A New Materialist Reading of House of Cards by Sudha Murthy

Abstract: The paper offers a New Materialist interpretation of Sudha Murthy’s House of Cards, examining how the novel stages the complex interplay between matter, agency and desire in the context of middle-class Indian domestic life. Drawing upon theoretical insights from Karen Barad, Jane Bennett, Bill Brown and Rosi Braidotti, the study explores how material objects, infrastructures and nonhuman forces shape human emotions, ambitions and social relations. The illusion of happiness, as pursued by the novel’s protagonists, is revealed not as a self-contained psychological state but as an emergent product of entangled material-discursive forces. This analysis reframes Murthy’s narrative as a site of ontological and ethical inquiry, highlighting how matter acts not as passive backdrop but as an active participant in shaping subjectivities. The paper challenges reductive readings of House of Cards as a straightforward domestic or moral tale and instead positions it within a broader philosophical framework that reconsiders the politics of things, spaces and bodies in the construction of happiness.