Postcolonial Existentialism: Identity, Race, and Belonging in Contemporary South Asian Fiction

This paper explores the nexus of postcolonial existentialism and the contemporary South Asian fiction to identify identity, race, and belonging as the central concerns of the post truth and the globalized world. Utilizing existentialist paradigms from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Views of Existence and Frantz Fanon’s the Wretched of the Earth, along with theories of post colonialism and otherness; this study examines South Asian literature, that is, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist , Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small things and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, to inquire how characters tackle the crisis of existence in the face of colonial traces, and what might be termed as the dislocations of diasporas. In lieu of this, these narratives present their crisis of selfhood, which is pulled about by racialized identity and the conditions of authenticity and alienation, only to mirror the general postcolonial crisis in representation. This research investigates South Asian authors using existentialism themes, freedom, absurdity, and search for meaning, to redefine the racial belonging in a transnational context, through close textual analysis. This paper claims that existentialism, a philosophy of European origin, houses existentialism within Contemporary South Asian fiction, which presents a postcolonial gaze that features race as a location for its oppression and agency. This study locates the texts in the socio historical realities of partition, migration and globalization in order to show how the protagonists’ quests for self ’s belonging unpick the idea of identity. As this analysis not only connects philosophy and literature but also enters a live discourse on race and diaspora in the 21st century, it brings into light the idea that South Asian fiction offers an important realm for renewing existentialist thought in a postcolonial context. Potential findings suggest that narrative is a subversive force through which the self can inhabit multiple selves wielding negotiative power in spaces contending with intersecting oppressions, while at the same time, extending narratives of identity formation in a rapidly fragmenting world.