In this thesis, I compare literary negotiations of Indian cultural identity within a system of global discourses that often overdetermines identity. Two key concepts I will use as cornerstones are hybridity and migrancy: the former, the state of being that results from the merging of separate, distinct, and often conflicting ideological, cultural, linguistic, or religious categories, and the latter, the further hybridized state of having moved from one geographical and ideological space, marked by particular culture, customs, traditions, and expectations, to an unfamiliar one. I argue that conflicting ideologies exerted on the migrant can be overwhelming and ultimately disabling; however, the liminal, in-between position of the migrant, poised between ideologies, can also be a positive and powerfully liberating position. Drawing on the scholarship of postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha, I analyse how the authors of three fictional Indian texts depict migrancy as enabling. These three texts are The God of Small Things by Indian writer Arundhati Roy, Tales from Firozsha Baag by Indo-Canadian author Rohinton Mistry, and The Namesake by Indo-American writer Jhumpa Lahiri. In Chapter One, I discuss how Bhabha's scholarship supports my reading of rigid ideological structure as an impediment to enabled migrancy. Subsequent chapters provide detailed accounts of each author‟s representations of the migrant subject, the ideologies that act on them, and the hybridity that, if utilized, can allow migrants to counter ideology, create new identities, and live out an enabled existence. Ultimately, I show that migrancy, as a form of hybridity, is an enabling force that undermines the limitations of ideology and allows for the creation of new, enabled identities, in this case among Indian migrants but by extension, for all those living out a globalized, overdetermined identity.
