On Inheritance

Inheritance is most often thought of as a legal machinery of transfer of assets by means of wills, trusts, and signatures on parchment. Yet behind every bequest, there lurks a more ancient question: what, if anything, do we truly receive from the past, and what do we make of it once it is placed in our eager or reluctant hands?

Material inheritances are the least mysterious, but often the most troublesome. A house bestowed is never just walls and beams; it comes saturated with the disappointments and victories of those who lived within it. A watch passed down is not merely a timepiece but an artifact that mocks us, almost cruelly, by reminding us that we are outlived by time. Many who inherit feel, secretly, that they are inheriting not things but unfinished lives, even dreams. Every inheritance, however small, binds the living to the dead in a web of obligation. To receive is to be implicated in another’s life, to shoulder intentions that may remain obscure. Even the most modest of inheritances carries with it an unspoken question: what will you do with what I leave behind? That question cannot be escaped, only answered, whether with reverence, rebellion, or indifference. One need only attend the probate courts to witness how families turn savage over the detritus of the dead, as though the mere division of objects could undo the tangled threads of love, resentment, and unmet expectation.

But deeper than gold or land are the inheritances that seep into us before we are conscious of them: temperament, language, belief, shame, pride. A father’s bitterness may lodge in the son like a splinter under the skin. A mother’s gentleness might soften the daughter’s voice decades after the mother has gone. And then there are cultural inheritances — unspoken rules of what is admirable, what is disgraceful, what is never to be mentioned. A Kumaoni child may inherit the taste for bhatt ki churkani long before she knows the name of the dish, just like an English child may inherit the dread of certain silences at the dinner table. These inheritances are not chosen, and perhaps cannot be escaped, but they may be reinterpreted. A song learned in childhood continues to shape how one hears all music; a proverb inherited from a culture shapes the instincts of judgment long after its words are forgotten. To inherit, then, is to discover that one’s originality will always be haunted by echoes. 

There is also the inheritance we dare not claim: the ideas and traditions offered by our civilizations. We live in an age that suspects inheritance, that mistrusts authority and seeks to begin from scratch. But to deny inheritance altogether is to condemn ourselves to endless improvisation, like children refusing to learn language because it is “second-hand.” Our minds, too, are heirlooms. The scriptures, the philosophies, even the cynicism that mocks them—all are passed down together, and to inherit them is not to obey them but to wrestle with them, to rearrange them, and to preserve their essence for those yet unborn. 

To speak of inheritance is to speak of continuity without assurance. There is no guarantee that what is handed down will be cherished, nor that what is cherished will endure. Objects are misplaced, fortunes squandered, but some seemingly trivial detail (a lullaby, a gesture of kindness, or a superstition whispered in passing) outlives all calculation. Inheritance moves through these hidden channels, indifferent to the designs of law or the pride of families. Yet it is precisely through this fragile and uncertain passage that life derives its depth. We do not begin anew each generation; we are born in a thicket of entanglements, compelled to wrestle with the unfinished lives that seep into our own. We cannot choose which histories reach us. The task is not to sever the chain in pursuit of pure originality, nor to bow slavishly before it, but to bear it with a kind of gratitude: gratitude that we were given anything at all, even the difficult things. 

Success, too, is a kind of inheritance, though we are accustomed to think of it only in terms of the bank balance, the house purchased, or the secure position acquired after decades of honest work. But the truer measure of success lies in having given a child moments of warmth that endure long after the giver is gone. For what greater triumph can there be than to live on in the daily rituals of another? When one pauses over one’s tea and remarks, “This is how my father took his chai,” or when one seasons one’s fish and thinks, “It tastes just like how my mother used to make it,” we witness success in its most durable form. A man who learns to recall is not merely imitating a domestic habit, but carrying forward the idea that nourishment deserves care, that an ordinary act can be dignified by attention. The abundance of such moments—drawn from memory and later recreated for one’s own children—reveals how deeply one was loved. To bequeath that is to have succeeded indeed.

When I think of inheritance, I look less towards the material wealth or assets left behind to me (though I am grateful for those too), but to the smaller keepsakes that pulse with the presence of the hands that touched them. A pair of red bangles from my maternal grandmother bears not only her memory but is part of a larger, overarching heritage of Bengali womanhood, where red and white bangles are worn by married women. A copy of The Bhagavad Gita gifted by an old aunt who still lives is less a relic than an ongoing dialogue, its pages soft with the weight of her faith. A mangalsutra bought with the money my paternal grandmother left me in her will is worn lovingly by me. My mother’s red sari, which I wore on the morning of my wedding day, remains carefully folded in my almirah. A sheaf of Femina magazine pages, stapled together and marked with grease stains, carry the recipes through which my aunt first learned to cook. And above them all, invisible yet more binding than any ornament, is the inheritance of love passed on from my grandfather to my father, and from him to me, entrusted, like an unfinished sentence whose ending I must attempt to write, and write well.

Image source: The Return of the Prodigal Son by Rembrandt.