Urban alienation and the crisis of identity in the selected novels of Namita Gokhale and Aravind Adiga

Abstract

The rapid transformation of metropolitan India under the pressures of globalization, consumerism, real-estate expansion, social mobility, and changing cultural values has substantially altered the relationship between individuals and urban space. Contemporary Indian English fiction has responded to these transformations by depicting the metropolis not merely as a physical setting but as a complex psychological, social, economic, and cultural force that shapes human identity. The present paper comparatively examines urban alienation and the crisis of identity in Namita Gokhale’s The Book of Shadows and Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower. Although the two novels differ considerably in narrative mode and thematic emphasis, both dramatize individuals whose sense of self becomes unstable under conditions of loss, isolation, social fragmentation, and metropolitan change. Gokhale approaches alienation primarily through the psychological and gendered experiences of Rachita Tiwari, whose traumatic disfigurement, emotional loss, and withdrawal from Delhi produce a fractured relationship with her body and identity. Adiga, in contrast, situates alienation within the material transformation of Mumbai, where Yogesh Murthy, or Masterji, becomes increasingly isolated after refusing to surrender his home to a property developer. Drawing on theories of metropolitan consciousness, spatial production, alienation, and urban modernity, the study argues that both writers reveal the erosion of stable identities when human relationships become mediated by appearance, property, money, social status, and rapidly changing urban values. Gokhale's protagonist retreats from the metropolis to reconstruct a damaged self, whereas Adiga's protagonist attempts to preserve identity through resistance to metropolitan redevelopment. In both cases, home, memory, body, and space become central to the struggle for selfhood. The comparative analysis demonstrates that urban alienation in contemporary Indian fiction is simultaneously psychological and structural: the individual may be estranged from the self, the community, the body, and the very spaces through which identity is constituted. The novels ultimately question whether authentic individuality can survive within metropolitan systems increasingly governed by social conformity, commodification, and material aspiration.