The Inheritance of Loss

by

Kiran Desai

Gyan Character Analysis

Sai’s twenty-year-old Nepali math tutor, though their relationship blooms into a romance. Gyan begins the novel as naïve as Sai, but eventually he matures due to the GNLF movement that arises in Kalimpong. He recognizes that he shares many of their complaints and concerns, and marches in protest with them. After this political awakening, Gyan becomes frustrated at Sai’s innocence and cultural elitism. He betrays her for the movement by telling his friends that the judge has guns at his house and no telephone, leading to the robbery of Cho Oyu. Eventually Gyan becomes wracked with guilt and tries to reconcile with Sai, though their relationship remains unresolved at the end of the novel. Gyan, like Sai, holds some hypocritical views, because he enjoys tea parties and cheese toast with her, but he also recognizes that these British imports are byproducts of a system that has led to his own subjugation. Ultimately, Gyan is a character reckoning with generations worth of systematic oppression, which becomes personal when it leads to his own coming-of-age process.

Gyan Quotes in The Inheritance of Loss

The The Inheritance of Loss quotes below are all either spoken by Gyan or refer to Gyan. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Colonialism and Globalization Theme Icon
).
Chapter 26 Quotes

It was a masculine atmosphere and Gyan felt a moment of shame remembering his tea parties with Sai on the veranda, the cheese toast, queen cakes from the baker, and even worse, the small warm space they inhabited together, the nursery talk—

It suddenly seemed against the requirements of his adulthood.

Related Characters: Sai, Gyan
Page Number: 177
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 27 Quotes

“You are like slaves, that’s what you are, running after the West, embarrassing yourself. It’s because of people like you we never get anywhere.”

Related Characters: Gyan (speaker), Sai
Page Number: 179
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 29 Quotes

Don't you have any pride? Trying to be so Westernized. They don't want you!!!! Go there and see if they will welcome you with open arms. You will be trying to clean their toilets and even then they won't want you.

Related Characters: Gyan (speaker), Sai
Page Number: 191
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 40 Quotes

There were houses like this everywhere, of course, common to those who had struggled to the far edge of the middle class—just to the edge, only just, holding on desperately—but were at every moment being undone, the house slipping back, not into the picturesque poverty that tourists liked to photograph but into something truly dismal—modernity proffered in its meanest form, brand-new one day, in ruin the next.

Related Characters: Sai, Gyan
Page Number: 280
Explanation and Analysis:

The chink she had provided into another world gave him just enough room to kick; he could work against her, define the conflict in his life that he felt all along, but in a cotton-woolly way.

Related Characters: Sai, Gyan
Page Number: 285
Explanation and Analysis:
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Gyan Quotes in The Inheritance of Loss

The The Inheritance of Loss quotes below are all either spoken by Gyan or refer to Gyan. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Colonialism and Globalization Theme Icon
).
Chapter 26 Quotes

It was a masculine atmosphere and Gyan felt a moment of shame remembering his tea parties with Sai on the veranda, the cheese toast, queen cakes from the baker, and even worse, the small warm space they inhabited together, the nursery talk—

It suddenly seemed against the requirements of his adulthood.

Related Characters: Sai, Gyan
Page Number: 177
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 27 Quotes

“You are like slaves, that’s what you are, running after the West, embarrassing yourself. It’s because of people like you we never get anywhere.”

Related Characters: Gyan (speaker), Sai
Page Number: 179
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 29 Quotes

Don't you have any pride? Trying to be so Westernized. They don't want you!!!! Go there and see if they will welcome you with open arms. You will be trying to clean their toilets and even then they won't want you.

Related Characters: Gyan (speaker), Sai
Page Number: 191
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 40 Quotes

There were houses like this everywhere, of course, common to those who had struggled to the far edge of the middle class—just to the edge, only just, holding on desperately—but were at every moment being undone, the house slipping back, not into the picturesque poverty that tourists liked to photograph but into something truly dismal—modernity proffered in its meanest form, brand-new one day, in ruin the next.

Related Characters: Sai, Gyan
Page Number: 280
Explanation and Analysis:

The chink she had provided into another world gave him just enough room to kick; he could work against her, define the conflict in his life that he felt all along, but in a cotton-woolly way.

Related Characters: Sai, Gyan
Page Number: 285
Explanation and Analysis: