Features: Magazine | Literary Review | Life | Metro Plus | Open Page | Education Plus | Book Review | Business | SciTech | Friday Review | Young World | Property Plus | Quest | Folio |

Home is elsewhere

There is always a deep desire for rootedness and an equally strong one for breaking away, Man Booker Prize winner Kiran Desai tells BAGESHREE S.

PHOTO: BHAGYA PRAKASH K.

BOOKENDS Kiran Desai: `You could feel more American at one stage of your life and feel much more Indian at a later stage'

What can you ask a Booker winner that she hasn't already been asked in a hundred interviews before? So I begin by asking Kiran Desai, whose Inheritance of Loss (Penguin) won the Man Booker Prize for 2006, to first give me her "Don't ask me this again" list. "Don't worry!" she says with a hearty laugh. "It's my job, and your job!" We chat a bit about book fairs "happening in every town these days", her mother Anita Desai who is writing her next book in Mexico and the brickbats and bouquets that accompanied the big prize. But she seems more comfortable as we settle down to talking about the book, which was released in the city earlier this week.

Could one say that Inheritance of Loss is about the idea of a home and the ironies it is fraught with? Home is the universal symbol of rootedness and solidity, and yet has always been so ill-defined and fragile, isn't it?

I was thinking of my grandparents as I was writing. My grandfather was in Gujarat and left for England to study. He came back and joined the ICS. He was posted far away from home, according to the ICS policy. In gaining the wider world, something was definitely lost. There is always a deep desire for rootedness and an equally strong one for leaving. They seem contradictory emotions, but a lot of us have both.

Biju in the novel represents exactly this, perhaps? He constructs a notion of home while in a foreign land and returns to find that what he claims to be home is a contested territory...

There are always many people's claims on the same territory. We are in a world of conflicting and competing interests, desires for the same patch of land.

There is a criticism that diaspora writers obsess over questions of identity and homelessness.

That's true. For someone like R.K. Narayan the question of home did not loom large. But for writers from the diaspora it is a big question. Immigration is not a linear process. You could feel more American at one stage of your life and feel much more Indian at a later stage. It's not a process of settling in more and more.

In your novel a character like Saeed seems to get over this question and get on with his new life.

I did want to show another side, people who somehow get through. He is charming, he is a charlatan too. He will go through the backdoor in preference to the front door! That kind of life spirit and optimism sometimes makes the most successful immigrant. Some people get through easily and others find it harder, not that one is better than the other.

The more we talk of melting pot and multiculturalism, the more we stand apart from each other, don't you think?

Multiculturalism has become fashionable. There is such emphasis on richness and diversity. But on the other hand people are also forming narrow identities. There is a lot of hypocrisy in the way the world is operating. There are wonderful, vibrant and supposedly multicultural cities in the West. But look at their foreign policies, which are doing anything but trying to establish equality. The vocabulary of aggression being used in the Middle East is amazing. You wouldn't think people can talk like that any more! While there is a class that is flourishing and can proclaim its diversity, there is another whose dignity is assaulted every single day. The class, colour difference is blatant.

The Shilpa Shetty episode would make you wonder if one can make millions on a racism charge.

That's the marketplace. Shilpa Shetty might have made a huge sum of money out of it. But when workers are being killed for the colour of skin by neo-Nazis, you realise it is not all for reality TV.

How does the American public view the question?

There is such a myth about States being a country where people find their dignity after leaving behind horribly undignified situations. They think of themselves as a benevolent nation. Nations operate like religions. They seduce themselves with their own image and seduce the rest with good advertising.

As we talk I wonder if a writer can ever be apolitical, now more than ever.

Writing is enmeshed in politics. When you are talking about a book, you soon realise you are talking about much larger issues. At the Jaipur literary festival, Salman Rushdie was saying that a writer has to fight for the private space. Writing is political, but it goes from a human point of view. It is like looking at the fears, humiliations and doubts of one individual in a room of people debating these larger questions rather than the other way round.

Does the novel have too much on the plate, from Gorkhaland movement to immigration to the class question to teenage love... It overflows.

It was an even more overflowing book earlier, running into 1,500 pages! I guess it's my realisation that there is so much subject matter. I was trying to explain a lot of things to myself. I think of it in terms of a process. It doesn't have the shape of a book in my mind. I guess it should, but it doesn't!

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail