The Aesthetics of the Green Postcolonial Novel in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss

Drawing upon the convergence of ecocriticism and postcolonialism, my article explores Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006), a novel that bridges human loss and environmental degradation. It is my contention that a green postcolonial aesthetics animates Desai’s complex novel that weaves fiction, history, realism and imagination. By staging human violence, gleaming landscapes and a rich ecological wealth of flora and fauna, The Inheritance of Loss exposes a critique of the anthropocentric positions, blurring the border between human and non-human.