Negotiating Culture and Identity: Diasporic Sensibility and East–West Encounters in Kamala Markandaya’s Novels

Abstract

Kamala Markandaya (1924–2004) remains one of the most perceptive chroniclers of postcolonial India’s encounter with modernity, nationalism, and diasporic consciousness. Her fiction intricately explores the dialectic between Eastern and Western sensibilities, tradition and modernity, and individual and collective identities. This paper examines three of her major novels—Some Inner Fury (1955), Possession (1963), and The Nowhere Man (1972)—to analyze how Markandaya transforms personal relationships into metaphors of cultural negotiation and identity formation. In Some Inner Fury, the collision of love and politics during India’s nationalist movement dramatizes the moral and emotional turmoil of cross-cultural attachments under colonial pressure. Possession allegorizes the dynamics of colonial domination and spiritual resistance through the relationship between the British patron Lady Caroline and the Indian artist Valmiki, revealing the moral limits of cultural appropriation. The Nowhere Man extends this inquiry to the diasporic context, portraying exile and racial hostility in postwar Britain through the tragic isolation of Srinivas, an Indian immigrant whose humanity transcends the confines of nationality and race. Across these narratives, Markandaya’s diasporic sensibility emerges as deeply humanistic—rooted in Indian values yet responsive to the complexities of global modernity. The study argues that her fiction articulates a sustained meditation on belonging, displacement, and intercultural understanding, thereby securing her position as a crucial voice in postcolonial Indian English literature.