From the River to the Seas: The Call of Water in Postcolonial Novels from India

Indian authors have frequently used the novel to narrate the emergence of the nation and postcolonial approaches have long privileged this association between what Homi Bhabha identified as the nation and narration. I argue that the heuristic association between the postcolonial nation and the novel form is triangulated with a terracentric approach that obscures an alternative affective economy bringing together regional forms of belonging with tropes of rivers and seas. This essay interrogates the remit of the “postcolonial” as a theoretical category by heeding the border-confounding call of water within a selection of novels written at different historical moments shaping postcolonial India.