Residents of the Himalayan town featured in Kiran Desai’s Booker Prize-winning novel The Inheritance of Loss are upset over her portrayal of them.

Desai, 35, is the youngest woman to capture the prestigious book award, a trophy that has eluded her mother, writer Anita Desai. 

Kiran Desai won the 2006 Booker Prize for The Inheritance Of Loss, which some critics say portrays Nepalese people unfairly.
(Kirsty Wigglesworth/Associated Press)

The jury saidThe Inheritance of Loss was selected because of its "humane breadth and wisdom, comic tenderness and powerful political acuteness."

Desai's aunt recently told a magazine in India that she has not told people in the town of Kalimpong about her niece because "the book contains many insensitive things."

The majority of the town’s 60,000 inhabitants are of Nepalese descent and some have complained the book unfairly portrays them as petty criminals and stupid.

The Inheritance of Loss unfolds in the 1980s and focuses on an affair between a young girl and her math tutor, an Indo-Nepali man who comes from a poor family. Many ethnic Nepalese rebelled during the 1980s, protesting their poor treatment by Indians.

"The book is just an outsider’s view of Kalimpong," Bharat Mani Pradhan, a social worker in the town, told The Guardian newspaper.

Critics say Desai has super-imposed her feelings about the Nepalese onto the novel, a thinly disguised autobiography. 

Desai has admitted the book is close to her family’s history and just like the main character, she attended a convent school in the town and lived in her aunt’s house.

Anmole Prasad, another resident, calls it a "one-sided account" which imparts Desai's own "estrangement from this dark, ominous place where Nepalese are just transient interlopers."

Some internet forums in India have been alive with debate about the novel, with people threatening to hold public book burnings of Desai’s novel.

"We see the book as pure fiction and these views are not an issue for us or Ms. Desai," said Hemali Sodhi, Penguin books’ head of marketing for India.

Desai is planning to visit the area, according to Sodhi, and does not fear any possible reprisals.