Readers’ Rites
When she became the youngest ever winner of the Booker prize Kiran Desai inadvertently lifted the town of Kalimpong out of the shadows of the Himalayas and into the glare of the media spotlight.
But few in the town are now thanking her for setting her novel, The Inheritance of Loss, in this landscape. Instead internet forums hum with indignation about the book’s “condescending statements” while others threaten public book-burnings.
So intense is the fury that Desai’s aunt, a doctor with a practice in the market, told India’s Outlook magazine that she has not “told people here about my niece, or the book, or that she won an award. The book contains many insensitive things.”
What has incensed locals in Kalimpong is the portrayal of people of Nepalese descent, who form the bulk of the town’s 60,000 people. The story revolves around an affair between a young girl, Sai, and her maths tutor, Gyan, an Indo-Nepali man who comes from a dirt-poor family. It unfolds in the 1980s, when ethnic Nepalese rebelled - frustrated at being treated, in Desai’s prose, “like the minority in a place where they were the majority”.
Many say Indians of Nepalese descent are projected as petty criminals, too stupid to do anything but work as labourers. Others complain that the bloodshed of the insurgency is only fleetingly mentioned.
“Really the book is just an outsider’s view of Kalimpong and the events that took place here,” says Bharat Mani Pradhan, a social worker in Kalimpong. “All [Desai’s] information comes from a group of disenchanted people here. The whole town is made strange.”
The above from today’s Guardian. I’m a little impatient with folks annoyed at finding their towns being made strange. That is what literature is supposed to do, making things anew. On the other hand, readers have their rights. There should be debate over representation. But book burnings? And that too of a book that radiates warmth and sympathy, not so much for a cause but for the complex humanity of all involved. People who find their lives or the places of their belonging turned into prize-winning fiction must find themselves estranged from their own sense of themselves; without wishing to sanction thuggery, I want to appeal for some understanding of this response, not resentment so much as a yearning for a separate, collective recognition in which they are the doers. A response like this is a sign of politicization and even of access to political rights; what it also reveals is the desperation of a dream for power in a setting where the literary is inevitably reduced to the political.
