Insanity runs in our family?the blood of the Vaidic Brahmins?and every generation, one or two of us go crazy. The Inheritors traces the changing life patterns of a family through a jumble of narratives, memories, and people from the ritual-bound home of an orthodox scholar in a small hamlet in Bengal in 1897 to Germany and Mumbai at the turn of the new century. Nyayaratna Bishnupada Deb Sharma's relentless puritanism leads his daughter Radharani to madness and highlights his grandson Shibkali's futile attempt to flee. Through a lifetime of quiet, Giribala expresses her wrath toward her surroundings, and her daughter Alo, a terrible victim of her husband's sexual perversions, serves as an echo of Giribala's fate. And Pramatha's depraved radicalism is set against Shashishekhar's progressive outlook which symbolizes the most significant departure from the stifling constraints of his community. Even as it inherits the deadwood of the past, each generation strives to liberate itself, setting the stage for the eternal conflict between tradition and change, between a legacy and its inheritors. Aruna Chakravarti draws upon history and myth, religion and folklore, rituals and culinary practices to create a vivid portrait of a community of Vaidic Kulin Brahmins. The narrative, oscillating back and forth in time, weaves a vibrant tapestry of life?differing ideologies and sensibilities, suicides and desertions, marriages and infidelities, bigotry and liberalism?set in the larger context of a nation's inexorable march towards independence and a society caught on the cusp of conservatism and modernity.