The ‘Loss' of Human-Sanity or of Eco-Stability: An Eco-Critical Appraisal of Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss

Abstract

Outstanding among the women novelists who have enhanced Indian English literature and won honour and International acclaim are: Kamala Markandaya, Anita Desai, Ruth Prawar Jhabvala, Nayantara Sahgal, Shashi Deshpande, Santha Rama Rau, Bharati Mukherjee, Kamala Das, Veena Nagpal, Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai. She appeared in literary aura in 1997 with her first publication in the New Yorker and in Mirrorwork, and in an anthology "50 Years of Indian Writing” edited by Salman Rushdie in which Strange Happenings in the Guava Orchard was the concluding piece. In The Inheritance of Loss Kiran Desai treats with fabulous insight, warmth, and often intense sarcasm; topical issues related to politics and terrorism as well as immigration, globalization, multiculturalism, colonial neurosis, identity-formation and subjectivity, and the nationalist, gender, cultural, ethnic and class differences that inform these processes. The text is abundant in natural resources: it begins with nature, with perfect serenity and calm; the lingering effects of nature on humane world comes repeatedly as a ‘leit motif' throughout the setting; and even at the end, it concludes with nature depicting it as the decisive haven of man, which we people do least care to bother about in our dreary steadfastness. But the crises tutor us to value the yet underrated substance to cover up the ‘loss' created by our unmediated brutality on ecological poise.