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Book Reviews
Kathmandu Blues: The
Inheritance of Loss and Intercultural Competence
by
Satis Shroff
 ‘My
characters are purely fictional,’ says Kiran Desai. In her book (The
Inheritance of Loss) she has tried to do exactly that, namely to
capture her own knowledge about what it means to travel between East and
West, and to examine the lives of migrants who are forced to hypocrisy,
angst of being nabbed, and have biographies that have gaps, and whose
lives are constructed with lies, where trust and faith in someone is
impossible, as in the case of Sai and Gyan.
Migration is a sword with sharp blades on both sides. The feeling of
loss when one leaves one’s matribhumi is just as intensive and
dreadful as having to leave a foreign home, due to deportation, when one
doesn’t have the green-card or Aufenthaltserlaubnis. Everyone
copes with such situations differently. Some don’t have coping solutions
and it becomes a traumatic experience for the rest of one’s life. Some
pull up their socks, keep a stiff upper-lip and begin elsewhere.
The problem of illegal migration hasn’t been solved in the USA, Britain,
France, Germany and other European countries. It is an open secret that
the illegal migrants are used as cheap laborers according to the
hire-and-fire principle, for these people belong to the underclass. In
the USA it’s chic to have Hispanics as baby-sitters, just as Eastern
Bloc women are used by German families to do the household chores.
Nepalis work under miserable conditions in India as darwans,
chowkidars, cheap security personnel and the Indians have the same
arrogance as the British colonialists. The judge, Lola and Noni are
stereotypes, but such people do exist. It’s not all fantasy. I’m sure
the Gurkhas looking after photo-model Claudia Schiffer and singer Seal’s
house and guarding the palace of the Sultan of Brunei are well paid and
contented, in comparison to other people in Nepal and the Indian
sub-continent.
What does a person feel and think when he or she goes from a rich
western country to the East? And what happens when a poor Indian comes
to the USA (land of plenty) or Germany (Schlaraffenland)? Is there
always a feeling of loss? I’ve been living thirty years in Germany and I
have met and seen and worked with migrants with biographies from Irak,
Iran, Turkey, Nepal, India, Pakistan, Vietnam, Kosovo, Albania, Croatia
and East Bloc countries. The worst part of it is that the Germans
ignored the fact that it had already become, what they call ‘ein
Einwanderungsland.’ They thought they’d invited only guest workers
after World War II, with limited stay-permits, not realizing that they’d
encouraged human beings with families and emotional ties, hopes and
desires of a better future in the new Heimat with for their children and
their grand-children.
Kiran Desai flashes back and forth, between Kalimpong and New York, and
she uses typical clichés and Indian stereotypes that have also been
promoted by Bollywood. She’s just as cynical and hilarious with her
descriptions of fellow Indians in the diaspora, as she is when she
describes the Gorkhalis in Darjeeling. Her portrait of the Nepalis in
Darjeeling is rather biased, but what can one expect from a thirty-six
year old Indian woman who has been pampered in India, England and the
USA? Her knowledge of Kalimpong and Darjeeling sounds theoretical and
her characters don’t speak Nepali. She lets them speak Hindi, because
she herself didn’t bother to learn Nepali during her stay in Kalimpong.
The depiction of a Gorkhali world might be true, as far as poverty is
concerned, but she has no idea of the rich Nepali literature (Indra
Bahadur Rai, Shiva Kumar Rai, Banira Giri to name a few), and folks
music in the diaspora.
Gyan’s role was overdone, especially when Sai demands that he should
feel ashamed of his and his family’s poverty and so-called low descent.
What is Gyan? Is he a Chettri, Bahun, Rai Tamang, or even a Newar?
Describing a country, landscape is one thing, but creeping into the
skins of the characters is another. The Gorkha characters remain
shallow, like caricatures in Bollywood films, and she overdoes it with
the dialogue between Sai and Gyan.
For someone like me, who also went to school in Darjeeling, Kiran
Desai’s book was a pleasant journey into the past, where I still have
fond memories of the Darjeeling Nepalis, their struggle for recognition
and dignity among the peoples of the vast Indian subcontinent. I’m glad
that peace prevails in the Darjeeling district, although I wish Subash
Ghising had negotiated more funds from the central Indian government,
and a university in Darjeeling. Gangtok (Sikkim) also does not have a
university. The recognition of Nepali was a positive factor, but a
university each for Darjeeling, Kalimpong and Kurseong would have given
more Nepalis (pardon, Gorkhalis) the opportunity for higher education
and better jobs, if not in the country, then abroad. To eat
dal-bhat-tarkari at home and acquire MAs and PhDs within one’s
familiar confines would have immensely helped the Gorkhali men and
women, even more than the recognition of Nepali. We can regard it as a
small step towards progress.
The description of Gyan’s visit to Kathmandu was extremely superficial.
Kathmandu is a world, a cosmos in itself, with its exquisite temples and
pagodas and stupas and the culturally rich Newaris families from
Lalitpur, Bhadgaon and Kathmandu.
Kiran is, and remains, a supercilious brown-memsahib, like the made-over
English characters of Varindra Tarzie Vittachi’s fiercely satirical book
‘The Brown Sahibs’ in her attitude towards Gorkhalis and the downtrodden
of her own country. I can imagine that the Nepali author D.B. Gurung is
piqued about Desai’s portrayal of the Nepalis in Kalimpong as ‘crook,
dupe, cheat and lesser humans’ and his own emotional rejoinder regarding
the Bengalis as ‘the hungry jackals from the plains of Calcutta.’ Since
D.B. Gurung is known for his poetic vein, perhaps he can treat the long
standing problems between Indians and Nepalis, or as Desai puts it,
Bengis and Neps, in his lyrical verses. But please, less of the vitriol
and more of tolerance, because even a poet and novelist can make or
break human relations. I, for my part, am for living together, despite
our differences, for variety is the spice of life in these days of
globalization. Vive la difference.
The story is served like a MacDonald’s Big Mac for the modern reader,
who has not much time, and there are multi-media distractions craving
for his or her attention. As small morsels of information, like in a
sit-com. I found the story-pace well timed and interesting, and she has
a broad palette of problems that migrants face when they leave their
homes, and when they return home. You can feel with Bijhu when he
embraces his Papa in the end. A foreign-returned son, stripped of all
his belongings. It was a terrific metaphor. I’m glad that there are
women like Kiran Desai and Monica Ali (Brick Lane) who’ve
traveled and experienced what it is like to be in the diaspora and try
to capture the emotional and historical patterns in their lives as
migrants.
When you read the last page of the Desai’s book you feel a bit
dissatisfied because you wish that the unequal love affair between Gyan
and Sai will go on and take a positive turn. There are so many
Nepali-Indian couples who live happy conjugal lives with their families.
I know at least three cases of Nepali women who’re married to Bengalis.
The Nepali women speak perfect Bengali, but their husbands don’t speak
Nepali, even though they live in Gorkhaland. They are proud that they
can speak English instead. Nepali (Gorkhali or Khas Kura) is such a
colorful and melodious language and we ought to listen to Sir Ralph
Turner’s when he says: “Do not let your lovely language become the pale
reflexion of a sanskritised Hindi.”
Dinesh Kafle calls Desai ‘schizophrenic.’ Well, when you talk with an
Indian he always praises the achievements of India in terms of the
second Silicon Valley (Bangalore), the Agni and Prithvi missiles, the
increasing nuclear arsenal, the expanding armed forces etcetera. But,
Gott sei dank, there are Indians, who like Gandhi, are humble,
religious, practice humility, are poor, deprived, castless, untouchables
and, nevertheless, human and full of empathy, clean in their souls and
hearts, and regard this world as merely a maya, an illusion, an earthly
spectacle to be seen and felt---without being attached. D. B. Gurung is
wrong when he assumes that Desai seems “unable to acclimatize herself to
either the western milieu or her own home.” But where is her home? She’s
a rootless, creative jet-set gypsy, who calls India, England and USA her
home. The gypsies (Sintis and Romas) were originally from India
(Rajasthan), weren’t they?
Even V.S.Naipaul (Half a Life, The Mimic Men), J. M. Croatzee (Youth),
Isabel Allende (The Stories of Eva Luna) and Prafulla Mohanti (Through
Brown Eyes) haven’t gone so far in their description of a race or nation
the way Desai has in her book. What is missing in her writing is the
intercultural competence. Instead of taking the trouble to learn Nepali
and acquiring background knowledge about the tradition, religion, norms
and values, culture and living style of the Gorkhalis in Darjeeling and
the Nepalese in Nepal, and comparing it with her own Indian culture, and
trying to seek what is common between the two cultures and moving
towards peace, tolerance, reconciliation---she just remains adamant ,
like her protagonist Sai. She does not make an ethnic reflection, but
goes on and on, with a jaundiced view, till the bitter end. The dialogue
between Neps and Bengis, between Neps and other Indians (Beharis and
Marwaris and others from the plains) or between the British and Indians
cannot be described as successful intercultural dialogues. The dialogues
are carried out the way it should not, because there’s always a fear
that one is different in terms of social and ethnic status, even between
her two main protagonists: Sai and Gyan. There is no attempt to reveal
the facts behind an alien in a new cultural environment, no accepting of
the problems of identity and no engagement for equality and against
discrimination.
If you’re looking for frustrations-tolerance, empathy and solidarity
with the Gorkhalis in the book, it’s just not there. The characters
necessary for intercultural interaction are joy in interaction with
foreign cultures (not arrogance and egoism), consciousness of one’s own
culture, stress tolerance, tolerance of ambiguity, and bucketfuls of
empathy. Had she shown empathy towards the Nepalis from Darjeeling and
Kalimpong and made a happy-end love story between Gyan and Sai, the
Nepalese would have greeted her with khadas and marigold malas. The way
it is, she has only stirred a hornet’s nest. Kiran just doesn’t have
empathy for Neps, despite the Booker Prize. Great women are judged by
the way they treat the underprivileged and downtrodden. With 36 years,
it’s time for meditation and self-searching in Rishikesh, like the
Beatles, I suppose.
February 10,
2007
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