Expression, Repression, and Ambiguity in Aravind Adiga's Selection Day

Abstract The human need to express, to articulate inner truths through language, image, or performance, lies at the very foundation of what it means to be sentient and socially embedded. Across cultures and histories, the creative impulse has provided a vital mechanism for individuals and communities to make sense of their internal landscapes and the external worlds they inhabit. Art and literature thus serve not only as aesthetic pursuits but also as powerful vehicles for communicating identity, desire, resistance, and memory. In the Indian context—particularly within postcolonial literature—the act of expression assumes a distinctly political dimension. Here, artistic creation often collides with entrenched power structures rooted in colonial legacy, caste stratification, gender hierarchies, and neoliberal economic policies. These structures shape and sometimes inhibit who gets to speak, what can be said, and how expression is received. Within this landscape, Aravind Adiga’s Selection Day (2016) emerges as a compelling literary intervention that probes these very tensions with surgical acuity. As a novel situated at the intersection of sports, capitalism, family, and identity, Selection Day does more than chronicle the coming-of-age of a young cricketing prodigy. It interrogates the cost of ambition, the fragility of individual autonomy, and the often-invisible ways in which societal forces govern personal expression. This paper explores how Aravind Adiga’s Selection Day (2016) captures the complex struggle for personal expression in a society shaped by patriarchy, capitalism, and postcolonial expectations. Through the character of Manjunath Kumar—a young cricket prodigy caught between his own intellectual and emotional desires and the rigid demands of his authoritarian father—Adiga paints a nuanced portrait of identity under pressure. The novel uses cricket not merely as a sport but as a metaphor for performance, conformity, and commodification in modern India, where success is often measured by market value rather than individual fulfillment. This paper argues that Selection Day shows how literature can give voice to what is often left unsaid. In doing so, Adiga’s work reminds us that expression—whether through words, silence, or desire—is not only personal but deeply political in a world that continually tries to dictate who we are allowed to be.