How not to read literature as a national allegory? The case of Manju Kapur’s Married Woman

This article questions Fredric Jameson’s national allegory methodology which proposes that the private and the public are indistinguishable in the “third world”, thus interpreting all third-world texts as “necessarily” allegorical. To interrogate this, it closely reads Manju Kapur’s second novel, A Married Woman (2003), for examples of where the private and public selves are both merged with and removed from the nation. These examples counter Jamesonian ideas and underpin the argument that the citizen’s connection with the nation is more textured than merely allegorical. In challenging Jameson’s methodology, this article’s intention is not to devalue such connections but rather to avoid forceful interpretations of all Global South texts as national allegories. To circumvent compulsory national allegory readings, it advocates using Aijaz Ahmad’s concept of the concurrent existence of collectivities, including the nation, as an alternative model for understanding the postcolonial nation.