Comparative postcolonial ruralities and English heritage: Julian Barnes’s England,England and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss

Abstract

This article argues for the vastly different ways in which English heritage is celebrated as a legacy of the British Empire in rural spaces located both in England and in India. Comparing Julian Barnes’s satirical novel England, England (1998) with Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006) affords disparate images of English heritage in postimperial Britain and in postcolonial India. Barnes parodies efforts by the English heritage industry, in an age of decline, to revivify English nationalism and to recollect erstwhile imperial glory. In a globalized world, he underscores the desire for nostalgia preoccupied with a mythic English agrarian past, its historical icons, and its social order as anachronistic instead of inspirational. At best, it appears historically ignorant; at worst, he suggests, it serves as a perversion of reality. For Barnes, the English heritage industry is self-indulgent and largely motivated by profit. In contrast, Desai’s novel represents the damage caused by a class structure forged from India’s colonial inheritance and a persistent privileging of English culture and heritage. Desai suggests economic power and social prestige, even in an obscure hill village in India, are articulated through material displays and personal knowledge of English heritage, reflecting the different classes’ uneven access to capital and knowledge. Her novel simultaneously depicts those at the bottom end of India’s class hierarchy who are compelled to acts of desperation in pursuit of better lives.

Given the occasion of this special issue of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature on “postcolonial environments”, it is worthwhile considering that the network of Commonwealth countries concerns comparative values of all kinds — social, economic, cultural — between Britain (as the common mode of comparison) and its ex-colonies. In literature, this relationship may be explored by comparing fiction about Britain’s identity as a postimperial nation with fiction produced within postcolonial countries. Yet doubtlessly, whether in the ex-colonies or in contemporary Britain, the experience of imperial legacies is both uneven and persistent. Geographic locale determines these varieties of experience, constructing a spatial or environmental perception of these legacies that is at once cultural and personal and which in turn impinges on values and choices.

The process of empire building fundamentally involved the cultural and economic conquest of space, intertwining the fate of the heart of Empire with that of the colonies. Andrew Thompson’s recent essay collection (2012) investigates the impact of imperialism upon twentieth-century Britain from a largely historical perspective. In literary studies, Simon Gikandi’s Maps of Englishness (1996) argues for the ways in which colonialism affected English writers, especially those of the nineteenth century. Two recent studies have further developed Gikandi’s work. End of Empire and the English Novel Since 1945, edited by Rachael Gilmour and Bill Schwarz (2011), as well as Graham MacPhee’s Postwar British Literature and Postcolonial Studies (2011) both focus on imperial legacies within postwar literary English novels. Indeed, MacPhee argues that “what has been recognized as postcolonial literature needs to be understood as much more central to postwar British literature and culture than has previously been understood” (2011: 3).

However, comparative understandings of the historically mutually constitutive relationship between Britain and the colonies have yet to be fully explored in postcolonial approaches to contemporary fiction. MacPhee’s and Prem Poddar’s interdisciplinary essay collection, Empire and After: Englishness in Postcolonial Perspective (2007), offers two sections on the impact of Englishness in the colonies and the impact of the colonies on Englishness in Britain as postcolonial legacies, but the essays do not directly compare the two contexts in conjunction. Elleke Boehmer, however, stresses the need for this comparison. A global outlook instigated by colonial processes affects writers from the colonial world to a much larger degree than those from England. She argues:

From the extensive evidence presented by novels written in English, produced by those with some form of colonial, colonized or decolonizing background, when compared with fiction by writers belonging to England without other ties, it remains the case that from 1790 to the present day, the world-spanning dimensions and dynamism of the British empire have been more vividly registered and embodied within that first category of writing than within the second. (2011: 241)

Comparative literary perspectives allow us to explore both the extent and the concerns of this difference in literatures which are fundamentally related through the global reach of empire. If Britain is to be considered postcolonial, how is this postcoloniality similar and different to the postcoloniality of the ex-colonies? Comparative postcolonial approaches to contemporary fiction afford us an opportunity to examine this within a late capitalist globalized context. They suggest how Britain’s efforts to confront its postimperial present (as these recent critical studies endeavour to explore) impress upon the ex-colonies in an increasingly interconnected world once bound through colonial hybridity.

More particularly, this essay is interested in the contrasting ruralities between Britain’s postimperial countryside and her postcolonial spaces. The British Empire bestowed very different legacies to these vastly varied rural spaces. Comparing literary representations highly conscious of the engagement between these rural spaces and globalization produces discrepant experiences, and memories. While texts such as W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (1995) and V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival (1987) see a postimperial Britain in decline reflected through an English countryside whose society and great estates are falling into decrepitude, Julian Barnes’s satirical postmodern novel England, England (1998) ostensibly engages with efforts to revivify the great traditions and heritage of the English countryside within the global processes of late capitalism. Barnes’s overtly satirical and playful tone contrasts with the melancholia which pervades Sebald’s and Naipaul’s texts. In the ex-colonies, Indian writers in particular — including Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie — also deploy self-conscious satire to mock the inherited English values which have infiltrated rural India. Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss (2006) similarly possesses elements of satire about the persistence of colonial values in the backwaters of India. However, the novel’s structure, with chapters alternating between rural India and metropolitan New York, prompts further connections between these two spaces. By comparing Barnes’s and Desai’s novels, this essay juxtaposes the postimperial English countryside with postcolonial rural India by exploring the discourses of English heritage within these different environments.

Barnes’s novel serves as an indictment of England’s highly successful heritage industry, and critiques Britain’s attempts to rekindle greatness in the face of postimperial decline and global obsolescence in the late twentieth century. More specifically, England, England suggests that England’s sense of its national heritage continues to be preoccupied with an idealized rural outlook and agrarian order. The novel presents this purportedly authentic idea of English heritage and cultural continuity as falsely celebratory, constructed to perpetuate an anachronistic myth of an original England based around a façade of country life and rural iconography. While offering sentimental nostalgia and a retreat from the modern world, this myth is a simulacrum of the past; one that, Barnes suggests, is parochial and ignorant. Yet the novel also farcically depicts this myth as a marketable commodity in a global tourist industry, sold to an international market eager to purchase and imbibe forms of Englishness. While Barnes’s novel enables “a global reading of the bucolic heritage in our literature” (Gifford, 2009: 246), it also questions the social construction of this heritage, often viewed blindly as innate to the nation’s spirit and identity.

This bucolic English heritage within a global context resonates quite differently in Kiran Desai’s Man Booker prize-winning novel, The Inheritance of Loss. Desai’s novel similarly concerns English heritage in an age of contemporary globalization, a period which can be seen to originate in, and be perpetuated from, the centres of capitalist power, many of which were once European imperial centres (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, 2009: 101).While Barnes satirizes Englishness as forms of populist national heritage, Desai’s novel is interested in the different ways in which Indians living in rural postcolonial India continue to construct their identities around expressions of Englishness that perpetuate colonial discourse and the superiority of English culture. She also crucially suggests the legacies of empire in postcolonial rural India bear more serious consequences, creating a highly unequal social order and contributing to systems of class inequalities and dispossession in a globalized world witnessing unprecedented waves of international migration. The history of British imperialism in the novel’s village sustains systemic poverty at local, national, and global levels. In Barnes’s novel, the way in which English heritage can be globally marketed as leisure and purchased by privileged tourist dollars is portrayed with ironic jouissance. In marked contrast, Desai suggests the once imposed forms of colonial Englishness persisting within the Indian countryside circumscribe a global class structure which drives acts of economic desperation and brutality amongst the rural working class. For her, these acts are linked to the experiences of undocumented immigrants struggling to survive and thrive in global cities like New York.

England, England

While postcolonial studies’ relevance to Barnes’s novel appears less evident than to Desai’s novel, England, England may nonetheless be considered “postcolonial” in the way that Katherine Cockin and Jago Morrison frame postcolonialism in the context of reading approaches to postwar and contemporary British literature. They argue that:

Informed by such thinkers as Eric Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson, a major theme of postcolonialism is to explore the ways in which nations — often established on unstable and discontinuous historical foundations — come to acquire an “imagined” aura of timelessness and naturalness. (2010: 7)

If read in this way, Barnes’s novel employs satire to destabilize well established traditions and seemingly timeless images which contribute to local, national and international understandings of England, and Englishness. Barnes himself saw England, England as an “‘idea of England’ novel” exploring “authenticity, the search for truth, the invention of tradition, and the way in which we forget our own history” (Barnes 1998: 27–28). This exploration includes, I would argue, England’s conservative forms of historical remembrance and celebration concerning its imperial exploits.

Barnes also feels that the novel exposes the falsity of imperial ideology as one aspect of English national identity through which we see “ourselves as dispensers of good government, an example to others of the civilized life” (Barnes 1998: 27–28). As Krishan Kumar argues in The Making of English National Identity:

Englishness and English national identity […] can best be approached by considering it as the nationalism of an imperial state. It helps explain the character of English nationalism over many centuries, when the empire (or empires) was in existence; and it helps to explain why questions of national identity have surfaced so urgently in the wake of empire. (2003: 34)

Barnes addresses these questions through structuring his novel around three images of England and Englishness in three sections: 1: England, 2: England, England, and 3: Anglia. These sections serve as self-reflexive satirical commentary on England’s conception of itself and its foibles through the lenses of history and geography in an age of postimperial decline when “[o]nly a few generations back, [the monarchy] had presided over a third of the globe. […] Now it was mostly gone, all that justice and majesty and peace and power and being Bloody Number One, gone, all gone […]” (Barnes, 2002: 165). The novel’s main satirical motif involves the nation’s attempts to confront the realities of a fallen empire and efforts to resurrect imperial and national pride through an emotionally and economically charged return to the nation’s perceived forms of heritage.

The initial perspective of a child’s gaze which opens the novel suggests Barnes’s critique of the early internalization of constructed forms of national order and grand narratives. The novel’s first section ostensibly recounts Martha Cochrane’s childhood growing up in the countryside and young Martha’s precocious interpretation of the nation of England. That England can be understood as an agglomeration of counties, divided by county lines, is notional, as reflected by Martha’s efforts, as a toddler, to force awkwardly the shapes of certain counties into the wrong spaces in her “Counties of England jigsaw” (4). A supposedly basic assumption about the way in which the nation is organized geographically is thus immediately called into question at the start of the novel. Barnes satirizes other factual assumptions about the country, in particular the belief that at the nation’s core, at the very heart of the heart of the old British Empire, lies the English countryside and its ordered traditions as timeless, unchanging, and securing stability for all who believe in this narrative. Indeed, Alun Howkins argues that in “the invention of […] rural England especially there is something, in the view of this invented myth, “‘incommunicable’ or ‘indivisible’ in the national heritage” (2001: 148). This myth is apparent in one of Martha’s seemingly most unquestionable memories of her childhood which involve her village’s Agricultural Show. Martha remembers the District Agricultural and Horticultural Society’s tradition of awarding a range of prizes. Her enraptured response to the long list of categories detailed in the Schedule of Prizes reflects Martha’s love for order while symbolizing an English rural solipsism priding itself on obsessive detail, hierarchy, and tradition. Categories include varieties of vegetables and flowers grown in England as well as different classes of farm animals. There are eight categories for dahlias alone and yet other categories include specific instructions that resonate like dictates: “Collection of Vegetables. Six distinct kinds. Cauliflowers, if included, must be shown on stalks” (8). Martha felt “the lists — their calm organization and their completeness — satisfied her” (9). As a child at the show, Martha instinctively responds to the fundamental doctrines of heritage which not only stress a communal and ritualized legacy, but also align heritage with a potent mythic past. She calls the Schedule of Prizes “an almanac; an apothecary’s herbal; a magic kit; a prompt-book of memory” (8). As David Lowenthal argues, “[t]o share a legacy is to belong to a family, a community, a race, a nation. What each inherits is in some measure unique, but common commitments bind us to others within our group” (1998: 2). Lowenthal also aligns the traits of heritage with religion even though this “faith denies the role of reason” and “forecloses compromise” (1998: 2). The religious aspect of heritage, too, applies to Martha. Mr A. Jones’s prize-winning beans “glowed in her mind — then, later, and later still — like holy relics” (10; emphasis mine). In this image, however, an English ruralist order and heritage also appear as highly narcissistic.

The novel’s Sir Jack Pitman personifies this narcissism. Nationally celebrated CEO of Pitco Industries, illustrious Sir Jack is a wealthy English patriot committed to preserving the nation’s glorious history, an arch-capitalist and consummate free-market entrepreneur. At heart, he represents the ideologies of modern Conservative, Thatcherite England, one that crucially prides itself on its connection to the countryside, ruralist discourses, and their attendant institutions such as the National Trust and English Heritage. Sir Jack constantly hums Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, “Pastoral”, serves as Honorary President of the Ramblers” Association (42), and hires Martha to assist in the development of “England, England”, a massive interactive theme park full of “Heritage Action” (206). To be built on the Isle of Wight, the enterprise, marketed to the global tourist industry as a distilled populist experience of all things perceived as quintessentially English, reflects the growing appeal of English heritage as “a distinctive ‘product’, distinguished from others, on a world scene” (Boniface and Fowler, 1993: 1). In a globalized economy, conceiving English heritage as a unique product is a response to the fear of global cultural homogeneity, an aversion to what Marjorie Ferguson terms “a metaculture whose collective identity is based on shared patterns of consumption” (1992: 80). Critics of this metaculture assert “[c]laims of ‘national cultural integrity’ or ‘regional cultural authenticity’ [which] typify attempts to protect or promote a national or regional collective identity” (Ferguson, 1992: 80). Even while Sir Jack aims to rescue authentic regional English culture from this metaculture, the theme park England, England is itself ironically reliant on a globalized tourist economy. England, England aims to detach itself from Old England which, according to Sir Jack, had become “an economic and moral waste-pit” (207).

Sir Jack stands for Conservative efforts, from the 1980s onwards, to revive imperial pride through a return to popular perceptions of the “local past” as a means to recreate a populist English nationalism and to fuel a profit-driven heritage industry. During this period, as Patrick Wright argues, “the idea of ‘national heritage’ could be suffused with […] imperial nostalgia” (2009: xii) as a desire to return to the heyday of British imperial glory and global power. To nurture this nostalgia, Sir Jack decries the idea that Britain’s “particular geopolitical function [is] to act as an emblem of decline, a moral and economic scarecrow” (40–41). However, his reference to postimperial decline more specifically becomes evident when he declares:

[W]e taught the world how to play cricket and now it’s our duty, an expression of lingering imperial guilt, to sit back and let everyone beat us to it. Balls, as it were. I want to turn around that way of thinking. I bow to no-one in my love of this country. It’s a question of placing the product correctly, that’s all. (41)

Ian Baucom argues that cricket greens across England serve as metonyms for empire, “each […] name England, or, more accurately Englishness” (1999: 148). While cricket inscribed “cultural identity on […] England’s colonial subjects abroad” (Baucom, 1999: 152), it is also historically linked with “the local”, with images of the village green and an English ruralism. Using cricket as a metaphor for empire building, Sir Jack unequivocally rejects any notion that the pursuit of empire should be couched in historical guilt, and he hires Martha assuming she believes the same. Barnes underscores Sir Jack’s imperialist posturing in the assertion that “Sir Jack enjoyed marching across land belonging to others” (43), with a proclivity for “methods of acquiring ownership. Methods such as theft, conquest, and pillage, for example” (109). Indeed, he dreams of an England once again great in the eyes of the world.

The image of English heritage that Sir Jack markets to the world is driven by a distorted, discombobulated idea of English history which relies on surface representation pandering to emotive and entertaining spectacles of an ill-defined past propelled by profit. Yet, Sir Jack and his team conceive of this form of heritage as a triumph for English cultural imperialism. They see England’s past and civilisation writ large across the world stage to successfully integrate England into the world economy and to revive a “modern patriotism” (207), even though their project ironically exploits cultural ignorance about the English. Notably, a large proportion of the replicated images of English heritage being sold as “Quality Leisure” to the international consumer reflects impressions of a rural picturesque: a white horse cut in a chalky hillside, the White Cliffs of Dover, Cotswold villages full of thatched cottages serving Devonshire cream teas, cricket, Brontë country and Jane Austen’s house, primeval forest and heritage animals, Stonehenge, half-timbering (146). Collated into a haphazard list with other popular heritage items that constitute the England, England experience, these images of rural heritage take on a comic light as they function exclusively on the level of simulacrum, celebrating Englishness through a barrage of icons evacuated of historical content. By the same logic, Barnes asserts that “[p]atriotism’s most eager bedfellow was ignorance, not knowledge” (85). He suggests the patriotism impelled by emblems of rural English life is founded upon a blissful ignorance that simultaneously yields a blind nationalism in the face of postimperial decline.

Sir Jack’s use of a myopic understanding of heritage to address a wasted Britain is eventually dismissed as social ideology. Martha comes to realize “it was not true, that it was a great lie perpetrated by humanity against itself” (226). Heritage, like religion, was:

made up to make us feel better about death, they founded a system then used the system as a means of social control, no doubt they believe it themselves, […] as something irrebuttable, a primal social truth, like patriotism, hereditary power, and the necessary superiority of the white male. (226)

However, Barnes’s most scathing condemnation of all that Sir Jack symbolizes culminates in the revelation that Sir Jack’s supposed filial visits to his Auntie May are a cover up for regular trips to a bondage and discipline sex parlour which caters for men wishing to indulge in “paraphilic infantalism”, a sexual fetish involving role-playing and impersonating a baby to achieve sexual gratification. During these sessions, Sir Jack regresses into babyhood as he plays at being Baby Victor, mollycoddled and sexually fulfilled by Nursie Lucy who caters to his relentlessly “imperious demands” (162). Thus, Barnes depicts Sir Jack’s imperial dreams, and those constructed around English heritage, as forms of infantile behaviour and perversion. The novel suggests the international sale of farcical images of Britain’s past, packaged as serious heritage, fulfils a desire to retreat into a childlike complacency free from real responsibilities to historical accountability.

Attempts to address postimperial downturn in the particular form of national English heritage founded on England’s rural past receive a final satirical turn in the novel’s concluding section, “Anglia”, a reference to the Medieval Latin name for England. Martha has left her CEO job managing England, England and retreated to a village peopled by disillusioned urbanites seeking to resurrect old forgotten ways of English country life which they piece together from inexact knowledge and hazy memories. In the absence of accurate facts, the villagers profess feigned rural adages in affected country accents while acting out parodic country behaviour. To further their desires for “authentic” English village life, they call on Martha to unearth her “authentic” childhood memories, which the villagers hope will inspire them “to revive — or perhaps, since records were inexact, to institute — the village Fete” (254). Martha recites to them from memory the list of categories in the District Agricultural and Horticultural Society’s Schedule for Prizes and shows the villagers her faded booklet detailing the full schedule and relevant rules for entry. Barnes reveals his opinion on this signifier of rural order and culture: “the frail book of lists seemed like a potsherd from an immensely complicated and self-evidently decadent civilization” (255). The simile here, which compares the list to a piece of broken ceramic retrieved from a bygone age, not only acknowledges the ruins of rural heritage as synonymous with a lost English civilization, but also critiques that erstwhile civilization as profoundly self-indulgent. However, as Nick Bentley argues, “[t]his longing for a lost England” in England, England:

can also be seen in the novel’s silence on issues of Empire and contemporary ideas of the nation as multicultural. […] England’s colonial heritage, reference to discrete racial identities within the nation, and multi-culturalism are all written out of the text: there is no mention of them anywhere in the book. (2007: 495)

Arguably, the novel does not completely eschew the topic of Empire as Bentley suggests, but it does fail to recognise England’s multi-racial landscape. However, this absence also forms a critique of the way in which the myths, totemic images, and grand narratives of white English heritage ignore the impact of Empire on England’s contemporary identity.

The Inheritance of Loss

The contemporary legacies of England’s colonial heritage, exported across the colonies, engenders different consequences in the Indian village of Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss. Both Barnes’s and Desai’s novels contribute to efforts in addressing what Timothy Brennan has deemed a gap within postcolonial studies: a failure to explore “an economics of culture” within “continuities […] that so dominate the vocabulary of globalization theory” (2005: 106). Desai’s novel is partially concerned with the cultural capital held by India’s elite in the wake of decolonization. Set during a similar period to Barnes’s England, England, the novel is, however, placed against two very distinct physical backdrops. One setting involves Kalimpong, a West Bengal hill station of “[u]ncivilized voluptuous green” (Desai, 2007, 323) situated in the Himalayas, and the other involves the chaotic unsettled immigrant communities of New York City.

The novel’s chapters alternate between the two locations, reflecting their fundamental interconnectedness while emplacing the obscure fictitious hill village, Cho Oyu, within a global urban landscape which includes the vast numbers of working poor who make up a global underclass. Cho Oyu’s privileged inhabitants include Sai, who lives with her Cambridge-educated grandfather, a retired judge from the Indian Civil Service. A Scotsman drawn to the hills by the promise of imperial adventure and romance once owned their home, now an increasingly dilapidated colonial estate. An ageing cook, “Cook”, serves Sai and the judge their meals and teatime in ritualized English fashion. Cook, disheartened from a lifetime of servitude, invests his hopes in the prospects of his only son, Biju, who hopes for a green card while working his way illegally through numerous New York restaurants. Nearby, the judge’s neighbours include a pair of relatively wealthy sisters, Lola and Noni, who live in a rose-covered cottage named Mon Ami. The sisters shape their identities around their affinity with England, priding themselves on their “English broccoli”, “the country’s only broccoli grown from seeds procured in England” as well as shelves with “all of Jane Austen”; “Wedgewood in the dining room cabinet”; and a jam jar displayed on the sideboard which once held jam with a royal appointment. Desai mocks the sisters” fetishization of the jam jar by detailing its royal seal: “‘By appointment to her Majesty the queen jam and marmalade manufacturers’, it read in gold under a coat of arms, supported by a crowned lion and a unicorn” (44). The novel’s central upper-class characters insist on personal identities and cosseted lives shaped by India’s colonial inheritance, one that Desai suggests has also bequeathed loss and deprivation to the village’s working-class characters such as Cook and Biju, who form the poorest family in the village.

The degree to which socially privileged characters in Cho Oyu adopt forms of English heritage and identity signify their relative wealth and social status within the village’s social hierarchy. As postcolonial subjects, they face what Simon Gikandi believes is “an intractable problem” (1996: 27). He argues that “even when the mythology of Englishness is displaced by alternative national histories, the imperial myth still continues to have a sacred presence, if not in the colonies themselves, then at ‘home’ in England” (1996: 27). Even while aware of the tension created by this problem, selective memories of England nursed by the village’s elite characters signal economic entitlement, agency, and power. Brandishing the vestiges of English colonial taste mediated by perceptions of English heritage, the social elite of Cho Oyu navigate the social space of the village in very different ways to the poorer villagers. As Pierre Bourdieu argues, these “systems of dispositions [are] characteristic of [the village’s] different classes and class fractions” (1984: xxix). Ironically, Lola critiques V. S. Naipaul for his “colonial neurosis”, but imagines that a more cosmopolitan English society, “the new England” where her daughter, a BBC news reporter, currently lives includes “the English countryside, castles, hedgerows, hedgehogs, etc.” juxtaposed alongside tikka masala as “the number one take-out dinner in Britain” (46). Lola possesses her own form of colonial neurosis; her instinctive vision of England reflects stock rural images, but she believes her knowledge of these images (diminished by the comic inclusion of the hedgehog in her list) endows her with special status that she further inflates with trips to England from which she returns declaring the delights of strawberries and cream.

Perpetuating English habits, preserving forms of English heritage, and extending connections to Britain enable considerable social capital in a village like Cho Oyu for, at every social level, there are those who have internalized the myth of English superiority. This myth is a legacy of colonial India, when a colonial class structure subsumed and, at times, superseded the Indian caste system. The judge, once a touring official in the civil service surveying farmland and villages, “relished the power over the classes that had kept his family pinned under their heels for centuries — like the stenographer, for example, who was a Brahmin” (61). Power, endowed by the judge’s very modest academic achievements at Cambridge where he was racially marginalized and culturally isolated, provides him, upon his return to India, with a highly lucrative career as a Chief Justice from which he accrues the considerable wealth that enables the purchase of Cho Oyu’s most lavish estate. His wealth, as owner of a colonial homestead, offers vast and unquestionable powers over much of Indian society. In Cho Oyu, the retired judge wields so much power that the local police, eager to remain in his favour, falsely accuse and brutalize an impoverished man from the village to pacify the judge and to present him with a culprit when his home is raided by thieves.

His niece, Sai — who hails from an English missionary school, speaks English and halting Hindi and only knows how to serve tea “the English way” (6) — perpetuates the excessive social power endowed by the fetish of Englishness and what Neil Lazarus terms the “fetish of the ‘West’” (2002: 44). These ideologies become personal for Sai when confronted with the realities of the material shabbiness faced by Gyan, her Nepalese tutor, and his family. On an unannounced visit to his home, Sai recoils with distaste: “How had she been linked to this enterprise, without her knowledge or consent?” (256). But the social divide Sai feels is founded not solely upon evident disparities in wealth. It stems also from her identity and social values constructed around a lifetime spent at a strict English missionary convent school which instilled a “system […] obsessed with purity” (29) and which privileged all things English over anything Indian. Sai’s appropriation of English sensibilities, English culture, and colonial perceptions of civilization skew her views almost entirely towards structures of European modernity. Desai conveys her damning judgement of such attitudes through Sai’s earnest proclamations to Gyan that eating cheese on toast constitutes civilized behaviour (258–259). Similarly, Desai belittles the simplicity, ignorance, and self-indulgence with which Lola, Noni, Sai, and Father Booty favour novels that depict an idealized, rural picturesque England: “English writers writing of England was what was nice: P. G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, countryside England where they remarked on the crocuses being early that year and best of all, the manor house novels” (198–199).

The reductive manner with which the privileged class of Cho Oyu deems these English novels as merely “nice” suggests they are keen to relate to England at superficial levels which are romanticized, an approach notably epitomized by their adoration of “countryside England” and manor house novels which reveal English society at its most ostentatious. These are certainly populist images of England which centre around a belief in the countryside as quintessentially English. Yet, Desai would suggest that even such superficial knowledge contributes to their social capital and power within the village. As with Barnes’s attitude to cultural essentialism in England, England, Desai endeavours to point out that Indians who perceive Englishness through essentialist and populist impressions may choose also to ignore the epistemological and economic violence enacted by the imposition of Englishness throughout the British Empire. ¹ This violence extends to the way in which the poor and uneducated in India may internalize a racial inferiority that stems from colonial racism, but ignore colonial racism as a veil for economic exploitation and cultural oppression which has historically created the deprivation faced by characters such as Cook and Biju. Desai’s consistently ironic view of the multifarious damaging effects of colonial racism is focalized through Biju’s hatred of black people:

This habit of hate had accompanied Biju, and he found that he possessed an awe of white people, who arguably had done India great harm, and a lack of generosity regarding almost everyone else, who had never done a single harmful thing to India. (77)

The elite characters in the novel similarly wish to align themselves with white value systems and white culture in the form of Englishness. Thus, cultural capital manifested through displays of knowledge about England and English ways, frequently mediated by rearticulations of colonial discourse, determines and exaggerates social stratification within Cho Oyu. The hierarchy enhances gaps which dislocate the poor from the rich, the Hindi-speaking classes from the English-educated. The novel’s structure, however, intimates that these class divisions, while unique to Cho Oyu, bear profound implications for global class divisions which drive desperate villagers from Cho Oyu to seek better lives abroad in the United States, often as illegal immigrants. In New York City, Biju lives a shadowy, vulnerable, and fearful existence shrouded by the threat of deportation from the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Amongst the restaurants and takeaway places where Biju works is “Le Colonial for the authentic colonial experience”: in the restaurant itself, “[o]n top, rich colonial” and in the basement kitchen, “down below, poor native. Columbian, Tunisian, Ecuadorian, Gambian” (21). Desai suggests that those who can afford to eat at Le Colonial represent a ruling elite in a postimperial and postcolonial world. Biju, however, counts as one of the poor natives of a global underclass frequently willing to undertake considerable risks to escape impoverished villages as they manipulate the cracks within the labyrinthine visa and immigration system. When Biju applies for a US visa at the embassy, “[o]utside, a crowd of shabby people had been camping, […] [w]hole families that had traveled from distant villages […] all smelling already of the ancient sweat of a never-ending journey” (182). This journey is saturated with an ancient sweat, for it serves as a metaphor for generations of oppressed poor making wrenching journeys from rural regions to wealthier nations in the hope of better livelihoods.

The image of endless journeying transposed onto a global immigrant landscape manifests itself in countless kitchens across the developed world. Other fictitious names of New York restaurants where Biju works signify these international class divisions. Baby Bistro, a French restaurant, and the Stars and Stripes Diner, “[a]ll American flag on top”, sustain “a whole world in the basement kitchens of New York” (22). An entire population ekes out a living from the scraps of a global economy dominated by ex-imperial European powers and a neoimperial United States where “profit could only be harvested in the gap between nations, working one against the other” (205). Desai furthers the associative connections between New York restaurateurs and colonialism through Odessa and Baz, owners of “Brigette’s, in New York’s financial district”, drinking their morning tea as Biju and the rest of the staff bustle around below. The owners drank “Tailors of Harrowgate [sic] darjeeling at a corner table” and Desai follows this image with the point that:

[c]olonial India, free India — the tea was the same, but the romance was gone, and it was best sold on the word of the past. They drank tea and diligently they read the New York Times together, including the international news. It was overwhelming. (133)

Produced in the district where Cho Oyu is located and enjoyed thoughtlessly by Brigette’s proprietors as a daily ritual of self-entitlement, Darjeeling tea signifies the facile consumption and commodification of India’s colonial past and Englishness within a globalized world. Yet this very same past subjugates Biju and his fellow workers as well as Gyan and his family, whose Nepalese ancestors worked on a Darjeeling tea estate. The novel underscores the nexus between the social order of Cho Oyu and an underclass population in New York City through Biju’s intermittent “pangs for village life” (81) and the “emptiness” he feels from the distance between him and his father - his poor pitaji - so that “[t]hey were no longer relevant to each other’s lives” (232). The intertwined working-class connections forged between Cho Oyu and New York are further detailed in the Cook’s account of the arduous process involved in sending Biju to the United States as well as details of the numerous airmail letters assiduously penned to his son pleading assistance for fellow villagers desperate to travel to New York. As Angelia Poon suggests, the novel articulates “the invisible script of parallel lives hidden from public view, or subsumed into larger historical narratives. […] [T]hese other scripts more accurately represent the opportunity cost of a global world” (2014: 548).

While imperialism foisted English essentialism on millions of colonial subjects, causing “an imprisonment within hegemonic colonial culture” (Poon, 2014: 551), the same spirit continues to inform contemporary British society of its cultural quiddity and national identity, constructing a system of signs that the tourist industry has captured and marketed to the world in the form of English heritage. Barnes’s England, England suggests that rural English heritage, in particular, is perceived to represent this quiddity in its most authentic expression, and towards the end of the novel a return to a rural past is viewed as an antidote to an increasingly globalized world. Yet, Barnes self-consciously argues that there can be no such return for England, only a future to be faced in which all memories and accounts of the past, including those of imperial greatness, are constructed and ideologically mediated. If English heritage can be commodified on a global scale and rural English heritage viewed as salve to postimperial disillusionment and postmodern malaise, then Desai’s novel argues that the imposition and perpetuation of English heritage in the rural spaces of the ex-colonies have very different epistemological and economic consequences. Instead, it contributes to dislocated rural communities, strained along cultural and linguistic faultlines, whereby class divisions are further emphasized through differing degrees of affiliation with colonial Englishness. The Inheritance of Loss suggests that these local class divides are inseparable from a global division of labour which forces increasing numbers of rural poor to seek work in urban centres of the rich world. However, the fragility of the privileged characters’ colonial inheritance and their faith in its ability to endow power is revealed at the novel’s end when the Gurkhas’ grass roots resistance overturns and wrecks their lives, disabling their faith in the talismanic power of their English heritage to protect them from “uncivilized” behaviour.