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 Inheritance of Loss is not autobiography, but there are parallels with Desai’s life. The author has a personal history with Kalimpong and has admitted in recent interviews that the book was ”close” to her own family’s story.
In the novel the character of a judge travels from penury in Gujarat to Cambridge University. So did Desai’s grandfather. The mansion in the book was inspired by Desai’s aunt’s house in Kalimpong. Like Sai, the teenager in the novel, Desai attended a convent school in a Himalayan town.
Critics counter that the book is more non-fiction than fiction. ”It is a one-sided account that tells you about [Desai’s] fears about Kalimpong. The central character Sai is obviously a self-portrait and you can feel her estrangement from this dark, ominous place where Nepalese are just transient interlopers in the landscape,” said Anmole Prasad, a local lawyer.
Desai’s publishers, Penguin, say such comments are just ”individuals’ opinions”, and that far from being fearful of the response in Kalimpong Desai plans to visit the area. ”We see the book as pure fiction and these views are not an issue for us or Ms Desai,” said Hemali Sodhi, head of marketing for Penguin in India.
Desai’s travails underline the ease with which passions are inflamed in places western readers have little idea about. Arundhati Roy angered locals and the ruling communist party in her home town in the southern Indian state of Kerala with her Booker prize-winning novel The God of Small Things. – Guardian Unlimited Â