4 ideas
Malin Kabalana is the educated heir of the wealthy Kabalana family, whose fortune descends from the Koggala line. He adopts socialist convictions and sides with organised labour against the capitalist enterprise his father Simon Kabalana built. The novel uses his defection from inside the owning class to mark the point at which the family's inherited order can no longer reproduce itself.
In the village order, standing came from family name, caste and land, and a family could stay respected while cash-poor. Under commercial capitalism, wealth made in trade outranks inherited prestige, so old families become dependent on new money or marry into it. The social hierarchy survives, but its currency changes from ancestry to capital.
The employer owes nothing beyond pay, and the worker has no claim on him as a person. This vacuum is what makes unions and socialist politics appealing, because they rebuild collective protection that kinship no longer provides.
Read each generation of one family as the carrier of a historical epoch. A family saga in this light is a way of showing structural change through the fate of one household, and the book's title, meaning 'end of an era', names the final stage.