Small Town India in the Mirror of English Fiction: Narrative, Space, and Identity in Contemporary Indian Writing in English

Priyanka Singh

doi:10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i03.78436

Small Town India in the Mirror of English Fiction: Narrative, Space, and Identity in Contemporary Indian Writing in English

Author(s)	Prof. Dr. Priyanka Singh
Country	India
Abstract	For decades, the creative geography of Indian fiction written in English has been partitioned between two familiar territories — the teeming metropolis on one side and the tradition-laden village on the other. Yet a third territory, equally fertile and far less theorised, has steadily claimed narrative ground: the provincial town. This paper investigates the ways in which selected novelists of Contemporary Indian Writing in English (CIWE) — including Chetan Bhagat, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Manu Joseph, Aravind Adiga, and Siddharth Chowdhury — construct the imaginative world of small town India. Employing spatial theory, postcolonial criticism, and the sociology of literary production as interpretive lenses, the study explores how provincial settings shape character motivation, define social boundaries, and encode ideological tensions. A central contention of this paper is that the small town functions not as a passive backdrop to human drama but as an active social force that governs the possibilities of identity formation, upward mobility, gendered behaviour, and caste negotiation. The paper further contends that this body of fiction is gradually dismantling the long-standing binary that positioned the provincial as peripheral and the metropolitan as normative. In rendering the small town as a site of competing temporalities — pre-modern and hyper-modern, global and stubbornly local — CIWE offers a nuanced account of India's social transformation in the post-liberalisation era. The conclusions drawn here have implications for how literary scholarship maps the geography of Indian fiction and evaluates its engagement with questions of class, caste, gender, and cultural change.
Keywords	: provincial fiction, small town India, CIWE, spatial identity, postcolonial narrative, social mobility, centre-periphery, caste and class, liberalisation, literary geography
Field	Arts
Published In	Volume 8, Issue 3, May-June 2026
Published On	2026-05-14
DOI	https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i03.78436

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Small Town India in the Mirror of English Fiction: Narrative, Space, and Identity in Contemporary Indian Writing in English

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