The Representation of State Power in Twenty-First Century Indian Novels

The Representation of State Power in Twenty-First Century Indian Novels Dr. Shantanu Singh This research paper examines the literary representation of state power in select twenty-first-century Indian English novels. Focusing primarily on Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008), Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), Prayaag Akbar’s Leila (2017), and Megha Majumdar’s A Burning (2020), it analyses how contemporary fiction depicts the Indian state as a complex apparatus of neoliberal governance, bureaucratic control, majoritarian nationalism, surveillance, and structural violence. Drawing on Foucauldian notions of power and governmentality, Gramscian hegemony, and postcolonial critiques of the nation-state, the paper argues that these novels move beyond earlier portrayals of Emergency-era authoritarianism to reveal a more diffuse, “systemless,” and everyday form of state power. Marginalised subjects—Dalits, Muslims, hijras, Kashmiris, and the urban poor—become sites through which the novels expose the contradictions between constitutional democracy and lived experiences of exclusion, dispossession, and precarity. The paper concludes that twenty-first-century Indian fiction functions as a critical counter-archive that challenges official narratives of progress and national unity.