Unsettled Belonging: Recognition, Desire, and Loss in Tomb of Sand and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.66635/7ad3s880Keywords:
Belonging, Identity, Recognition, Desire, Melancholia, Contemporary South Asian FictionAbstract
The present study examines Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand and Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness through selected concepts from the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud. It argues that both novels represent belonging as a relational and continually negotiated condition rather than a stable social status. Drawing on Lacan’s concepts of the Symbolic Order, the Other, and desire, the study analyses how identities are shaped through symbolic structures, processes of recognition, and experiences of exclusion. Freud’s concept of melancholia is used to examine the continuing influence of loss, memory, and unresolved attachments on individual lives. Through comparative textual analysis, the paper demonstrates that belonging emerges through ongoing negotiations between self and society, recognition and exclusion, and memory and absence. The selected novels reveal that borders extend beyond political divisions and continue to shape identity, desire, and experiences of belonging. The novels reflect that belonging remains unstable because it is formed through symbolic systems of recognition while also being shaped by enduring experiences of loss and absence.
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