Abstract

Rapid developments in the fields of trade, market, commerce and telecommunication technologies, together with cultural confrontations at the global level are creating a paradigmatic shift in people's understanding of selfhood and identity. This paper makes a serious attempt to trace and map out the making of contemporary post-national identities within the sub continental cultural production of India and in its English fiction. One of the structural ventures of this study is that these newer identities, which are basically fragmented, ruptured, hyphenated in nature, require new descriptions and new elaborations within the field of creative literature and literary criticism. In order to pursue its research on these lines, the present work contrasts the notion of subject hood and identity with the earlier phases of Indian cultural imagination as represented in some of the pioneering works of Indian English fiction that have now attained a canonical status. By analyzing some of the predominant concerns that work as leitmotif in most of the Indian English novels, the paper brings together and reinterprets some problematic concepts such as history, culture, religion, nation and nationalism and creates a theoretical axis upon which it charts insightful and engaging aspects of selfhood and identity.

Key words: Selfhood, identity, insight, crisis, hidden dimensions, quest, escape.