Witnessing Fragmentation and Ethical Crisis: A Cultural and Postmodernist Reading of S. L. Bhyrappas Sakshi

This paper offers a rigorous analysis of S. L. Bhyrappa’s Sakshi, deploying Cultural Theory and Postmodernist Theory to examine its complex treatment of tradition, modernity, and moral ambiguity in post-independence India. Through Raymond Williams’s framework of residual, dominant, and emergent cultural forms, Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital, and Stuart Hall’s theory of representation, the essay demonstrates how Sakshi stages ideological conflicts over cultural authority, social stratification, and identity. Simultaneously, Jean-François Lyotard’s critique of metanarratives, Fredric Jameson’s account of postmodern commodification, and Linda Hutcheon’s notion of historiographic metafiction illuminate the novel’s formal fragmentation, narrative ambiguity, and epistemological skepticism. This interdisciplinary approach reveals Sakshi as a self-reflexive narrative that interrogates the production of truth and meaning in a society marked by historical rupture, ethical crisis, and cultural dislocation, thereby exemplifying Bhyrappa’s engagement with the complex realities of India’s modernity.