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This paper explores the crisis of colonised subjects and colonial modernity in postcolonial literature focusing on A House for Mr Biswas and The Mimic Men by V.S. Naipaul. This paper foregrounds the politics of colonialism. Rather than showing progress, it yields cultural alienation, psychological displacement, fragmentation of identities and homelessness.
Through the protagonists like Mohun Biswas and Ralph Ranjit Singh, Naipaul displays that colonial societies are trapped between Western imitation and loss of indigenous roots. Leveraging postcolonial and subaltern theories of Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak, this paper attempts to display that Naipaul’s novels reflect profound crisis of colonised subjects and colonial modernity marked by instability, imitation and quest for identity. The paper concludes that Naipaul’s novels remain pertinent in figuring out the impact of colonialism over colonizers and colonised subjects.
Saumitra Sahai, Mudita Agnihotri. “Crisis of Colonised Subjects and Colonial Modernity in A House for Mr Biswas and The Mimic Men.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 3, June 2026, pp. 89-101. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n3.6.
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