Imperial Legacies and Postcolonial Discourses: Miscommunication and Identity in A Passage to India and The God of Small Things

The paper aims to explore the role of miscommunication and fragmented identity in E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, focusing on how broken conversations illuminate cultural estrangement across colonial and postcolonial India. Although both novels have received substantial critical attention, the intersection between communicative collapse and identity dislocation remains a comparatively neglected dimension, particularly in relation to narrative structure and symbolic geography. This aspect gains significance when situated within each author’s engagement with historical rupture and the ethics of empathy. To address this gap, the paper adopts a qualitative research approach centered on close textual analysis. It investigates pivotal scenes such as the Mara bar Caves incident and Estha’s courtroom silence supported by secondary sources, including academic journal articles and theoretical commentaries grounded in Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism and Homi Bhabha’s concept of hybridity. The findings suggest that miscommunication is not merely incidental to plot but intrinsic to each author’s philosophical critique of voice, agency, and the limits of cultural understanding. Ultimately, the paper argues that Forster and Roy deploy silence, dissonance, and symbolic settings as strategies to expose fractured subjectivities and dramatize resistance, where failed dialogue becomes a conduit for existential and postcolonial inquiry.