Lest our admiration for Kiran Desai become tinged with some unnattractive jealousy, consider that it’s not easy being the youngest woman to ever win the Man Booker Prize, whose shortlist I discussed in an earlier post. Bring to mind the detractions of fame. When you become a famous film star, you never know when someone is going to leap out of the rubbish bin to snap a photo of you bending over to organise the recycleables with your hairstyle resembling a nest of no less than three weasels, and when you create literary history, the town you have immortalised may suddenly threaten to burn your book as a show of concern.

Desai won the Man Booker Prize for her second novel The Inheritance of Loss whilst I was away. Desai is following in the tradition of her mother, Anita Desai, thrice shortlisted for the Prize. (And she’s not the only one: the Man Booker comittee also followed in the ‘tradition’ of this year, staging a double-upset by not shortlisting the top people expected to win, and then not giving the Prize to the shortlisted people expected to win, either.) Kiran thanked her mother, to whom the book is dedicated, during her acceptance speech, saying, “To my mother, I owe a debt so profound and so great that this book feels as much hers as it does mine. It was written… in her wisdom and kindness, in cold winters in her house when I was in pieces. I really owe her this book so enormously. A minute isn’t enough to convey it.”

In addition, the book is very much a product of the younger Desai’s cross-contintal life. Born in India in 1971, she went to school in Delhi and Kalimpong before moving to England at the age of 14 for schooling. Soon thereafter, she moved to the United States, attending Bennington College and studying creative writing at Columbia University. She now lives in the U.S., but spends part of the year in India; the author revealed that she wrote “the Indian bits” of The Inheritance of Loss in India, so that she “wouldn’t be too distanced from it.”

The novel itself, as all of this suggests, oscillates between Kalimpong, in the northeast of India, where orphan Sai encounters the movement for Nepalese independence while living with her embittered grandfather, and New York, where the son of the cook who serves Sai and her grandfather is struggling to find work as an illegal immigrant. Parallels between Desai’s life and that of her teenage heroine emerge: both have grandfathers who moved from poverty in Gujarat to Cambridge University; both attended a convent school in a Himalayan town. Desai’s aunt had a house in Kalimpong that served as in inspiration.

But apparently, its autobiographical resonance is precisely why, in the opinion of some, it must become kindling. “It is a one-sided account that tells you about [Desai's] fears about Kalimpong. The central character Sai is obviously a self-portrait and you can feel her estrangement from this dark, ominous place where Nepalese are just transient interlopers in the landscape,” said Anmole Prasad, a local lawyer.

The main argument and book-burning movement, which has been apparently circulating on that hotbed of rationality and clearsightedness the Internet Forum (some self-deprecation is included in that statement), is that Desai portrays the characters of Nepalese descent in an unsympathetic light. “Condescending statements” about Nepalese Indians apparently present these characters as “petty criminals, too stupid to do anything but work as labourers,” as reported by the Guardian.

The Nepalese rebellion, seen through the lens of the relationship between Sai and her Indo-Nepali tutor, is described in the book as the result of being treated “like the minority in a place where they were the majority”—which sounds like a reasonably sympathetic assessment of the town’s predominantly Nepalese residents. But others are complaining that the bloodshed of the rebellion is not sufficiently emphasized, and others are complaining, apparently, because you should only be allowed to write about things which you have experienced from the inside. “Really the book is just an outsider’s view of Kalimpong and the events that took place here,” said Bharat Mani Pradhan, a social worker in Kalimpong, dismissing the validity of the book.

Correct me if I’m misreading this: apparently, half of those angered by her portrayal of the Nepalese Indians object because it’s clearly autobiographical, and the other half are annoyed because it has no personal connection. On the other hand, as I have pointed out in similar situations, one also has to doubt the sanity of anyone who would propose the burning of a book, that he, ostensibly, purchased. The gesture seems to say to me, “Take THAT! And take your tiny but compiling royalty while you’re at it!” It’s hardly a cost-effective fuel, not to mention usage of time. As Penguin, the publisher of The Inheritance of Loss, waves off the complaints as “individual’s opinions,” and “not an issue for us or Ms. Desai,” defending the novel as “pure fiction,” it seems that the only solid conclusion one can make is that people rather enjoy getting annoyed about things.

After all, Kiran Desai is not following in her mother’s footsteps alone. At 35 years old, she outsed the former Youngest Female Booker Prize Recipient, Arundhati Roy, who won in 1997 for The God Of Small Things at the decripit old age of 36. The God of Small Things created a similar hue and cry amongst the residents and ruling communist party of her home town in Kerala, a state in southern India. Perhaps it is only an indication that you’ve written a good book.

Thanks to the admirable Booksquare, through whom I found the Guardian article; visit a thriving discussion of Desai’s Booker Prize win at SepiaMutiny; Modal Minority has a fantastic point about the book brouhaha that is even more artfully balanced than the lovely piece to which it responds—and furthermore wins my Undying Admiration for quoting Yeats.