OCCASIONAL PAPERS ON LITERATURES AND CULTURES (Monograph-1) 2011 Social Exclusion in Postcolonial Fiction: A Reading of Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss Ashok K Mohapatra Department of English U.G.C. Special Assistance Programme (DRS-I) Sambalpur University, Odisha INDIA 1 Occasional Papers on Literatures and Cultures Monograph 1 Editorial Board B.K. Tripathy, Professor R.S. Nanda, Professor K Misra, Professor Ashok K Mohapatra, Professor S. Tripathy, Reader A. Patel, Lecturer Copy-right Holder & Publisher © Department of English, Sambalpur Uniuversity, Jyoti Vihar, Burla-768019, Sambalpur, Odisha, INDIA OPLC brings out monographs annually in areas of Postcolonial Studies, Cultural Studies, Translation Studies and Literary Theory. It invites long essays from interested scholars, with word-length from 10,000 to 15,000 words, on topics pertaining to the areas in question. The monographs should make original, comprehensive and intensive engagement texts or issues. The essays should conform to the 7th edition of MLA style manual. Individual Subscription- Rs 100/- Institutional Subscription- Rs 150/- Overseas Subscription- $ 10/- 2 Social Exclusion in Postcolonial Fiction: A Reading of Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss Ashok K Mohapatra A man was only what he saw of himself in others- V.S. Naipaul Where man is at his greatest, he is unconscious – Rabindranath Tagore This essay deals with the problem of social exclusion characterizing the existence of the major characters in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss from ontological and epistemological perspectives. Although social exclusion is usually an object of sociological enquiry with its own disciplinary justification, this essay critiques those tendencies of conservative social sciences that reify the social categories and generally claim as a virtue the positivist knowledge they produce – a knowledge that is devoid of ideology, value and politics. The novel exemplifies through the traumatic existence of each of its important characters social exclusion at an experiential level of the individual self as an experience that is leavened with the affective and ethical values of human relations within the state, community and the family in postcolonial history. Although it may sound commonplace, these values can be addressed with an empathetic rationality together with a keen historical sense as well as a political awareness of the ordinary moments of human triumph and failure, which the literary artist is usually capable of. This rationality is not only different from that of the natural sciences that are oriented towards technological instrumentalism, but also very unlike that of the social sciences that are biased in favor of an objective and “systematic knowledge”, an apolitical intellectualism that André Béteille would endorse (10). The empathetic reason of literature affords to the literary critic access to the notion of self as a more adequately analytical category of symbolic exchange relations in a cultural system than ‘class’, a reductive social category, which is defined in the abstract and reified terms of labor and property relations. A perceptive social scientist, Beverley Skeggs tells us that “categories are not neutral terms. They are not only shaped by the conditions of their emergence, but also by the way in which they are continually cited” (27). If we take elf as an ontological category, it is produced discursively and invested with cultural values. The discursivity is most well pronounced in literature, and particularly in fiction. What Skeggs persuades us to believe is that social exclusion may well be problematic, having its broadest range of ramifications in psychological, cultural and political terms rather than being a mere sociological proposition with its indexical proofs on an empirical foundation. Duly encouraged by Skeggs’s proposition, I will proceed to explore the ontological and epistemological dimensions of social exclusion 3 of the major characters in The Inheritance of Loss, the Man Booker Prize winning novel in 2006. Social exclusion is both an ontological and epistemological problem that is ordinarily understood as the socio-economic marginalization of certain groups of people, their misrepresentation in, or complete omission from such systems of cultural signification as popular media, various knowledge formations and literary discourses. Ontologically, it is a mode of existence of the underprivileged, a lived experience on their part of existential hardship, humiliation, resentment and above all a painful sense of their alienation from socio-economic development process and identitarian politics. Epistemologically, the socially excluded are denied the means to formulate the modalities as to how to perceive the others and be perceived by the others, since they cannot design the template of their own cognitive autonomy. In other words, they are excluded from the knowledge producing mechanism imbricated in specific power relations, political conditions, economic processes and practices, which Foucault’s “genealogy” (1980), a concept of historical and materialist knowledge, explains so well. They are denied opportunity for self-representation in their own rights, occluded from the public sphere as illegitimate subjects of knowledge. They are also made out to be deviant, sub-cultural, obscene and an exceptionable juridical category of “bare life” (Agamben 1995)1, pushed beyond the threshold of the bio-politicking sovereign state, with its own knowledge/power regime of productivity, utility, normality, meaning and value. But this is just not all. The additional and more important point I wish to make is that the socially excluded are not always passive. Being excluded, they themselves try to exclude others as well, like the major characters in The Inheritance of Loss do, marking off for themselves an inside space, which may as well be deemed outside the dominant epistemic order of the empire or the first world state, even though ultimately they lose out to the dominant imperial and neo-liberal powers. To account for this dynamics, I would briefly draw upon some of Agamben’ insights into the liminality of location, self and power, although my basic proposition is not reducible to his theory. Agamben explains the curious negotiation between inclusion and exclusion that is effected by bio-politics and bare life. He points out the paradoxical nature of “bare life” not as something simply excluded, but as a category of “exception” and etymologically ex-capere: something “taken outside”, included through its own exclusion” (109). Hence the ontological condition of exclusion is predicated upon its inclusivity within the materiality and historicity of the postcolonial sites. It is as much structured by the suppositions, notions, opinions and political knowledge as inflected by feelings and sentiments regarding what it means and feels to be a subject in the context of radical structural changes that came about in the politics, society and culture in colonial and postcolonial India. Further, he says that the sovereign power makes “situation of exception” in a “paradoxical threshold of indistinction” between situation of “fact” and 4 that of “right” by juridically legislating the suspension of rule (14). Agamben helps us understand how the sovereign power decrees the suspension of its own law in order to make the new law of exception so that some people can be socially excluded and abandoned as ‘bare life” beyond the family, community, homeland, state and the dominant structures of rules and meaning. Agamben’s seminal concept of inclusion- through-exception/exclusion is in fact the very principle by which sovereignty and its modus operandi are defined. I will apply this basic theoretical concept of Agamben with necessary modifications in order to understand the ontological and epistemological liminality of the socially excluded characters in The Inheritance of Loss. The modifications I suggest are quite a few. First of all, the socially excluded, instead of merely inhabiting the space of anti-structure passively, tries to posit in its own liminal site an ambiguous kind of centeredness and works out a resistant epistemic structure of its own to exclude the other/others. S/he excludes the other/others while being excluded by the other/others. Secondly, social exclusion is dispersive, since the object of someone’s exclusion can be the agent of the exclusion of someone else, and the liminality of the space of exclusion lies in the epistemological fuzziness as to who is in, and who is out, and what the center is and what lies outside it. Even the time of exclusion, as will be apparent from the representation of the complex patterns of thoughts and feelings of the major characters in The Inheritance of Loss, is asynchronous. The characters inhabit the temporalities of past and present merging into each other. In this state of epistemological uncertainty the socially excluded ontology is constituted with its oppositional knowledge and has potential for excluding the others. Thirdly, the sovereign power that Agamben talks about is not just the state but also it can be used in a most extensive sense to signify an institution, a regime, a community, or even an individual. Fourthly, it is an ontological category that exists not a priori, but is constituted a posteriori in the very liminality of inclusion-through-exclusion across a dispersible space of exclusions. For this reason, lastly, one may as well argue that the socially excluded ‘bare life” victim