory of nationalist simultaneity and Homi Bhabha's theory of colonial time-lag. Depending on these theories, this dissertation tries to analyze this relationship in terms of broader postcolonial issues.

Keywords

GNLF – Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson, Dipesh Chakraborty

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References

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised ed., Verso, 2006.

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton University Press, 2000.

Desai, Kiran. The Inheritance of Loss. Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006.

Middleton, Townsend. The Demands of Recognition: State Anthropology and Ethnopolitics in Darjeeling. Stanford University Press, 2016.

Mishra, Pankaj. "Wounded by the West." The New York Times, 12 Feb. 2006, www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/books/review/wounded-by-the-west.html.

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