A Single Structure of Return: Analysing Gender and Class in Lahiri’s The Namesake and Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss

Abstract

Outward migration has long been central to discussions in Indian Diaspora literature. Return, however, occupies a marginal position; as a result, it remains understudied. This paper reads two homecomings that share only their direction: Ashima in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, who, after her husband’s death, splits her year between Calcutta and the United States, and Biju in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, robbed on the road home and returned to his father in a woman’s nightgown. The two returns pit a woman against a man. While Ashima’s homecoming seems to turn on gender, Biju’s seems dominated by class. This paper reads their returns through the interlock of gender and class and shows the two working as one structure, not separate forces. Ashima’s widowhood results in her return, and her sound class position gives it the form of an oscillation. On Biju, the GNLF men rob him of his savings on his way home to Kalimpong; he covers his nakedness with a woman’s nightgown, losing his money and his manhood together. Gogol never returns, and the paper makes no claims about him. The judge, stripped of his manhood by his Cambridge years, proves the structure is not new, but older than Biju by a generation. This paper reads the difference as the work of one structure — gender and class. It draws on William Safran, Stuart Hall, Vijay Mishra and Avtar Brah for the diaspora frame; it also uses the intersectional framework of Kimberlé Crenshaw and of Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis in a supporting role.