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Peripheral Identities and Hybridity in Arun Joshi’s The City and the River

Abstract Arun Joshi’s The City and the River has often been read as an allegorical text, sometimes as an existential one, and in other cases as a philosophical parable. Considering the fact that The City and the River reveals a distinct form, narrative technique, and political predicament in comparison to his earlier novels such as The Foreigner and The Strange Case of Billy Biswas which delve into the grime of everyday life struggles, such diverse, often conflicting reception of Joshi’s text is thoroughly justified. This paper argues that while Joshi’s commitment to the predicament of ‘everyday life struggles’ remains intact, The City and the River marks a latent shift in terms of character constellations and their predisposition to peripheral locations that make the text a precursor to later discussions of hybridity in postcolonial studies. In particular, the identity crises of its characters are inflected in the constant change of the narrative’s locations and their respective political positions.