by Mala Pandurang

Arundhati Roy. Critical Perspectives. (ed.) Murari Prasad. New Delhi : Pencraft International. New Orientations Series. 2006. 211 pages. Rs 450.

This volume is a competently edited collection of eleven qualitative essays that focus on Arundhati Roy’s engagements with intersecting discourses of postcolonialism, globlization, anti-capitalism and feminism.

The contributions can be divided into two categories. First, those offering multiple perspectives of Roy ‘s only novel, The God of Small Things – beginning with Aijaz Ahmad’s oft quoted response to GOST that first appeared in Frontline in 1997. While Ahmed accepts that ‘the ideology of form’ is Roy ‘s strength, he critiques her ‘ideological opposition to communism’ as fraught with complications. Campbell-Hall presents a comparative study of the textual representative of skilled labour in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and Anil’s Ghost and GOST and suggests that the text offers alternate post colonial identities through the dalit artisan characters; Alex Tickell analyses the scene of the family in their sky-blue Plymouth as a ‘fitting analogy for the creative situation of the post colonial author’; Antonio Navarro-Tejero focuses on the signification of the ‘factory’ in the novel in the context of the ‘decadence of domestic business as modernization and capitalism takes over’; and Madhu Benoit analyses the consequence of the ‘metatemporal narrative mode.’ The essay I particularly enjoyed reading was Brinda Bose’s reading of the construction of the erotic in GOST. Bose counters Aijaz Ahmad’s critique of Roy ‘s political positioning by suggesting that ‘ one’s personal politics is after as extension of one’s position’, and therefore ‘ a politics of desire could be considered as viable as a politics as any other’.

by Mala Pandurang

Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss, 2006; Penguin Books, India (Rs. 495. 324 pgs.)

The Inheritance of Loss has a minimal plot. The narrative is set at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas. It is 1986 when the story opens with a robbery by young insurgents, who force their way into a retired judge’s decrepit colonial mansion and steal his hunting rifles in the presence of the judge, his seventeen-year-old granddaughter Sai, his cook, and his purebred dog Mutt. The narrative then weaves back and forth, offering the personal histories of the characters, and the political background to a growing discontent and insurgency of the Indian Nepalese youth, “ fed up with being treated like the minority in a place where they were the majority” (19). The Gorkhaland National Liberation Front (GNLF) is now seeking a separate Nepali state , and as acts of violence, and of police brutality mount, the lives of the non-Nepalis who have resided in the hills for decades take tragic twists, as they become unwanted outsiders, and prisoners of their own location.