· Protesters object to Desai’s ‘condescending’ writing
· Indians of Nepalese descent ’seen as criminals’
Randeep Ramesh in New Delhi
Thursday November 2, 2006
The Guardian
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.” (more…)
