Secularity and Religiosity in Selected Fiction by Githa Hariharan

Abstract

This thesis examines the construction of the boundaries between the secular and the religious in selected literary fiction by the Indian novelist Githa Hariharan (1954-). Combining insights from religious studies and the burgeoning field of narratology, I investigate the divergent historical and socio-cultural discourses that have contributed to the debate between the secular and the religious, and the role of religion in the public life of contemporary India. I consider how counter-discourses such as those of gender, history, and caste have redrawn the boundaries between the secular and the religious on the subcontinent, especially in light of the rise of politicized religion in the form of Hindutva. In doing so, I seek to articulate an ‘eloquent silence’ at the heart of Hariharan’s radical literary project, and, more broadly, at the heart of the secular-liberal project in postcolonial India. Put simply: religiosity is a blind spot of the secular imaginary in the context of Hindutva’s hegemony over the religious realm.

Following an introduction in which I set out the key historical and intellectual contexts of religiosity and secularity in contemporary India, the thesis consists of three main chapters, each on one of Hariharan’s most important fictions: The Thousand Faces of Night (1992), In Times of Siege (2003), and I Have Become the Tide (2019). Through my reading of these texts, I demonstrate that the discourse surrounding the category of ‘religion’ has been largely produced by secular intellectual thought, and show that the blind spot of religiosity within the postcolonial secular imaginary has political, historical, conceptual and – most importantly for the fiction – narrative aspects. Overall, the thesis seeks to contribute to the extant literature on Indian Writing in English, applying the concepts of narrative voice and progression to investigate the relationship between the secular and the religious in literary fiction, and will be of interest to scholars working in the field of South Asian cultural and literary studies.