15 - Of Win and Loss: Kiran Desai's Global Storytelling

Summary

‘Born in India, educated in India, England and the United States.’ These sparse bits of information, found on the dust jackets of Kiran Desai's novels, already tell a story of their own. It is a global story – that of a talented daughter of an internationally acclaimed novelist, that of an upper-class nonresident citizen of a postcolonial country on the way to become one of the economic players of the ‘new’ empire, and that of a cosmopolitan writer and permanent resident of the US moving casually within the transnational league of what used to be termed ‘diaspora writing’.

This essay will trace some of these storylines and investigate their conjunctions against the background of global processes. Kiran Desai, I suggest, tells global stories to a, more or less, global audience. And yet, I would like to add, Kiran Desai tells emphatically Indian stories. Inherently, these assertions entail manifold and well-worn questions of the localization of culture, agency and the self-positioning of a writer within and with literature. Also, in the scope of this anthology and its explicit focus, the question of audience and the mechanisms of the market cannot be omitted.

By a close reading of Desai's work this essay will follow up the various journeys that she embarked on through and in her writing, thus trying to trace the particular topics, concerns and major themes of her work, and accentuate the radical process her writing underwent from the first to the second novel.