Stories were once the vehicles of worldviews, ethical notions, historical memory.  They were once nothing less than our connection to the divine world.  In India, the story has not lost its sacred center—the katha is still a vahan, a vehicle that connects us to the divine.  But what has happened to the story today in the more secular, more global and English-dominated arena of “Literature,” with the division between the sacred and the literary itself a sign of our “inheritance of loss”?  Today, those of us who “study literature” do not study what stories say, we study what they do not say, or we analyze how they say, through the quasi-science of philosophical theories.  We have become smarter than the story, which lies inertly at our professional fingertips like “a patient etherized upon a table.”  This is the state of literature departments across the world, mired as they are in the more scientific prose of theory, a prose without the poetry of story. But the best storytellers of our time still try to reach us—mind, body and soul—through stories; still bring to us pictures and plots and characters and symbols: our own world in magnified, heightened, clearer, though often defamiliarized, form.  They force us to wade through the daily morass of facts and information, through the multiple “realities” of media images, and the cacophony of theories to come face to face with the moral core of our shared and unshared experiences—even when that confrontation means nothing more transcendent than a recognition of the absence of a core, an emptiness at the center of it all. 

Kiran Desai’s 2006 Booker-Prize-winning novel, The Inheritance of Loss, circles furiously around this feeling of absence and loss at the center of our increasingly deracinated world. As such, it is a refreshing break from the voluminous output of the mystifying proponents of the modernist project, who impatiently anticipate the arrival of that center’s cosmopolitanism at the heart of the junglee periphery. This novel fumes relentlessly, not only against the neo-liberal platitudes about the benefits of “globalization,” but also against the all-too-common celebrations of modern uprootedness and hybridity that we see in contemporary literature, academic theory and popular culture; that form, in fact, the very foundations of American and thus global ideology. Desai is equally impatient with the magic realist evasion of the violent uprooting and destruction entailed by the modern. Her novel is a polemic against just such storytellers and their often heartless optimism about the modern world; heartless because such optimism requires a looking-away from the pain and suffering, the irrevocable loss, necessitated by moving from here to there in our constricting geographies of time and space and soul.