“We are a land obsessed with mythology, obsessed with history, obsessed with rituals and obsessed with symbolism”: Mapping the Cultural Space in Ashwin Sanghi’s The Krishna Key

ABSTRACT The paper examines Ashwin Sanghi’s The Krishna Key as a literary construction of Indian cultural space, exploring how natural landscapes, social rituals, architectural relics, and religious iconography come together to shape a spatial narrative. Drawing upon Henri Lefebvre’s theory of social space, Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, and Fredric Jameson’s cognitive mapping, further extended by scholars like Robert T. Tally Jr. and Bertrand Westphal, the study posits that the novel functions as more than a historical thriller. The central hypothesis proposes that The Krishna Key reconstructs India not merely as a narrative backdrop but as a cultural space in which geography becomes ideology, memory materializes as architecture, and myth is experienced as lived space. The paper addresses: How does the novel deploy spatial structures, natural, social, architectural, and symbolic to narrativize cultural identity? How do myth and historical memory function as heterotopic sites within the text? Through an interdisciplinary blend of spatial theory and literary analysis, the study argues that Sanghi crafts a heterotopic setting that fosters cultural continuity while inviting contemporary reinterpretation, thereby making The Krishna Key a critical text in the context of the spatial turn in Indian English literature.