📄 Abstract
The present paper deals with Kiran Desai’s Booker Prize Winner novel The Inheritance of Loss focusing how the western hegemony attracts the orients to it’s educational periphery. The study challenges the dominance of the West which has created binaries among the occidents and orients during colonial period. It also explores how Thomas Macaulay’s Minutes presented in the House of Commons in 1835, and subsequent implementation by the British Government in colonized India created vacuum of haritance in many of the Indians’ minds. Under the influence of the colonizers’ planned educational system and selected western values in India, people like Jemubhai Popatlal Patel start thinking about their primrosy flight to Britain by leaving behind their roots. For them, the western world is a kind of developed, authentic, superior, dominating and powerful centre of perfect identity formation. After his return from the hostland to homeland, Jemubhai considers Indians powerless, inferior, inauthentic and illiterate, and behaves like a mimic, hybrid but homeless diaspora. The term diaspora refers to a person who has been dispersed or scattered and carried with it the ambiguous status of migrant, envoy or refugee, either by choice, by accident or by force from roots, community or native homeland to various parts of the world. He looks everything with an eye of colonial mind-set. No doubt, he is born and brought up in Indian roots and culture who looks like a typical Indian in blood and colour but has now been converted into an eccentric English in taste and mimic in opinions for whom English values come first while living close to the foothills of the Western Himalayas in Kalimpong, not in his birthplace Piphit, where he reimages his identity within and beyond boundaries as a hopeless diaspora. These experiences lead him to in-betweenness, uncertainties and unhomliness between his heritage and inheritance. Thus, his journey from an orientalist to an anglicist world shapes his identity into isthmatic and dialectic which seems to be in transit. Salman Rushdie expresses that “our identity is at once plural and partial. Sometimes we feel that we straddle two cultures; at other times that we fall between two stools” (15). The present study reveals how diaspora reimaging their identities beyond boundaries in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss.
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📚 How to Cite:
Dr. Susheel Kumar , DIASPORA, IDENTITY AND UNHOMLINESS IN KIRAN DESAI’S THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS , Volume 12 , Issue 8, August 2026, EPRA International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research (IJMR) , Pages: 189 - 193 , DOI: https://doi.org/10.36713/epra31199