ABSTRACT The paper examines Ashwin Sanghi’s The Krishna Key as a literary construction of Indian cultural space, exploring how natural landscapes, social rituals, architectural relics, and religious iconography come together to shape a spatial narrative. Drawing upon Henri Lefebvre’s theory of social space, Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, and Fredric Jameson’s cognitive mapping, further extended by scholars like Robert T. Tally Jr. and Bertrand Westphal, the study posits that the novel functions as more than a historical thriller. The central hypothesis proposes that The Krishna Key reconstructs India not merely as a narrative backdrop but as a cultural space in which geography becomes ideology, memory materializes as architecture, and myth is experienced as lived space. The paper addresses: How does the novel deploy spatial structures, natural, social, architectural, and symbolic to narrativize cultural identity? How do myth and historical memory function as heterotopic sites within the text? Through an interdisciplinary blend of spatial theory and literary analysis, the study argues that Sanghi crafts a heterotopic setting that fosters cultural continuity while inviting contemporary reinterpretation, thereby making The Krishna Key a critical text in the context of the spatial turn in Indian English literature.
ABSTRACT The article tries to examine Manik Bandopadhyay’s Padma Nadir Majhi and Adwaita Mallabarman’s Titash Ekti Nadir Naam, two novels set in the rural river-scape of late colonial Bengal that depict the socioeconomic and cultural life of the fishermen, boatmen, and ferrymen communities. Examining the process of subject formation in the two novels, the paper explores how caste and class figure as unconscious in the novels. The imagination that animates Manik’s novel, which characterizes the fishing community as a class and evades the question of caste, has an undercurrent of caste running through the novel as an unconscious. On the other hand, Mallabarman’s novel invokes caste in politically self-conscious ways, but the imagination is structured by an unconscious that depicts social relations in terms of class. The analysis points to the need to reflect upon the structure and dimensions of the unconscious to make our understanding of the subject in the Indian novel richer and nuanced. The article makes a symptomatic reading of Padma and Titash to understand how caste and class figure as unconscious in them and frame the narratives even when their overt interests rest elsewhere.
ABSTRACT This article is a Foucauldian study of the biomedical sway over US migrant health care, foregrounding how Guruprasad Kaginele’s 2020 novel Hijab uncovers the “medical gaze” that regulates the ethnic practice of fictionalized Sanghaali Muslim mothers against cesarean sections. By drawing on thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Judith Butler, and Mary Louise Pratt, the article shows how South Asian “model minority” physicians become instrumental in waging epistemic violence, induced by Western rationality and bioethical relativism under the pressure of assimilation, on holistic Sanghaali motherhood practices and fertility taboos. The article looks at the text through a polyvocal framework, reshaping the novel’s dialogic flair and reasoning of Dr. Mohammad’s advocacy for cultural sovereignty. It takes into consideration the background of the contentious “contact zones” of female genital mutilation and misrepresentations, where hybrid identities navigate power polarities. While espousing a relational ethic in redistributing “emotional capital” to recognize migrant agency and advancing a decolonial demand, the article mirrors Sanghaali resistance in reassessing the notion of motherhood as a locus of biopolitical conflict, prompting hybrid care models that deconstruct surveillance in favor of compassionate interventions.
ABSTRACT This paper reinterprets Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls as a metaphysical case study rather than a historical satire. Through grotesque form, satirical estrangement, and symbolic repetition, Gogol dramatizes the erosion of ethical selfhood in a world governed by bureaucracy, civility, and spiritual inertia. Rather than resolving the moral crisis, the novel enacts it, turning rituals, landscapes, and linguistic absurdity into a cartography of disconnection. Drawing on philosophical ethics, literary theory, and symbolic visualization, this study situates Dead Souls in dialogue with Dostoevsky, Schopenhauer, and Nabokov, while tracing its resonances in contemporary mythic fiction. In doing so, it repositions Gogol’s work as a diagnostic narrative that reveals what happens when the soul becomes a ledger entry within a spiritually exhausted world.
