Publishers,
critics, and the writers themselves, acknowledge the
seminal influence of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's
Children (1981) in the post-independence era in
triggering off the boom in Indian writing in English.
Its impact was also decisive in making The New York
Times dub the young crop of Indian English novelists
as "Rushdie's Children". Though the status
of all these writers is not the same, most of them happen
to be diasporic Indians residing outside the nation-state
of India, and many of them have been awarded literary
prizes and astronomical sums as advance. Looking at
the recently awarded Man Booker Prize to Kiran Desai
(something that eluded her illustrious mother), this
article focuses on the politics behind the prizes and
how Kiran was hailed by The New Yorker way back
in 1997 as one of India's leading novelists, when she
was just writing her first novel, Hullabaloo in the
Guava Orchard. It also includes a discussion on
diasporic writers through a witty essay written by Desai
herself. Further it deals with the status of Kiran Desai
as an Indian diasporic writer and discusses in detail
the reaction of the writer herself as well as the critics
in assessing the novel The Inheritance of Loss.
A bio-bibliographical introduction of the writer is
given in order to show how the diasporic and transcontinental
nature of Kiran Desai's extended family members recur
in the novel. The article concludes with the view that
with just two very different books behind her, it is
difficult or may be too early to gauge where Kiran Desai
is heading.
On
October 10, 2006, defeating the five other novelists
who made it to the shortlist, Kiran Desai won the UK's
leading literary award, the Man Booker Prize, for her
novel, The Inheritance of Loss. Apart from being
the youngest woman writer to receive this prize, she
is the third writer of Indian originafter Salman Rushdie
and Arundhati Roy-to win this prestigious award and
also simultaneously catapult Indian writing in English
to further worldwide fame as a special genre of writing.
It is ironic that a book titled The Inheritance of
Loss earned her 50,000 pound sterling and became
a sort of redemption for the Desais, whom Salman Rushdie
calls the "first dynasty of modern Indian fiction".
Although her mother Anita Desai had been shortlisted
for the Booker prize thrice- Clear Light of Day
(1980), In Custody (1984), and Fasting, Feasting
(1999), with the prize then simply called the Booker
and not the Man Booker as it is being called since 2002-she
failed to receive the prize. It is further ironical
that The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai's second
novel, was according to the author herself, much harder
to write than her debut novel, Hullabaloo in the
Guava Orchard, taking "seven years of my being
determinedly isolated". It almost didn't get published
in England. "The British said it didn't work,"
she admitted, and nearly ten publishing houses rejected
it until Hamish Hamilton bought it. The judges described
it as "a magnificent novel of human breadth and
wisdom". |
