Postcolonial Existentialism: Identity, Race, and Belonging in Indian Fiction

Abstract

This paper examines the intersection of postcolonial theory and existentialist philosophy as a productive framework for reading identity, race, and belonging in Indian fiction. Drawing on the theoretical contributions of Frantz Fanon, Homi K. Bhabha, Stuart Hall, and Avtar Brah, and engaging with primary texts including Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981), Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997), Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake (2003), Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss (2006), and V.S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men (1967), the paper argues that postcolonial Indian fiction stages a form of existential crisis in which colonial histories of racial classification, cultural hierarchization, and forced displacement systematically undermine the colonized subject's capacity for authentic selfhood. The paper further contends that, rather than resolving this crisis through nostalgic return or wholesale assimilation, the most significant Indian fiction occupies a Third Space — hybrid, provisional, and generative — that constitutes a new mode of postcolonial being-in-the-world.