Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006) and Manju Kapur’s The Immigrant (2008) are not simply literary documents of migration and displacement. Instead, I argue that these novels attempt to re-assess and problematize the concept of the self-aware, rootless and mobile “migrant” in order to mount a larger critique against the notion of the global citizen, the fluidity of the postmodern condition (Harvey) and the all-subsuming, equalising potential of global capital (Deleuze and Guattari). This attack on the discourse of the global citizen unfolds in two ways. In Kapur’s Immigrant, the myth of the globalised, well-adjusted “Non-Resident Indian” (NRI) is dismantled through the failures of the Indian “intellectual” at assimilation, while in Desai’s Inheritance, the discourse of the mobile, undocumented and potentially subversive “illegal immigrant” is also challenged. Additionally, instead of reproducing and privileging the monolithic notion of the migrant as one that “goes abroad”, I propose that both texts develop the notion of “the migrant within”—a perpetual state of internal exile and displacement, characterising not just figures who cross legal borders but also those who negotiate psychological, ideological and socio-economic borders in the local. Ultimately, both texts demonstrate a turn to de-centering and pluralising the discourse of the Indian “migrant”, as a means of questioning the rhetoric of “borderless” globalisation.
The idea of the global citizen is hardly new. It can be traced back to cosmopolitanism theory in classical Western thought, from Kant through to contemporary theorists like Jürgen Habermas and others (Carter 1-5). Some key traits of the global citizen are his autonomy, transnational mobility and an overall emphasis on universalism, thus challenging conventional concepts of state-specific citizenship (Carter 2). The figure of the migrant is part of this discourse on the global citizen; in tandem, there has been consistent scholarly emphasis on the self-aware, mobile and rootless dimensions of the migrant-as-metaphor. Said’s claim that the migrant is “a counter-ensemble of interdependent perspectives, identities and political positions, a ‘nomad’ between histories, cultures and narrations rather than the citizen of a nation” exemplifies this “deterritorialised” view of the migrant (60). A subject open to “decoding” (Deleuze and Guattari 33), the migrant is compatible with the homogenising, all-consuming superstructure of global capital, as theorised by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (144-145). The migrant thus befittingly encapsulates the “postmodern condition” (Harvey), equipped to traverse the “global village” (McLuhan 6).
To a certain extent, Desai’s and Kapur’s texts still reproduce this pervasive conception of the well-adjusted, seamlessly global (em- or im-) migrant: in Inheritance, it is the malleable, “sanitised elegance” of Piyali “Pixie” Bannerji (47), Lola’s daughter, that enables her to thrive as a BBC reporter in Britain and eventually marry a British man (46, 322). Similarly, Dr Sharma of Kapur’s Immigrant successfully establishes himself in Halifax by being an unfettered “citizen of the world” (Kapur 25), a signifier pliant to inscription. Both Lola and Dr Sharma are formulations of the migrant that exemplify how the migrant “tends towards the threshold of decoding” (Deleuze and Guattari 33), towards abstraction, that then enables it to converge with and seemingly validate the discourse of globalisation, in all its fluid and homogenising capacity.
However, Desai’s and Kapur’s texts contest and dismantle this universalising treatment of the migrant-metaphor, in order to critique the broader premise of globalisation as one that subsumes difference. The first level of critique is levelled at the two common typifications of the migrant: the “hollow signifier” of the “intellectual” migrant and its “illegal” counterpart. Kapur’s Immigrant, for example, seeks to dismantle the myth of the NRI as a type of globalised, well-adjusted migrant that is poised to assimilate into the neoliberal, Western signifying system—in this case, of Halifax, Nova Scotia. The figures of Nina and Ananda – despite their intellectual and economic capital – remain as symbolic outsiders; their status as “strangers” endure. Kapur signals this on a formal level by adopting a de-centering split perspective that shuttles between Nina and Ananda: Ananda’s seemingly-confident narrative of life as “Andy”, the “new Canadian”, cracks under Nina’s interwoven, parallel account of her own problematic immigrant experience. A further textual de-centering is enacted in Kapur’s choice to position Ananda as a dentist, not a doctor, and Nina as a librarian, not a professor—both dwelling in the metropolitan shadow of Halifax, as opposed to urban centres like Vancouver, Toronto or even the United States. From the outset, the accounts of Nina and Ananda are already somewhat positioned in the periphery.
Nina and Ananda adopt various strategies to accelerate their transition into well-adjusted cosmopolitans. Both strive to embody the malleable, adaptable migrant: “They [Canadians] were the ones among whom he, and now she, intended to pass their lives, and it was important they [Nina and Ananda] be understood for what they [professionals] were, rather than be judged by stereotypical ideas” (Kapur 148). Accordingly, Nina-in-Canada embarks on a voracious conquest to ingest and accumulate material signifiers: she imbibes Canadian media and its agendas (Kapur 122), ritually visits the mall “to possess”, both mentally and physically, “the blandishments of the material West” (Kapur 125, 127), and assimilates the contradictory ideologies of transnational texts from Continental feminist classic The Second Sex to Canadian Cooking at its Finest. Getting part-time work at the Halifax Library is a step towards augmenting her spending power to support her pattern of consumption (Kapur 202). While Ananda manages (not without some initial difficulty) to acquire and keep in circulation his own constellation of consumer goods – the Reebok sneakers, the Saab, pizzas – to sustain his self-presentation as a cosmopolitan intellectual (Kapur 65, 110, 112), Nina stumbles. At the kitschy Taj Mahal restaurant in Halifax, for instance, the “turmeric… red chillies… onions and garlic… releasing sweet sharp smells… cumin and coriander… these smells and imagined sights travelled across the world from north India to eastern Canada to kick her sharply in the stomach” (Kapur 139; emphasis added). Thus, even as she builds up her catalogue of material effects, the evocative and irrational affects from her specific Indian experience return to disrupt her transition into the “capitalist machine” (Deleuze and Guattari 33).
Another strategy that Nina and Ananda mobilise in order to assimilate into the capitalist system is sexual consumption. Penetrative sex with the White Other, apart from serving as a physical entry-point into the West (both Nina and Ananda have extramarital affairs with Whites), also promises a psychological breakthrough, a further severance from their Indianness into a more abstracted, unmarked sphere. However, Ananda’s and Nina’s strategies of sexual politics fail to completely achieve their objectives of assimilation, further estranging them. In Ananda’s case, sexually possessing his receptionist Mandy as his long-hoped for “Newfoundland” is but a one-dimensional border-crossing (Kapur 237) anchored in the sphere of capitalist exchange. For one, the different significances of the term “Newfoundland” for both Ananda and Mandy already allude to this dissonance—for Ananda, it is a liberatory sexual metaphor of possessing the Other, as per Donne; for Mandy, it is merely a literal referent to the Canadian province (Kapur 237). Ananda’s attempts to deepen the significance of their affair are continually thwarted by Mandy: in levying “such high taxes” (Kapur 281) by her insistent material demands from Ananda in exchange for sex, she reminds him that his integration has primarily succeeded on the level of the monetary, and not necessarily on a more fundamental level of humanity for which he craves. For Nina, she succeeds on some level at shedding her cultural markers and sliding into her “cosmopolitan migrant” role after sleeping with Anton; for now, post-penetration, it “seemed especially hypocritical to hang on to vegetables” (Kapur 267) and continue adhering to her Hindu vegetarian diet. However, this dalliance ultimately ends up alienating Nina when Anton, her gateway, stages a violent rejection of her claim to autonomous mobility (in choosing to have sex with Anton when she pleased) by savagely raping her (Kapur 308-9). Thus, Nina’s “sophisticated” rendezvous with Anton not only fails to liberate, but repeats primitive ideological and physical patterns of (gendered) subjugation and domination. Sexual consumption afforded Nina and Ananda a certain freedom to reinvent themselves, but what “returns” and catches up with them renders them unable to fully sever their ties to the “primitive territorial machine” (Deleuze and Guattari 144).
In addition to Kapur’s attack on the abstracted and well-adjusted configuration of the intellectual migrant, Desai’s Inheritance also mobilises the figure of the “illegal immigrant” to contest some of the hopeful promises of the “postmodern condition” (Harvey) and the “global village” (McLuhan 6). Biju, the low-skilled son of Judge Jemubhai’s cook, is somewhat “exiled” by his father and by economic circumstances to New York, seeking employment on a tourist visa. Soon, he joins other illegal immigrants from South Asia and elsewhere in the larger flows of “disposable” migrant bodies in the multinational illegal labour system (Ngai). He falls between the cracks of the law and the official surveillance of the census, occupying an interstitial and invisible position as he constantly shuttles between his changing places of work and his dingy Harlem basement shared with “a shifting population of men” (Desai 51). Already, this alerts us to the deep inequality of economic globalisation, even within the supposed mecca of capitalism that is New York.
Perhaps more significantly, Biju’s supposed rootless and exilic position remains resistant and unable to mesh with the global system. Desai enacts this partly on a formal level: even as the reader shifts between the two main narrative fragments – one with Biju in New York, and the other set in Kalimpong – both geographically-disparate threads are inextricably linked; the ethno-religious insurrections in West Bengal still intimately affect and shape Biju’s own existence in New York. Any fantasy of a neatly-compartmentalised or severed account of the (illegal) migrant experience is thus dashed. This unshakeable haunting of difference, of history and home, is exemplified by Biju’s inability to connect – cognitively and bodily – with a fellow Pakistani alien, when he reaffirms that “he could not talk straight to the man; every molecule of him felt fake, every hair on him went on alert./ Desis against Pakis./ Ah, old war, best war” (Desai 23). In addition, Biju, in the abstract metropolis of New York, still sustains several life-giving fantasies back in Kalimpong: his father’s tenacious “desire … for modernity” (Desai 55) and subsequently, as a repository of hope for the rest of the town’s dispossessed young men (Desai 80), as well as for Sai’s own dreams of travel by putting a name and body on her inflatable globe (Desai 18). Indirectly, these links grate on Biju’s ability to be assimilated; New York grows inhospitable to Biju’s marked resistance, his abjection and passivity, and he is drawn back to Kalimpong.
As the migrant that has fallen between the cracks, Biju is dispossessed, but is also able to exploit certain “cosmopolitan” tools available to facilitate his integration into New York’s labour system. The Trinidadian illegal immigrant Saeed Saeed is able to do this, in his chameleon-like strategic usage of signs. Saeed tries to reduce the visibility of his non-White body in New York’s affluent circuit by dressing fashionably (Desai 121), using trendy slang, amassing Polaroids with celebrities (Desai 78), and by sexual assimilation, in bedding girls of all creeds and staging a “green card” marriage (Desai 78, 121). Yet, Saeed is “strategic”: even as he rejects some links from home by ignoring the phone calls of his Trinidadian relatives, he still looks forward to marrying a “clean” girl from Zanzibar (Desai 318). Biju, however, is a contrast to the theoretical “cunning picaro” position that Saeed is a testament to. To cite one example among many, globalisation’s tool of telecommunication becomes a debilitating rather than an empowering experience for Biju. When he phones his father to check on his well-being amidst the political anarchy in Kalimpong, both father and son encounter a wall of distortion and disembodied voices on a poor phone connection, making any meaningful exchange impossible (Desai 230-232). What was meant to assuage both parties and collapse the distance between them instead heightened their anxieties and underscored the chasm between them. The notion of the “global village” (McLuhan), brought closer by space-time compression (Harvey) that democratically levels disparities, is but a theory that fails, as seen in Biju’s in lived experience.
Going further, Biju’s attempts to emulate Saeed’s strategic adoption of material signifiers also go awry. He goes for a final shopping spree with his meagre savings and fills his luggage with the “modern codes” (Desai 55) of his father’s dreams: a mix of electrical hardware (including a VCR and a camera) and cultural “software” (including “I Love NY” T-shirts and perfumes) (Desai 270). By arming himself with such commodities of the “global village”, Biju could, in theory, present himself as the triumphant returning migrant that has benefited from the capitalist system. However, this is not to be, as he is unexpectedly robbed to the bone and left bereft by the Nepali insurgents that he hitchhikes with. Thus, Biju’s ultimate material dispossession, by forces beyond his control, challenges the autonomy with which the migrant can manipulate the signs of globalisation. It is also a reminder of the disruptive power of the vernacular, of forces of politics, religion and legacies of history that violate any transition into the all-effacing “capitalist machine” (Deleuze and Guattari 33).
Apart from problematising the figure of the inter- or transnational migrant as one that “goes abroad”, Kapur and Desai go a step further in positing that the migrant also exists “within”. “Intra-national” estrangement is also inherent in figures who are “exiled” in their own country, negotiating borders (psychological, corporeal, socio-economic) policed and maintained by institutions of power. For example, Nina in Immigrant is not just an outsider in Halifax but even in Delhi, before she meets Ananda. Nina is a minority figure: by hegemonic standards, she is overeducated with an elite-school background (Kapur 5, 12), unmarried and living with her widowed mother, cloistered in the hyperliterate utopia (or, arguably, heterotopia) that is the Miranda House college for women (Kapur 3). Locating Nina in the grimy all-female Miranda House draws possible oblique references to the equally cloistered space of the widow’s ashram, reminding us of the enduring institution and divisive “border” of gender inequality that is one factor in rendering Nina as irrevocably “Other”, even at “home”.
Expanding on the notion of socially-enforced borders, Nina’s failure to be a (re)productive mother in a patriarchal (and, in a larger sense, capitalist) system also results in her being exiled her from her own body. It is a disjuncture so fundamental that the novel begins with these feelings of alienation: “Her spirit felt sixty…. her heart felt a hundred… and her womb, her ovaries, her uterus, the unfertilised eggs that were expelled every month” come across as disparate organs, rebelling against organic unification (Kapur 1). Even at the corporeal level, Nina’s very self is split and disruptive, signalling her broader resistance, subsequently as an immigrant, in being assimilated by the cosmopolitan “capitalist machine” (Deleuze and Guattari 33). Thus, Nina as an “internal exile” is already a stranger to herself and to her country, displaced by practices and institutions of power.
This state of “internal exile” is also enacted in Inheritance in the figures of the elite class. Like her grandfather Jemubhai and relatives Lola and Noni, Sai is part of the minority in Kalimpong: affluent and Anglicised, she suppresses her Indianness, accepting that “English was better than Hindi” (Desai 30). Following in the footsteps of Jemubhai who treads the Macaulay’s “Minute Men” archetype of a mission-school-to-Oxbridge education (Desai 64-67), Sai is also educated at a convent and acquires the elite markers of a Western accent and literary taste (Desai 68-69). If reproducing the patterns of domination passed down from the colonial to the postcolonial era enabled Sai’s class to maintain a semblance of material “ownership” in Kalimpong, the Nepalese insurrection undoes this. “Fed up with being treated like the minority in a place where they were the majority” (Desai 9), the Nepali separatists exile Sai, Jemubhai, Lola and Noni in their own properties, as their huts “mushroom” on Lola and Noni’s property, reclaiming the space (Desai 240). By extension, this throws the broader notion of citizenship into crisis. If Sai, Jemu, Lola, Noni and others of their class have become aliens, they can never migrate “homewards” either, for the container of “home” and the nation are already being repeatedly destabilised: “warring, betraying, bartering” made “ridiculous the drawing of borders” (Desai 10). Hence, Desai’s rethinking of the migrant-metaphor, beyond categorisation through national borders, develops the concept of the “internal exile”. Produced and policed locally by socio-economic and historical borders, and maintained by “colonial hangovers” (Desai 199), these “internal exiles” in turn reveal globalisation’s homogenising limits.
Like Nina in Immigrant, the “internal exile” in Inheritance also undergoes a crisis on a fundamental psychological level. Jemubhai is an example: even as he attempts to inhabit his persona as an educated, worldly sophisticate, the loss of his dog Mutt has him “undoing his education, retreating to the superstitious man making bargains, offering sacrifices” (Desai 301), savagely beating his cook, just as he had previously pummelled his late wife (Desai 304)—in other words, “re-marking” himself with the codes of the “primitive territorial machine” (Deleuze and Guattari 144). Jemubhai’s psychological dislocation and self-alterity critiques the idea of the sanitised, pliant product of the Western system. The transnational mobility of bodies – which the metaphor of the migrant exemplifies – does little to negate the disruptive logic inscribed within bodies, divisive borders of centre and margin, of self and Other, reproduced by practices and institutions in power.
Pluralising the category of the migrant, as Kapur and Desai have done in their respective works, is a necessary intervention to complicate simple narratives of exile and be/longing, freedom and nostalgia for home. On a more literal level, the “hollow signifier” of the migrant still remains as a maladjusted outsider abroad, indelibly marked by the local. Both the self-aware, Dedalian intellectual migrants and the undocumented, rootless illegal immigrants of Kapur’s and Desai’s novels resist the seamless integration promised by the capitalist dream. Echoing Said’s observation that textual representations of space are almost always politically inflected (62-80), the “space” that delineates common understandings of the migrant is also opened up, to accommodate more productive notions of intra- and self-exile. The space of the “global village” (McLuhan), under the novels’ scrutiny, is no longer a straightforward “open text”, and having no “home” in the world comes closer to a given rather than an exception. Thus, by working against the fetishisation of exilic im/migrants as compliant components of global capital, both Inheritance and Immigrant offer a new inroad for interrogating the phenomenon of globalisation and its supposed capacity to “incorporate difference” (Hall 33).
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