Identity, Religion and Violence in Contemporary South Asian Fiction: A Comparative Study of Indian and Pakistani Novels

Abstract

This paper examines how four twenty-first-century South Asian novels in English represent the entanglement of religious identity, national belonging, and violence. It reads Shashi Tharoor's Riot: A Love Story (2001) and Megha Majumdar's A Burning (2020) as interventions in the politics of identity in contemporary India, and Uzma Aslam Khan's The Geometry of God (2008) and Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) as critiques of Islamic fundamentalism and post-9/11 identity conflict in Pakistan and its diaspora. Drawing on postcolonial theory, the concept of reactive identity formation, and re-orientalism, the study uses qualitative close reading and comparative analysis. It argues that all four novels treat identity not as a fixed inheritance but as a contested construction that states, parties, media, and global economic forces shape and weaponise. In the Indian novels, the secular constitutional ideal is shown to be eroded by majoritarian mobilisation and post-truth media. In the Pakistani novels, violence arises from the state's monopoly over a single interpretation of Islam and from Western Islamophobia that reduces Muslims to a threat. Formally, each text resists single, authoritative truth through polyphony, fragmented documents, or dramatic monologue. The paper concludes that these novels offer an ethics of plural, dialogic identity as a counter to ideological rigidity.