Dialogues and Dialectics:  
The Intersection of Space, Memory, and Identity in 

Select Malayalam Fiction 

 

 

Thesis submitted to the  

University of Calicut for the award of the Degree of 

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLISH 

 

 

 

GAYATHRI VARMA U. 

 

 

 

 

RESEARCH & POSTGRADUATE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH 

ST. JOSEPH’S COLLEGE (AUTONOMOUS) 

DEVAGIRI, CALICUT 

May 2025 









 



ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

 

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my research supervisor, Dr. 

Remya K., Assistant Professor in the Research and Postgraduate Department of 

English at St. Joseph’s College (Autonomous), Devagiri, Kozhikode. Her 

meticulous supervision and constructive feedback were invaluable, and this 

dissertation would not have been a reality without her guidance. Her affectionate, 

empathetic, and amiable demeanour made my research journey a peaceful and 

fulfilling one. 

I am deeply grateful to Dr. Salil Varma R., Retired Professor of English, St. 

Joseph’s College (Autonomous), Devagiri, and Dr. Vinitha Vemoth, Head of the 

Department of English at St. Joseph’s College (Autonomous), Devagiri, for their 

insightful suggestions, which played a significant role in shaping my thesis. I also 

extend my heartfelt thanks to all the faculty members of the department for their 

love and encouragement throughout the course of this research. I owe special thanks 

to Dr. Boby Jose, the Principal, and Dr. Sabu K. Thomas, the former Principal of St. 

Joseph’s College (Autonomous), Devagiri, for ensuring access to all essential 

facilities required to complete this research. I also thank all the staff of the college 

for their technical and clerical assistance. 

I am profoundly thankful to Dr. Janaky Sreedharan, Professor of English at 

the University of Calicut, for her expertise and guidance, which greatly contributed 

to the completion of this research.  

I also wish to express my gratitude to the Library of St. Joseph’s College, 

(Autonomous), Devagiri, the C. H. M. K. Library of the University of Calicut, and 



 
 

the State Public Library and Research Centre, Kozhikode, for providing various 

resources needed for the research.  

I am extremely grateful to my parents, Suja and Udayavarman K. N., my 

most beloved grandmother, Bhargavi Raja, my partner Aravind, and to my mother-

in-law Bindu and father-in-law Haridasan, for their unwavering moral support and 

motivation throughout this journey. On a deeply personal note, I am overwhelmed 

with love and gratitude for my little daughter, Nanda, who gently stepped into my 

life during the final year of my research and grew serenely alongside the writing-

phase of my research career. Thankyou for gifting me the warmth of motherhood; 

your heart-melting smiles truly softened the hectic pathways of this research 

journey. 

Finally, I would like to extend special thanks to all my friends and fellow 

research scholars for their love, compassion, and support during the course of this 

endeavour. 

 

                                                                                               Gayathri Varma U. 

 

           

      

  



 
 

 

 

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS 

 

 
Chapters                               Titles                                              Page No. 

 

 1. Introduction 1-19 
                        
 2.  Space, Memory, and the Self              20-82 
 
 3. From Victim to Victor:  83-135 
  Tracing Dasan’s Journey  Beyond           
 
 4. “I remember, therefore I am”              136-221 
 
 5. Epistles and Episodes:  222-298 
  Echoes of Narrative Identity  
 
 6. Conclusion      299-306 
 
  Recommendations        307-308 

 
 Works Cited 309-318 

 

  







 

 

Chapter One 

Introduction 

 

Spaces can be real and imagined. Spaces can tell stories and unfold histories. Spaces 

can be interrupted, appropriated, and transformed through artistic and literary 

practice.  

                       —bell hooks, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness” 

Memory is knowledge with an identity-index, it is knowledge about oneself, that is 

one’s own diachronic identity, be it as an individual or as a member of a family, a 

generation, a community, a nation, or a cultural and religious tradition.  

                                           —Jan Assmann, “Communicative and Cultural Memory” 

Literature connects places, time, and people in diverse forms and frames 

employing realistic, imaginary, real-imaginary, mythical, surrealistic, and other 

diverse modes of narration, and regional literatures carry the local, indigenous tone 

and tenor in their representations in this regard. In Malayalam literature, the novel 

form began to appear around the nineteenth century in association with the Christian 

missionary activities initiated by the colonial powers who aimed at enlightenment 

and awakening new wisdom in their colonised subjects under the dictates of 

Christianity. Mrs. Collins’s Khathakavadham (1878) and Arch Deacon Koshy’s 

Pulleli Kunju (1882) are examples of early novels in this tradition. The much-

celebrated novels that are often cited as marking the beginning of novel-writing in 

Malayalam, Kunthalatha (1887) by Appu Nedungadi and Indulekha (1889) by O. 

Chandu Menon, were crafted in the mould of colonial modernity following the 

European narrative style and thematic structure, and they also aligned with the 



 
 

 

2

prevalent concepts of nation and nationality. This was followed by the era of 

historical novels of C. V. Raman Pillai (Marthandavarma of 1891 is a classic 

example), Kappana Krishnan Menon, Pallath Raman, and many others, along with 

which emerged various writings for social reformation and detective novels. N. K. 

Krishnapilla, Appan Thampuran, Moorkoth Kumaran, and Karatt Achutha Menon 

are some names worth mentioning during this period. Realism, which emerged in 

the 1940s carrying the spirit of the Renaissance, was a conscious attempt to 

disconnect or sever from these existing traditions and conservativism, and to throw 

light on the stark realities of social life during the period. Thakazhi Sivasankarapilla 

(Kayar, Randidangazhi), P. Kesavadev (Odayil Ninnu, Bhrandalayam), Vaikom 

Muhammed Basheer (Balyakaalasakhi, Mathilukal), Uroob (Ummachu), and S. K. 

Pottekkat (Vishakanyaka, Oru Theruvinte Kadha) are the prominent figures in this 

tradition. The travel writings of Pottekkat also contributed to the lustre of 

Malayalam novels during this period.  

Malayalam critics K. Ayyappa Paniker in Ayyappa Panikerude Lekhanangal 

(1985), P. K. Rajashekharan in “Aadhunikatha/Utharadhunikatha: Randu 

Samvaadangal”, and A. J. Thomas in “Malayalam Short Story After Modernism” 

identify the period from the 1950s and 1960s to the late 1980s and early 1990s as 

featuring modernism in Malayalam literature for showcasing a renewed thought in 

both content and form by breaking apart from the realistic tradition that had existed 

until then, for delving deep into the internality or internal consciousness of mankind 

by severing from the focus on externalities or materialities, and for redefining the 

relation between the larger society and human existence (140-144; 40; 74-75). They 

view the phase of modernism in Malayalam literature as aligning with and adapting 



 
 

 

3

to - and not a pure imitation of - the sensibilities and characteristics of Modernism 

that emerged in the West during the initial half of the twentieth century prominently 

expressed in the works of writers like Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, 

T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and others, and also manifested through movements like 

Cubism, Expressionism, Dadaism, Futurism, and Surrealism. Thomas significantly 

points out the sense of scepticism that the modernist writers bred during the period 

and records that they “grew genuinely anxious about the strange nature of this 

universe, as time-honoured values, beliefs, institutions and social structures eroded, 

turned empty or lost relevance, in the particular social situations in Kerala” which 

led them to combat “meaningless values and social structures” (177).  

Rajashekharan, in “Aadhunikatha/Utharadhunikatha: Randu Samvaadangal”, 

records that even though the circumstances like rapid industrialisation, 

mechanisation, technological development, and the world wars that sowed the seeds 

for modernism in the West cannot be traced in the Kerala context, there has been a 

spike in educational opportunities, wide reading, and mobility to the Gulf and larger 

cities of India from Kerala that led to the resonances of the modernist sensibilities 

similar to the West in the writings of this period. He observes that despite the 

absence of such direct experiences of war and capitalist upsurge in the land of 

Kerala similar to the West, the sense of alienation and existential issues crossed the 

boundaries to profoundly influence the intellect and emotional faculty of the writers 

from Kerala (39-40). According to him, the modernist trend can be traced in the 

fiction of M. T. Vasudevan Nair, T. Padmanabhan, M. Mukundan, and O. V. 

Vijayan which stretches to that of Anand, Paul Zacharia, and N. S. Madhavan, in 

poetry ranging from Ayyappa Paniker, N. N. Kakkad, Kadammanitta Ramakrishnan, 



 
 

 

4

and Satchidanandan to Balachandran Chullikkad and A. Ayyappan, and in criticism 

starting from Appan and Ashamenon until the contributions of Balachandran 

Vadakkedath and M. K. Harikumar (“Aadhunikatha/Utharadhunikatha” 40). More 

conveniently, Rajashekharan divides the writers of fiction who emerged after the 

1950s into three groups: the first consists of writers such as M. T., N. P. 

Muhammed, Kovilan, U. A. Khader, Malayattoor Ramakrishnan, C. Radhakrishnan, 

V. K. N., Valsala, and Lalithambika Antharjanam who brought in subjective-

oriented or self-oriented experiences through the representation of conflicts between 

an individual and society, and represented the early beginning of modernism 

(“Novel-Randu” 823); the second group who wrote between 1969 and 1989 is 

identified as modernist and it comprises Kakkanadan (works such as Ushnamekhala, 

Parankimala), Vijayan (Khasakkinte Ithihasam, Dharmapuranam), Anand 

(Aalkkoottam, Abhayaarthikal), Mukundan (Mayyazhippuzhayude Theerangalil, 

Aavilayile Sooryodayam), Sethu (Thaliyola, Pandavapuram), Punathil Kunjabdulla 

(Smaarakasilakal), and others who discarded the notions of ‘reality’ and meaning’, 

linearity of narration, objectivity, and totality of vision projected by realism in 

favour of problematising man’s identity by addressing the complexity of living 

(826-827);  and the third group consists of specific works that emerged in the 1980s 

as a result of the changed socio-political and cultural context of insecurity and 

uncertainty brought in by the Emergency of 1975 in India such as Anand’s 

Utharaayanam (1982) and Abhayaarthikal (1989), C. V. Balakrishnan’s Aayussinte 

Pusthakam (1984), and Vijayan’s Dharmapuranam (1985), to name a few (828-

830). According to the critic, the last group possesses the characteristics of 

modernism but also showcases a difference in theme, approach, and tone compared 



 
 

 

5

to the novels until then owing to their political inclination and historical affinity, and 

therefore, initiates a postmodernist trend in Malayalam literature (“Novel-Randu” 

831-832).  

 Modernism appeared as anti-romanticist and philosophical, projecting the 

notions of will and individual freedom, employing fantasy, allegory, mythification, 

ironic vision, black humour, abstract and dense language, and foregrounding a 

complex vision of life. Kallada Ramachandran, the Malayalam critic, notes that it is 

the chaos, perplexity, and sense of unrest found in the works of Kafka, Camus, and 

Sartre, above the philosophical propositions of Kierkegaard and Heidegger, that 

invited the writers from Malayalam to dwell on the profound existential problems of 

man (17). John K. J., another native critic, examines various definitions of 

modernism that are prevalent in the current theoretical discourse - such as V. C. 

Sreejan’s take on the term that it is a branch of literature that denies tradition, 

acknowledges the futility of life, and discards the external nature - and precisely 

records the following characteristics of the movement reflected in the literary works 

of the time: existential search, alienation, a sense of futility, nothingness or 

emptiness of human existence, a state of melancholy or a mentality of grief, an 

attitude of denial, loneliness and orphanhood, a feeling of detachment towards life 

and death, and atheism (61).  

Highly inspired by the revolutionary literature from Europe and South 

America, and by the existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, Mukundan deals 

with the themes of “anomie and captivity” in his modernist novels of the 1960s 

(Introduction 2). In his study on Mukundan, A. V. Pavithran records the words of 

the writer who proclaims that he has penned stories that are fundamentally 



 
 

 

6

existentialist in nature (43). S. Krishna Kumar, the Malayalam critic, observes that 

writers like Mukundan and Vijayan articulate both modernist and postmodernist 

trends in their works of fiction according to the temporal and temperamental shifts 

and alterations that emerged in the course of their writing careers. While the early 

novels of Mukundan and Vijayan - written during the sixties and the seventies - 

capture the innate and intrinsic psychic states of characters drawn by severe mental 

agony, angst, and existential dilemma, the works emerged after the eighties focus 

more on material history and various cultural and socio-political conflicts of the 

time, and also follow an unconventional pattern of narration (157). Kumar, referring 

to Mukundan’s Aakasathinu Chuvattil (1969), Haridwaril Manikal Muzhangunnu 

(1972), and Mayyazhippuzhayude Theerangalil (1974), states, “Mukundan's early 

novels were centered on antiheroes who were victims of existential fear and 

metaphysical vexation”, and contrasts and compares them with Daivathinte 

Vikruthikal (1992) and Aadithyanum Radhayum (1993) that brilliantly sketch a 

broader vision, moving beyond the individual to a larger society, in a postmodernist 

style of writing (158). 

Postmodernism emerged both as a continuation and a radical revision or 

redefinition of the modernist form, content, and sensibility, and in Malayalam 

literature, it was inaugurated by the set of modernist writers such as Mukundan, 

Vijayan, Anand, and others during their later period of writing. According to Kumar, 

“Postmodernism can be looked upon as the movement away from modernist 

abstraction to concreteness, from its metaphysics to material reality, from its 

language of rhetoric to the language of reality, from its homogeneous, determinate 

vision to heterogeneous, indeterminate vision” (157). The new political atmosphere 



 
 

 

7

formed after the fall of Communism and globalisation, and the emergence of novel 

media culture and new social movements have influenced the growth of the 

postmodernist sensibility in the post-1980 writings of Malayalam literature, 

especially in short stories. Rajashekharan sees the shift of focus – from the plane of 

individualism, existentialism, and the question of subjective dilemma that 

modernism had emphasised to a profound evaluation of the contemporary political 

condition and a renewed awareness of history – emerged after the 1980s, which 

concretised in the 1990s, as marking a postmodernist trend in Malayalam literature 

(“Utharadhunika Malayala Novel” 76-77). Vijayan’s Madhuram Gayathi (1990), 

Mukundan’s Aadithyanum Radhayum Mattu Chilarum (1993) and Kesavante 

Vilapangal (1999), K. J. Baby’s Maveli Mantam (1991), T. V. Kochubava’s 

Vriddhasadanam (1991), Anand’s Govardhante Yathrakal (1995), N. Prabhakaran’s 

Thiyyur Rekhakal (1999), Sarah Joseph’s Aalahayude Penmakkal (2001), N. S. 

Madhavan’s Lanthanbatheriyile Luthiniyakal (2003), T. D. Ramakrishnan’s Francis 

Ittikkora (2009), and Subhash Chandran’s Manushyanu Oru Aamukham (2010) are 

prominent examples in this vein. These works showcase a renewed historical 

consciousness and a broader vision of life, language, humanhood, and history in 

comparison with the earlier period of writing.  

According to Rajashekharan, even though modernists denied the objectivity 

of meaning and questioned the ‘given’ reality by projecting the possibility of an 

alternate ‘reality’, they envisioned the novel as a medium to carry their strong 

authorial, philosophical visions, which is discarded by postmodernists 

(“Utharadhunika Malayala Novel” 74). Postmodernism has its focus on 

contemporary politics and history, where subaltern, marginalised narratives contest 



 
 

 

8

and question mainstream representations, narratives, and manipulations. In this 

sense, Prasannarajan, another Malayalam critic, envisions the movement as a 

“cultural condition”, “a new vision”, and “an aesthetic sensibility” that adopted a 

novel thematic approach, which is that of cultural politics. According to him, the 

politics that the postmodernists exhibit primarily consists of “the experiences of 

freedom in the modern world” (my trans.; 14). The postmodernist works capture the 

intense, intrinsic human experiences of the complex world characterised by history, 

politics, and power through chaos and fragmentation, but in a more festive or 

celebratory tone compared to that of modernism. By employing literary devices such 

as self-reflexivity, multiple narrative voices, fragmentation, metafiction, non-linear 

narration, intertextuality, open-endedness, ambiguous/multiple endings, fantasies, 

parodies, and pastiches, the texts in this tradition render identities as performative 

and as engaged in an endless ‘play’, as the poststructuralists postulate.  

Madhavan and Chandran emerge as two remarkable litterateurs of the 

postmodernist period. Madhavan imbibes strength from modernism and crafts a new 

style altogether by keenly exposing the diabolic face of political power-centres, the 

horror that the chaotic present times create in the minds of modern men, and the 

disintegration of relationships. His writings take on a non-linear, rhythmic, lyricist, 

and sometimes self-reflexive narration, most often blurring the boundaries between 

poetry, fiction, epistles, journal, and history through a crafty combination of such 

varied genres, and carry a severe criticism of the existing social and political system 

that metes out injustices and inequality, and that which casts man into a dungeon of 

despair, monotony, and mental agitation. His most-acclaimed short stories “Higuita” 

and “Thiruthu”, and short-story collections such as Choolaimedile Shavangal (1981) 



 
 

 

9

and Paryaya Kadhakal (2000) testify to this. Chandran is another celebrated literary 

figure of the contemporary period who experiments with the mechanics of writing 

and takes a critical and visionary approach to life. Interdigitating identity politics, 

history, and parody, and adopting cues from myth, epics, and folklore, the writer 

addresses the intricacies and nuances of the contemporary human condition. Novelty 

of language, intertextuality, and amalgamation of varied genres make his writings a 

unique and fascinating read. Manushyanu Oru Aamukham (2010), Ghatikarangal 

Nilakkunna Samayam (2000), Parudeesa Nashtam (2002), and Samudrasila (2019) 

are unparalleled contributions in this regard.  

Identity, the sense of self cultivated by an individual, has long been a subject 

of discussion in the discourses of philosophy, psychology, sociology, and cultural 

studies, and all disciplines unanimously agree that identity is not an autonomous, 

insular, or independent entity. Psychologist John Shotter, in his “Social 

Accountability and the Social Construction of 'You.'", and Social Identity theorist 

Ian Burkitt, in his work Social Selves, have postulated that an individual’s 

subjectivity or identity is the product of interactions and interpersonal 

communications that take place within a community or society, and they underscore 

the significance of dialogues and conversations in the development of a relational 

self (137-138; 39-42). Scholars like Erik H. Erikson, Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, and 

Louis Breger have also widely discussed the formation of identity through a process 

of active interaction with others, where an individual configures and shapes his/her 

idea of self by pruning their ideologies and interests, and also by gaining insights 

from the existing social structure (19-20; 15-16; 194-196).  



 
 

 

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Space/place and memory are two integral factors that immensely contribute 

to crafting one’s existence and assisting one in navigating the world of living, and 

they fundamentally determine and delineate identity or selfhood for a person. The 

meaning-production and the formation of reality for one, manifested through the 

interrelationship with others and a keen and profound discernment of the world, are 

primarily driven or actuated by one’s remembrances and the sense of space/place 

that one cultivates. Spatial Literary Studies is a branch of study, a discourse, that 

emerged during the second half of the twentieth century and it primarily deals with 

the notions of space and place in a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary 

framework. It engages with the interconnections and intersections of space/place 

with time, power, identity, society, and culture. Regarding the significance of place 

to humans, Edward Relph, the Canadian geographer, famously writes in his classic 

work Place and Placelessness (1976) that, to be human “is to live in a world that is 

filled with significant places: to be human is to have and know your place” (1), and 

he emphasises the notion of identity constituted by “the emotional and psychological 

ties” that humans cultivate from it (141). The inevitability of places in one’s life is 

also recorded by Edward S. Casey, the American philosopher, through the 

statement: “We are surrounded by places. We walk over and through them. We live 

in places, relate to others in them, die in them” (“Disappearing Places” ix). Spatiality 

and spatial consciousness thus lie central to an individual’s existence.  

Memory is a phenomenon and instinct which renders humans a sense of the 

present through the preservation of the past. Episodic memory, autobiographical 

memory, collective memory, communicative memory, and cultural memory are 

some of the widely employed concepts under the discipline of Memory Studies, an 



 
 

 

11

interdisciplinary branch that concretised during the late twentieth century and that 

profoundly indulges in varied aspects of memory on individual, collective, and 

cultural levels. It explores the intersections of memory with identity, history, 

society, and culture, transcending borders and boundaries. The consciousness of the 

past determines, shapes, and constitutes the consciousness of the present for a 

person, and it pivotally assists one in navigating the world. The integral 

interrelationship between memory and identity, the role of memory in building a 

sense of selfhood, has been an area of concern for various scholars. For John Locke, 

“personal identity” is a product of the retrieval of the past itself. He states, “As far 

as. . . consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far 

reaches the identity of that person” (449). Kirsten Jacobson articulates that memory, 

“like a home, provides us with a dynamic pivot for our past and future; it is the 

living, breathing landscape of identity” (30).  

Taking into account these three notions, the thesis attempts to study three 

texts from Malayalam literature: M. Mukundan’s Mayyazhippuzhayude Theerangalil 

(1974) translated as On the banks of the Mayyazhi (hereafter On the banks) by Gita 

Krishnankutty in 1999, N. S. Madhavan’s Lanthanbatheriyile Luthiniyakal (2003) 

translated as Litanies of Dutch Battery (hereafter Litanies) by Rajesh Rajamohan in 

2010, and Subhash Chandran’s Manushyanu Oru Aamukham (2010) translated as A 

Preface to Man (hereafter Preface) by Fathima E. V. in 2016. Real-imaginary places 

and people form the crux of these novels, where the protagonists and/or narrators 

interact with and confront various kinds of spatial entities and evoke memories on 

diverse planes during their course of action. The texts foreground specific places 

with unique socio-cultural, political, and historical contexts through a personal 



 
 

 

12

narrative, where an individual, born and bred in that particular place carves her/his 

identity by growing attached to its entities and later creating ruptures or fissures in 

the dominant societal structure or the establishment through the adoption of an 

unconventional, rebellious action or a stance in the course of their revolting journey 

against power-structures, orthodoxy, and authoritarianism. The major characters 

journey across the micro-spaces within the larger places, recall and revisit the past 

on various occasions, experience crises of differing intensity, and are cast in 

alienated, peripheral, and passive states in relation to the macro-structures for being 

anti-establishmentarian and anti-structural as the novels come to a close. 

The study places its focus on the construction of the identity of the 

protagonists and/or narrators through their dialogues with various spaces - 

addressing the socio-cultural specificities of each but rooting more in the existential, 

humanistic aspects - and the evocation of memories. Employing the triadic 

framework of memory, space, and identity theories to examine the interrelationship 

between the recollections, the spaces of transactions, and the identity of the 

protagonists, the thesis looks into how the characters construct their identities as 

interstitial and dynamic through a dialectic interplay of attachment with and 

detachment from various spaces, and also mould themselves as potential agents. In 

this way, the study explores the possibility of reading beyond the explicit, direct 

meanings of the texts that cast the protagonists and/or narrators as tragic, passive, 

and powerless victims devoid of agency of any kind, and it also contests and 

reassesses the established or widely accepted notions of their identities in the 

prevalent readings to create opportunities for novel contributions to the discourse. It 

argues that memory, through its transactions with spaces/places, becomes the 



 
 

 

13

provider of agency, resilience, solace, and spirit of resistance for the protagonists 

and/or narrators, and that both memory and space play a pivotal role in meaning-

production for them.  

On the banks has been extensively subjected to colonial, postcolonial, 

political, historical, and philosophical readings ever since its publication, and 

Dasan, its protagonist, has been variedly identified as an existentialist, a 

philosopher, or thinker, apart from being an advocate of postcolonialism. 

Thematic readings centring on the land of Mayyazhi – such as the colonial-

postcolonial interface, the historicity of the place, the dialogue between the text 

and history – and on the protagonist Dasan - Dasan’s identity as a postcolonial 

and hybrid subject - have been a prominent area of concern for the reading 

community. A. M. Unnikrishnan’s Mukundante Kala: Asthithwathinte 

Arthaantharangal (1993) and K. Augustine Joseph’s Aadhunikatha Malayala 

Novelil (1997) examine On the banks, among other Mukundan’s works, in the 

context of modernism. K. P. Malathi’s Adhiniveshavum Charithravum M. 

Mukundante Novelukalil (2013) is a thematic exploration of the colonial and 

historical aspects in Mukundan’s works of which On the banks forms a major 

part, and A. V. Pavithran’s M. Mukundan: Kathayum Jeevithavum (2015) 

constitutes interviews and conversations with the writer and analysis of the 

general themes in his works.  

Mayyazhippuzhayude Theerangalil: Patanangal (2017), edited by 

Prathapan Thayat, is a compilation of criticisms, articles, reviews, and speeches 

on the novel. Some of the studies in it are examined here. K. N. Panikkar’s 

article, “Novel Bhavanaathmakacharithram Enna Nilayil”, delves into the 



 
 

 

14

imagined history of Mayyazhi and its liberation as manifested in the novel, and 

“Samooham, Swathwam, Nattarivu: Mayyazhiyude Randu Chithrangal” by 

Mahesh Mangalat examines the dualistic colonial and postcolonial elements that 

the novel holds. The colonial and postcolonial themes manifested in the text, 

such as the formation of colonial subjectivities, hybrid subjectivities, and the tug 

of war between native and foreign traditions are identified by Dr. M. S. Paul in 

“Mayyazhi: Viplavam, Vimochanam”, P. S. Radhakrishnan in 

“Nashtashareeravum Bhrashtanaya Prajayum”, Umar Tharamel in 

“Adhiniveshathinte Puravrithangal”, K. P. Mohanan in “Mochanam Thedunna 

Aathmaavukal”, and S. Radhakrishnan in “Mayyazhiyude Vikrithikal”. 

“Kaalathinte Vilakkukaalukal” by K. S. Venkitaachalam takes a thematic 

approach to the novel analysing its socio-cultural context. Articles such as 

“Mayyazhi – Sthalapadangal” by Dr. Shaji Jacob and “Aparangalude Mayyazhi” 

by R. Sreelatha Varma are two articles that engage in a spatial analysis of the 

novel. Jacob identifies five spaces – language, race, religion, politics, and 

economy – that construct the cultural identity of Mayyazhi while Varma 

discusses the myths depicted in the novel in relation to the representation of the 

land of Mayyazhi. P. Pavithran’s “Kaamanaroopangalude Colonial Prathisandhi” 

is a postcolonial analysis of the novel focusing on the aspect of different forms of 

desire manifested in it.  

 Samskara Sankalanam: M. Mukundanteyum O. V. Vijayanteyum 

Novelukalil (2000) by Dr. Basheer Kutty, Asthithwavaadathinte Swadheenam 

Malayalathile Aadhunika Novelukalil: O. V. Vijayan, Kakkanadan, Mukundan, 

Anand Ennivare Aadharamakki Oru Patanam (2003) by Dr. Baby Sebastian, 



 
 

 

15

Adhiniveshasamskaaram M. Mukundante Novelukalil (2006) Dr. P. Ajikumar, 

Tales of the Threshold: A Comparative Inquiry into the ‘Postcolonial Domestic’ 

in the Fictional Writings of Mario Vargas Llosa and M. Mukundan (2016) by 

Minu Susan Koshy, Colonyvaazhchayude Samskarika Prathisandhi: 

M.Mukundante Thiranjedutha Rachanakale Munnirthiyulla Patanam (2020) by 

Sudha Maringat constitute some of the dissertations and theses on the novel. 

Evidently, the available literature lacks an approach centred on the aspects of 

memory and space, and their influence on the identity-formation of Dasan. 

The prevalent discourse on Litanies, which includes its criticism, analysis, 

and other studies, is primarily based on the historicity of the island called Lanthan 

Bathery depicted in the novel. Thematic studies on the historical and geographical 

attributes of the island, the development and design of the place conflating history, 

memory, and imagination, the historiographic construction and the exchange 

between history and fiction, the interplay between historicity and textuality, and the 

much-contested Anglo-Indian identity have emerged. The portrayal of the island and 

the waterbodies through the lens of Maritime literature or maritime studies and the 

spatiality associated with it, the aspects of nationality, regionality, and language, and 

ecological concerns such as the representation of nature have also been subjected to 

study by various scholars and researchers. M. R. Chandrasekharan’s 

“Lanthanbatheriyile Luthiniyakal” (2007), “Sthalavum Samskaaravum 

Lanthanbatheriyile Luthiniyakalil” (2006) by Vasudevan Korombrom, P. P. 

Raveendran’s “History as Textual Practice: Reading Contemporary Malayalam 

Fiction” (2011), “Lanthanbatheriyile Luthiniyakal: Charithramenna Jeevasthaanam” 

(2013) by Sunil P. Ilayidom, “The legibility of things: Objects and public histories 



 
 

 

16

in N. S. Madhavan’s Litanies of Dutch Battery” (2018) by U. Kumar, and 

“Lanthanbatheriyude Deshacharithram” (2018) by Dr. Ashrafa Nisa lay their focus 

on the representation of history and the depiction of the place called Lanthan 

Bathery in the text, but they do not showcase a sustained investigation into Jessica’s 

identity. The articles “Shallows in the Doe Eyes: An Ecofeminist Reading of N. S. 

Madhavan’s Litanies of Dutch Battery” (2021) by Sarithamol K. P. and 

“Challenging the Cosmopolitanism and Resilience of the Port City of Kochi through 

N. S. Madhavan’s novel Litanies of Dutch Battery” (2021) by Maya Vinai approach 

the novel through the theoretical disciplines of Eco-criticism and Maritime studies 

respectively. Another article, “Provincializing Island Poetics: The Personal as the 

Spatial in N. S. Madhavan’s Litanies of Dutch Battery” (2024), by Soni Wadhwa 

and Jintu Alias places the text within the framework of Island Studies and examines 

the islandic metaphors and images in the text. Dissertations and theses focusing on 

the spatiality of the novel mostly look into the depiction of various places/spaces in 

the text, their historicity and geographical veracity, and their association with the 

larger ideas of nation and nationality. Novelum Sthalavum: M. Mukundan, Sarah 

Joseph, N. S. Madhavan Ennivarude Novelukal Aadharamakki Oru Patanam (2015) 

by Sona P. R., Sthalakalamudrakal N. S. Madhavante Krithikalil (2017) by Deepa 

M. V., and Novelile Desham: Kovilante Thattakam, Sarah Josephite Aalahayude 

Penmakkal, N. S. Madhavante Lanthanbatheriyile Luthiniyakal, Subhash 

Chandrante Manushyanu Oru Aamukham Ennivaye Munnirthiyulla Patanam (2018) 

by Archana M. are examples in this regard. Kadaltheerajanathayude Samskaaram 

Malayala Novelil (2011) by Sunil Markose P. is a thesis that studies the 

representation of coastal culture in the novel. Studies that are exclusively or 



 
 

 

17

comprehensively centred on the identity of its protagonist as related to both the 

inhabiting space/place and the aspect of memory are found to be absent in the 

existing literature. By placing the protagonist, Jessica, and her mobility across the 

macro and micro places of the land - personal/private and social/public – under the 

lens and exploring the intrinsic connection between the trio- memory, space/place, 

and identity – the research resorts to filling the gap in the discourse. 

Studies on Preface have been conducted on the themes of casteism, 

humanism, existential crisis, degeneration of modern man, and the socio-cultural 

context of the text, and also on the form, such as the narrative style of 

postmodernism. Spatial and cultural studies of the novel evaluate how the text 

designs the place called Thachanakkara and its cultural and historical characteristics. 

Sabeena Banu’s “Novelum Sthalavum: Thachanakkarayude Samskarika 

Bhoomishasthram” (2016) is a study in this regard. Manushyanu Oru Aamukham: 

Patanangal (2022) edited by Sethuparvathy S. is a collection of select critical 

readings on the novel that have been conducted ever since its publication. 

“Kudumbacharithravum Samoohyacharithravum” by N. Prabhakaran, “Deshavum 

Manushyarum Charithravum” by E. P. Rajagopalan, and “Entwined histories of 

caste and locale in 'A preface to the human'” by T. T. Sreekumar base their study on 

the socio-cultural context of the novel and the historical perspective it conveys. 

Broader perspectives focusing on the themes of the text such as the existential crisis 

of man, and the absurdity and hollowness of life are imbibed in writings such as 

“Noottanduneelathil Malayaliyude Vaikarikacharithram” by Prof. M. Leelavathi, 

“Jeevithathinu Oru Aamukham” by Indira Ashok, “Manushyamelam” by Dr. N. P. 

Vijayakrishnan, “Naagarikathakk Oru Aamukham” by Ajay P. Mangat, 



 
 

 

18

“Ezhuthitheeratha Novelile Ezhuthitheernna Jeevitham” by Ravisankar S. Nair, and 

“Maranathinu Oru Aamukhamezhuthumbol” by Dr. V. Lissy Mathew. All of them 

re-assert the pessimistic tone of the text and applaud the novel as an exemplar of the 

contemporary state of man’s degeneration in all respects. Other articles such as 

“Manushyanu Oru Aamukham: Puthiya Novelezhuthinum” by T. D. Ramakrishnan, 

“Manushyanu Oru Aamukham: Charithrarachanayude Sookshmaroopangal” by Dr. 

M. S. Paul, and “Tharavattu Puranavum Manushyajeevithalakshyadharmangalum: 

Oru Vichinthanam” by Sr. Jesmi focus on the narrative style of postmodernism in 

the novel. “Athikadhanathinte Charithrapaatangal” by Manju K. is another article 

(that does not form a part of this collection) that examines the unique style of 

postmodernism that the text employs.  

Thematic studies on space, spatiality, nation, nationality, regionalism, and 

their link with culture by focusing on the larger places depicted in the texts taken for 

the study have emerged; however, their central concern has been the intersections of 

space with the notions of nation, nationality, history, historicity, globalisation, 

imagination, and nationalist politics. The existing literature lacks studies that 

exclusively focus on the notion of memory and identity. Most significantly, critical 

approaches integrating space/place, memory, and identity of its protagonists and/or 

narrators in a triadic framework have not emerged so far, which the research seeks 

to delve into.   

Having established the objectives, the research gap, and the focal areas of the 

study in the introduction, the second chapter titled “Space, Memory, and the Self” 

aims to delineate and explicate the various theoretical and methodological tools 

adopted from Spatial Literary Studies, Memory Studies, and place-identity theories 



 
 

 

19

to analyse the select novels. The third chapter titled “From Victim to Victor: Tracing 

Dasan’s Journey Beyond” is an analytical reading of Mukundan’s novel On the 

banks intending to identify the intrinsic connectivity between the identity of its 

protagonist Dasan, the inhabiting space, and his recollections at various points, 

which is expected to revise and reassess the prevalent readings of the text. The 

fourth chapter, “‘I remember, therefore I am’”, is based on Madhavan’s novel 

Litanies, and it attempts to examine the integral role of memory and narrative in 

devising a particular sense of self for the speaking subject of the text. It delineates 

the engagement of the protagonist with the surrounding micro-spaces – in the form 

of assenting and dissenting encounters – and seeks to ascertain the construction of 

selfhood that opens a possibility to reconsider and reconfigure the explicit meanings 

the text offers. The fifth chapter titled “Epistles and Episodes: Echoes of Narrative 

Identity” is a structural and thematic analysis of Chandran’s novel Preface delving 

into the construction of narrative identity through a dialogue between memory, 

space, and the self of the protagonist. This is followed by a concluding chapter, 

recommendations for further research, and a section on the works cited in the thesis.  



 

 

Chapter Two 

Space, Memory, and the Self 

 

A triadic framework connecting space, memory, and identity using insightful 

concepts from the theoretical disciplines of Spatial Literary Studies and Memory 

Studies, and from select identity theories (theories that link place/space and identity) 

is an efficient gateway to probe the construction of the identity of the protagonists of 

the selected texts in relation to various micro-spaces and diverse memories that are 

evoked. By introducing the historical background of each discipline in brief, the 

major concepts that are relevant to the study under each umbrella category are dealt 

with while some ideas are also placed at an intersection and in interaction with each 

other transcending the strict disciplinary boundaries to forge a holistic working 

paradigm.  

 Space is a concept that persistently permeates the lives, discourses, and 

thoughts of all beings and determines their selfhood, existence, and sustenance. It 

existed in the thinking of the ancient Greek masters, Plato and Aristotle, and has 

diffused across centuries seeping down to the present carrying varied and altered 

readings. Even though the term originated in the discourse of science, especially in 

Geography and Mathematics, it has widely been employed in other disciplines such 

as Humanities, Social Sciences, Philosophy, Phenomenology, Psychology, 

Architecture, Cultural Studies, and Anthropology and has acquired varied and 

diverse meanings and interpretations in the present. Theoretical, performative, and 

practical usage of the term in an interdisciplinary manner has rendered fluidity and 



 
 

 

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dynamism to it and has led to the subversion of binaries and fixed conceptualisations 

of the world. Providing a single, all-encompassing definition for the term is a 

tedious task as objective, scientific, subjective, social, political, personal, and lived 

aspects, practices, and conceptions of the term widely spread across a large number 

of disciplines/fields are in vogue in the present. In general, the term has “a wide 

variety of uses denoting a period, quantity or interval of time or duration, as well as 

more common uses relating to notions of distance, area, extension, expanse, 

volume/dimensionality, a void/ gap, a cognitive realm, or outer space” (Merriman 

6). As the geographer Neil Smith says, “[I]t is a vague concept with a multiplicity of 

sometimes contradictory meanings” (66). The major dimensions of space that have 

emerged so far are Euclidean space, Cartesian space (proposed by Rene Descartes), 

absolute space (theorised by Newton), relative space (developed by Gottfried Von 

Leibniz and Samuel Clarke, and later used by David Harvey and Gilles Deleuze), 

mental or psychic space, lived space or existential space (developed by Edmund 

Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty in the philosophical and 

phenomenological traditions, which was later taken up by Casey and Jeff Malpas for 

their theory of embodiment, and also contextually altered by Henri Lefebvre and 

Edward Soja in the sociological-Marxist tradition), social space (used by 

sociologists such as Emile Durkheim and Pierre Bourdieu and anthropologists such 

as Levi-Strauss) and relational space (used in the post-structuralist and post-

humanist tradition by thinkers like Harvey and Doreen Massey). It can be noted that 

the term is employed on both humanistic, phenomenological, and existential grounds 

and more politically inflected grounds - examining the power-politics and identity-

politics related to space - as reflected in Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, and Soja.  



 
 

 

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Foucault famously proclaimed in 1967, “The present epoch will perhaps be 

above all the epoch of space” (22), which echoed other scholars of the time who 

observed that even though spatial consciousness or spatiality was in vogue since the 

classical times, the notion of space had only been treated as a background/backdrop, 

a container, and as a dead, immobile, and fixed entity over the more fluid, lively, 

and dynamic notions of time and history. The spatial turn that emerged in the 

humanities and social sciences to salvage space from its devalued status during the 

postmodern period, the 1970s and the 80s, with a renewed interest in the notions of 

space and place over time and its associated temporal notions, saw the divergence of 

the study to various branches such as Humanistic Geography, Environmental 

Psychology, Urban Literary Studies, and Postcolonial-Global-Transnational Studies. 

Before delineating the branches and concepts significant to the present study, the 

terms ‘space’ and ‘place’ can be dealt with through their existing definitions. While 

some scholars of spatial studies prefer one term over the other, some others use them 

interchangeably, and the historical backdrop of the terms is always explicated 

together. Although the distinction and similarities between the two have a long 

history in diverse disciplines such as science, philosophy, sociology, 

phenomenology, geometry, and geography, and their in-depth detailing is beyond 

the scope of this research, a quick glance at a few definitions that are valid for this 

study can be conducted. According to Merriman, the ancient philosophers Plato and 

Aristotle used the terms chora and topos respectively to refer to the geographical 

place, and the present usage of the term ‘space’ is said to be derived from topos (5). 

The major distinction between the two that can be traced in the spatial discourses 

that have emerged so far is that while space is considered vacuum, abstract, and 



 
 

 

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general, place is conceived of as concrete, particular, and rooted; Relph, Tim 

Cresswell, Casey, to name a few, have proposed their theories in this tradition (8, 

29; 100, 112-113; “Between Geography and Philosophy” 683). In abstract spatial 

analysis, the geometric account of place, places are considered “nodes in space” that 

reflect “the spatial imprint of universal physical, social and economic processes” 

while in concrete environmental analysis, the phenomenological conception of 

place, places are significant “milieux that exercise a mediating role on physical, 

social and economic processes” (Agnew 317). Yi-Fu Tuan, the American-Chinese 

Humanistic Geographer, regards place as a ‘pause’, a moment of respite, and 

associates it with inhabited space, “security and stability”, and links space with 

movement, “openness” and “freedom” (Space and Place 6). For Casey, space is the 

“volumetric void in which things (including human beings) are positioned”, while 

place is “the immediate environment of [the] lived body - an arena of action that is 

at once physical and historical, social and cultural” (“Between Geography and 

Philosophy” 683). In the same line, R. B. Bechtel and A. Churchman, the 

Environmental Psychologists, conceive of space as an abstract entity, whereas place 

as that which holds “lived” and experiential realms (108).  

A few definitions of space and place considered relevant for the research 

need some attention at this juncture. Michael Rios, Leonardo Vazquez, and Lucrezia 

Miranda define place as, “territorialized local communities, collective memories 

associated with territory, claims of authenticity by local actors, phenomenological 

associations with locales, and social relations among people in territorial 

communities” and as “a setting for the everyday, the location of ideas and practices, 

and identity produced by place” (5). For Lynn A. Staeheli, place is “a context or 



 
 

 

24

setting, in relational terms”, “an outcome or product of processes”, and is 

“something active and dynamic” (159). For her, apart from being a physical 

location, place is a “social location” that designates people “within webs of cultural, 

social, economic, and political relationships that shape their identities, or 

positionalities” (160). In his work The Future of Environmental Criticism (2005), 

Lawrence Buell defines ‘place’ as “space that is bounded and marked as humanly 

meaningful through personal attachment, social relations, and physiographic 

distinctiveness” and regards placeness as “co-constituted environmentally, socially, 

and phenomenologically through acts of perception” (145). 

Coming to space, Massey, the British geographer, conceptualises it in three 

ways: first, as “the product of relations (including the absence of relations)” and as a 

“complexity of networks, links, exchanges, [and] connections”; secondly, as an 

entity that carries “the dimension of multiplicity”; thirdly, as that which is “in a 

process of being made” and “is always under construction” (“Concepts” 17). Michel 

de Certeau, the French theorist, in his work The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), 

distinguishes between space and place using the terms espace and lieu respectively. 

For him, place “is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are 

distributed in relationships of coexistence”, while space “is composed of 

intersections of mobile elements” and “occurs as the effect produced by operations 

that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of 

conflictual programs or contractual proximities”. More precisely, he states, “[S]pace 

is a practiced place. . . i.e., a place constituted by a system of signs” (117). With the 

advancement of information technology and the popularity of networking using the 

internet, virtual space became important and the term space began to gain the upper 



 
 

 

25

hand over place to signify, more assertively, a fluid platform of interactions, 

exchanges, and dialogues leading to the production and consumption of meanings 

and discourses. 

Evidently, some discourses and scholars attribute particularity, concreteness, 

and fixity to the term place and dynamicity and elusiveness to space, whereas some 

others use the terms in interchangeable and indistinguishable ways treating the line 

of differentiation between the two as narrow. The common ground that connects 

both is the existence of interrelations, networks, and relationships that provide 

meaning and identity to the people who inhabit them. There exists a purely 

subjective realm to the process of people experiencing a place/space and 

constructing the meaning of their selves. In tune with these definitions, the thesis 

employs the terms ‘space’ and ‘place’ as products and processes, a sum total of 

relations, and as active, dynamic agents that vitally influence people and constitute 

their sense of selves or selfhood. The term ‘space’ which is more commonly 

employed in the analysis of the primary texts will stick to the definitions proposed 

by Massey and de Certeau, with the objective of signifying a metaphorical plane - a 

certain symbolic, connotative, and second-level meaning - over the literal or first-

level meaning that arises from the material relations that constitute the geographical 

‘place’. Also, the ideas of openness, fluidity, dynamism, and free flow of meanings 

are denoted through the employment of the term. For the spatial and memory 

analysis of the novels, a framework by integrating significant theoretical concepts 

from Humanistic Geography, Environmental Psychology, and Memory Studies is 

devised. Each concept is dealt with separately and the methodological framework 

integrating them is provided afterwards.  



 
 

 

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It is noteworthy that what binds the diverse spatial theories and their 

practitioners is their agreement on the integral relationship between space/place and 

its people’s identity. Humanistic Geography is a branch that collates humans and 

their lived-in environment to examine their intricate interrelationship, and it 

addresses space and place as an integral part of designing one’s sense of self or 

identity. The existence as a human, in an existential and phenomenological 

perspective, is the focal area of the discipline. According to Tuan, “Humanistic 

geography achieves an understanding of the human world by studying people's 

relations with nature, their geographical behavior as well as their feelings and ideas 

in regard to space and place” (“Humanistic Geography” 266), which marks the focus 

of the discipline on the lived and subjective experiences of people in connection 

with the places they inhabit. Tuan in Space and Place (1976) and Relph in Place 

and Placelessness (1976) together inaugurated an approach to geography by 

conflating the branches of philosophy and phenomenology. Delving into the 

complexities and multidimensionality of the interactions between man and his 

geographical world, the discipline brings to the fore “the existential dimension of an 

em-placed subject” and takes the idea of place “as a field of care, a locus of 

emotional attachment” (Antonsich 121). It later branched out into Cultural 

Geography, Phenomenological Geography, Political Geography, Existentialist 

Geography, Feminist Geography, and others intending to incorporate the socio-

political aspects of human interaction. It can also be observed that it was with the 

arrival of Humanistic Geography that the ancient conceptions of space as immobile 

and as a mere container were subverted through the projection of its lived, active, 

and dynamic aspects across the planes of human interactions. Apart from Tuan and 



 
 

 

27

Relph, Christian Norberg-Schulz, Martin Buber, and Marwyn Samuels are also 

some of the prominent figures in the field.  

A key argument that the thesis endeavours to raise is the nature of the 

relationship that the protagonist maintains with his/her inhabiting place. Two 

significant terms in vogue in Humanistic Geography to delineate the binary aspects 

of attachment with and detachment from a place/space are topophilia and 

topophobia, which signify the dualistic and conflicting sentiments of affinity and 

disaffection that an individual breeds towards a place/space respectively. 

“Topophilia” is a term coined by Tuan in Topophilia: A Study of Environmental 

Perception (1974) using the Greek terms topos and philia (love), and it is defined as 

“all of the human being’s affective ties with the material environment” which can 

vary “from the fleeting pleasure one gets from a view to the equally fleeting but far 

more intense sense of beauty that is suddenly revealed”, and here place is conceived 

as “home, the locus of memories, and the means of gaining a livelihood” (93). The 

affinity for the place – “the love of place” - is said to emerge from aesthetic pleasure 

(obtained from a close engagement with nature), physical proximity, “awareness of 

the past”, and “patriotic rhetoric”, which is “the call of the roots of a community” 

(99). The profound emotional ties that one develops with a particular place/space 

through close identification or assimilation with the same is designated by the term 

and the critic Beatriz Muñoz González tags it as “a pleasurable habitat” (194). The 

antithetical postulation of topophilia is indicated by the term topophobia, which 

refers to the feeling of fear, hatred, and disgust that a person develops for the 

places/spaces of interaction due to unprecedented circumstances. Although Tuan 

does not use the term per se, he devotes an entire book, Landscapes of Fear (1979), 



 
 

 

28

to explicate the element of fear that all beings carry, where he draws the “anxiety 

[they develop] in strange settings or on social occasions” and different types of fear 

such as “dread of corpses and of the supernatural; fear of disease, war, and natural 

calamities” and many others (3). In his work Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the 

Spatial Imagination (2019), Robert T. Tally, Jr., the Geocritic, records topophobia 

as “the cartographic anxiety or sense of bewilderment” experienced by an alienated 

subject in his/her interaction with a space/place. The sentiment is also recorded by 

the feeling of “being lost” or “being uncomfortable in a place” (Tally 23), and even 

the emotions of anxiety, consternation, and disgust that familiar spaces such as home 

engender in people are attested to the term (25). The resultant action of topophobia 

is the urge of the subject to distinguish, separate, or sever oneself from the 

environment. Clearly, it is the subjective experiences of an individual with the 

spaces/places around her/him that contribute to the production of these feelings, and 

they significantly influence the identity of the persona.  

Urban scholars/theorists (Daniel O’Hare, Peter Murphy), architects (Jean-

Louis Cohen, Neil Leach, Vittorio Gregotti, and Paul Hogben), and geographers 

(Relph, David Seamon, Gaston Bachelard, Cresswell, Agnew, and Tally) have 

extensively employed the terms in their respective discourses conducting 

sociological, empirical, and literary studies of various kinds. Even though the 

discipline of Humanistic Geography had initially encountered criticism from 

scholars like D. Gregory that it is blind “towards the materiality of social life” (qtd. 

in Antonsich 121), with the emergence of Critical Human Geography that opened to 

other disciplines such as Postmodernism, Poststructuralism, and Postcolonial theory, 

and other interdisciplinary theoretical contributions and studies, it has gained 



 
 

 

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renewed prominence in the recent times. The research resorts to employing the 

terms topophilia and topophobia to analyse the alternate ‘topophilic’ and 

‘topophobic’ sentiments cultivated by the protagonists as they move across various 

micro-spaces within their respective macro-spaces or outside of it and to elucidate 

their resultant identity-construction.  

Along with these, another useful term adopted for the study is “topophrenia”, 

coined by Tally by combining the existing concepts of topophilia and topophobia to 

refer to a particular sense of place that dominates all thinking of humans (1-2). As 

Tally puts it: 

[T]he pervasive place-mindedness infusing our subjective experience in and 

apprehension of the world is characterized by a profound sense of unease, 

anxiety, or discontent. Even in the more familiar or homey (Heimlich) zones 

of being-in-the world, we are nevertheless still cognizant of, and affected by, 

[a] sense of estrangement. . . . To put it differently, even when we are “at 

home”, we maintain our awareness of the unfamiliar, the unheimlich, and a 

subtle, yet visceral feeling of spatial anxiety subtends our thoughts and 

actions. (25) 

Here, the admixed sentiments of love for and fear of a place that one simultaneously 

breeds are explicated. Tally proposes the concept by contextualising displacement, 

mobility, and spatial shifts that individuals encounter in their everyday life, and it 

gains immense significance for the thesis that navigates the identity of the 

protagonists in connection with their inhabiting spaces/places. 

A key identity-theory proposed by Neil Leach, the British architect, that 

forms the crux of the argument raised in the thesis needs to be mentioned in 



 
 

 

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connection with the terms discussed. Although the formation of identity related to a 

space/ place has been a concern of humanistic geographers and environmental 

psychologists – the terms ‘place attachment’, ‘sense of place’, and ‘place-identity’ 

are significant in this sense and will be discussed in detail later – the notion of 

identity that Leach proposes can be seen as unique and unrelated to any other place-

identity theory proposed till then, for its creative employment of the notions of 

topophilia and topophobia. In his essay “The Role of the Environment in the 

Formation of Identity”, Leach proposes his theory based on two essays, namely, 

“Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia” by the French social theorist Roger 

Caillois and “The Mirror Stage” by Lacan, through which he emphasises the integral 

role a place or environment plays in determining the identity of a being. Leach briefs 

Caillois’s observations about how an organism attempts to camouflage itself from its 

surroundings and predators by mimicking the environment within which it lives. For 

Caillois, this act of mimicking is an intermediary phase in the ultimate process of 

“assimilation to the surroundings” (qtd. in Leach 32) which leads the being to lose 

itself and get caught in a state of confusion and crisis with regard to its sense of self 

and existence. Leach explains:   

The inability to distinguish oneself from the environment. . . leads to a 

condition of crisis. . . . The reason why this condition is problematic is that 

identity depends on the ability of an organism to distinguish itself from its 

surroundings. . . . Without this ability. . . we descend into a condition that 

Caillois describes as “legendary psychasthenia. . . . Psychasthenia can be 

defined as a weakening of the sense of self, that is brought about by the 

erosion of distinction between the self and the environment. (33) 



 
 

 

31

For Leach, Caillois challenges and subverts the established assumption that mimicry 

is an act of preserving the self, an act of successful survival, by postulating that 

assimilation, which involves the process of striking oneself indistinguishably similar 

with the surroundings, culminates in “a form of depersonalization” and “a 

surrendering of our sense of self”. He also records that even though Caillois 

postulated his theory in the context of organisms and their environment, “he is 

addressing the question of human behaviour”, the question of how humans relate to 

and construct their identity in relation to their living environment (34).   

Leach then analyses Lacan’s “The Mirror Stage”, labelling the essay as a 

corollary to Caillois’s proposition, as indicating “a discovery of the self” opposed to 

the latter’s idea of the loss of the self (34). Lacan’s formulation of the mirror stage, 

where a child engages in an imaginary identification with its image on the mirror 

opposite to it, is considered crucial in the formation of the ego and subjectivity in the 

life of an individual. Leach specifically notes that the identification is an 

““alienating” identification, in that the subject. . . identifies with itself objectively as 

an imago - and sets the scene for potential secondary identifications” (35). The 

mirror stage, according to Leach, provides the subject an opportunity to alienate the 

self and mark the distinction only to connect with the external world later, and he 

underscores the idea that “[i]dentity is born of an interaction between the self and 

the other, as a continual process of attraction and repulsion” (36). In this sense, it is 

also a critique of Caillois’s proposition that mimicry is only and always a dissolution 

of the self.  

In the light of these two essays, Leach posits that identity is the result of 

one’s capacity to first establish a connection with the external environment, an 



 
 

 

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absence of which will lead to a “melancholic self-withdrawal”, and to later 

distinguish from it, an absence of which will lead to a “loss of self in the other” (39), 

where the “separation presupposes and generates the capacity for further 

identification” (37). As he notes: 

The condition of identity is never a static one. It resides neither in the state of 

being connected, nor in the state of being distinct. Rather it involves in a 

continual shuttling between these two conditions, a keeping alive of the very 

possibility of change. Identity should be viewed as an interactive process of 

becoming – of becoming one with the world, and of becoming distinct from 

that world - where both states are locked into a mechanism of reciprocal 

presupposition, and are interdependent. It is only by becoming similar that a 

sense of distinction can be envisioned, while it is only by becoming distinct 

that a sense of connection can be postulated. (39) 

Stating thus, Leach brings in the dualistic, mutually opposing yet complementary 

tendencies at work in the process of identity-formation. He affirms that the self is 

the product of “a direct identification with the environment - a form of topophilia” 

and “the urge to distinguish the self from that environment - a form of topophobia” 

(40). It can be observed that Leach’s formulation of identity points at an interstitial 

or in-between nature/form that identity assumes as it constantly shifts between 

topophilia and topophobia: it is neither a state of permanent or absolute 

identification with nor a state of absolute severance from places/spaces, but is the 

very process of change, the fluid state of in-betweenness. The interstitial aspect of 

Leach’s theory is adopted as an efficient tool to analyse the identity-construction of 

the protagonists in relation to diverse spaces and memories evoked.  



 
 

 

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The interstitial has been a field of increased interest in the modernist-

postmodernist discourses, especially in relation to postcoloniality. Homi K. 

Bhabha’s theory of hybridity, the notion of “insider’s outsideness”, Gloria 

Anzaldua’s theory of borderlands, and bell hooks’s concept of the margins are the 

prominent theories in relation to hybridity and interstitiality that have emerged in the 

postcolonial context. In the discussion on interstitiality, the concept of liminality is 

one that gains immense significance in the research.  

The idea of the “liminal” originated in the French ethnographer Arnold van 

Gennep’s work, Les Rites de Passage (1909) translated as The Rites of Passage 

(1960), as the second phase of “transition” in “the rites of passage” in ancient tribal 

societies and religious cultures (11). The concept of the liminal was later extensively 

developed by Victor Turner, the British anthropologist, in his work The Ritual 

Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969) to study larger societies - secular 

cultures and communities - and moments of transitions that span across them. His 

work primarily centred on the Ndembu tribe of Africa which later expanded to other 

cultural systems. In Turner’s reading of van Gennep, rites de passage are “rites 

which accompany every change of place, state, social position and age” and they 

signify a transition (94). Following van Gennep, Turner records the three phases in 

this process as follows: “separation, margin (or limen, signifying “threshold” in 

Latin), and aggregation” (94). The first consists of “symbolic behaviour signifying 

the detachment of the individual or group either from an earlier fixed point in the 

social structure, from a set of cultural conditions (“a state”), or from both”, the 

liminal phase is one of ambiguity that does not carry the attributes of other phases, 

and the third phase stands for a reaggregation or reincorporation of the subject into 



 
 

 

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the earlier structure (94). It is the liminal phase to which Turner turns his attention 

and it is taken as a significant tool to negotiate the identity-construction of the 

protagonists taken for study. Turner’s description of the term is as follows:  

The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae (“threshold people”) are 

necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip 

through the network of classifications that normally locate states and 

positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they 

are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, 

convention, and ceremonial. . . . Thus liminality is frequently likened to 

death, to being in the womb, to invisibility. . . and to an eclipse of the sun or 

moon. (95) 

A significant feature of the liminal phase, as Turner identifies, is that it is 

unbounded, fluid, dynamic, unstructured, and open to new possibilities of change. 

The element of transformation, the renewal of identity, that characterises the period 

springs from the liberation that an individual gains from the structural constraints 

imposed by the larger society. As opposed to the norms, power, hierarchy, and top-

down authority maintained by the established structure, the liminal phase stirs up the 

property of “anti-structure”, where the entity is temporarily freed from any 

mandatory role-playing stipulated by the larger structure and prepares for a 

transformation from the present state. As Bjørn Thomassen states, it is “a state of 

suspense, a moment of freedom between two structured world-views or institutional 

arrangements” (Liminality 7). Analysing one of the rituals of the Ndembu tribe, 

Turner professes that in the liminal phase, “submissiveness and silence” are the 

attributes of the liminal entity (103), but as Sarah Gilead observes, “[T]hese negative 



 
 

 

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features (negative with respect to ordinary "structural" thinking) carry a 

transformative power” for the occupant of the liminal state (182). Despite the 

temporary silence that the subject assumes in the liminal phase, it curiously and 

paradoxically holds a transformative potential within.  

In his article “Uses and Meanings of Liminality”, Thomassen states different 

types of liminal experiences: in the case of an individual, unexpected events like 

“death, divorce, [and] illness” affecting one’s life or “individualized ritual passage 

(baptism, ritual passage to womanhood. . . [etc])” and critical stages of life such as 

“puberty or teenage” make them occupy the state of liminality; in the case of a 

group, ethnic and social minorities such as transgenders and immigrants, and events 

like graduation ceremonies are considered liminal; in the case of a society, wars and 

revolutionary periods, and unprecedented events like a plague or a natural disaster 

produce the state of liminality (17). The positionality in the interstices is granted by 

critical and decisive life-experiences and to those who are “standing outside 

normality” such as “artists or writers” at the level of an individual (18).  

Ever since the term came into vogue, liminality has been a popular tool for 

theorists and scholars in diverse fields such as Literary Studies, Cultural Studies, 

Postcolonial and Postmodernist discourses, Performance and Theatre Studies, and 

Media Studies. Connecting the notions of transition, transformation, transgression, 

in-betweenness, marginality, and interstitiality, liminality has been symbolically 

employed in the case of individuals (real and fictional), groups, communities 

(diasporic and immigrants), and societies to register changing moments, epochs, and 

crucial periods, and it has also found a place in cross-disciplinary studies and non-

European contexts. A few examples in this sense are Contemporary Trauma 



 
 

 

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Narratives: Liminality and the Ethics of Form (2014) edited by Jean-Michel 

Ganteau and Susana Onega, Landscapes of Liminality: Between Space and Place 

(2016) edited by Dara Downey, Ian Kinane, and Elizabeth Parker, Liminality, 

Hybridity, and American Women’s Literature: Thresholds in Women’s Writing 

(2018) edited by Kristin J. Jacobson, K. Allukian, Rickie-Ann Legleitner, and L. 

Allison, and Beyond the Threshold: Explorations of Liminality in Literature (2007) 

edited by Hein Viljoen and Chris N. van der Merwe based on South African 

literature. Some articles such as “Indeterminate Liminality and the Refugee Journey: 

Partition and Hindu Sindhi Women’s Life Narratives” (2022) by Radhika Mathrani 

Chakraborty, “Narrating “India”: Liminal Narratives of Northeast and Assertion of 

Identity” (2022) by Liji Varghese, and “The Concept of Liminality as a Theoretical 

Tool in Literary Memory Studies: Liminal Aspects of Memory in Salman Rushdie’s 

Midnight’s Children” (2022) by Claudia Mueller-Greene serve as examples of the 

application of the notion of liminality within narrative and cultural contexts to study 

Indian literature. In this sense, the term is considered a valid tool in approaching the 

select texts from Malayalam literature. Thomassen’s observation that “liminality 

serve[s] not only to identify the importance of in-between periods, but also to 

illuminate the human reactions to liminal experiences [such as] the ways in which 

personality was shaped by liminality, the sudden foregrounding of agency, and the 

sometimes dramatic tying together of thought and experience” (Liminality 201), 

serves as the key to examine the primary texts.  

One prominent criticism that the concept encountered is from Barry 

Stephenson, a theorist with a keen interest in Performance Studies and Religious 

Studies, who observes three limits of the employment of the term in the field of 



 
 

 

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Performance Studies: one, “the erasure of ritualized practice within the liminality 

paradigm” (1), two, the detachment of the term from its “original theoretical 

framework, to become ‘free floating’” and three, the valorisation of anti-structural 

liminality “at the expense of norms, institutions, and structures” by placing the two 

in binary opposition (3). It should be noted that the criticism is not generalised but 

rather arises from the writer’s analysis of the field of Performance Studies that is 

centred on real-life, lived practices. The thesis lays its focus on a world of fiction 

open to endless interpretations or readings, where liminality may or may not gain the 

upper hand, structures may or may not be subverted and the notions of ‘rituals’ or 

‘rites’ can achieve symbolic or metaphorical status. As Thomassen states, “[I]t by no 

means follows that all these [liminal] experiences are demarcated with a transition 

rite – at least not the same kind of clearly recognizable and institutionalized rites 

with identifiable ceremony masters, as studied in the work of van Gennep” (“Uses” 

17). In the analysis, therefore, the original theoretical framework is attempted to be 

preserved, but it is symbolically channelised to approach and analyse the states 

occupied by the protagonists, which is expected to add a novel reading-angle to the 

existing ones. 

The research employs Tuan’s propositions of topophilia and topophobia, 

Leach’s identity-theory, and Turner’s conception of liminality together to build a 

framework to negotiate the construction of the identity of the protagonists. It is an 

efficient framework for establishing the subjects as holding or exerting the 

possibility of agency, though not absolute agency, as the selected texts come to a 

close.  



 
 

 

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In connection with topophrenia, a specific reference to the domestic or 

familial space - the home - as a site of the conflicting sentiments of attachment and 

detachment, of opposing ideologies and identities, resulting in the production of a 

space of hybridity and polyvalency rather than one of purity or singularity of 

meaning, is also brought under study. The space as a vital point of contact for an 

individual providing warmth, security, stability, and boundless affection, and as a 

prime determiner of one’s identity has been a widely used notion in spatial studies. 

According to Jacobson, “Home is the pivot for the ingressive and egressive character 

of our way of being-in-the-world” (36), which highlights the significance of the 

space as a springboard for inculcating values, morals, and preachings for its 

inhabitant and as that which asserts considerable influence over an individual by 

designing and determining his/her demeanour and perceptions. Elizabeth H. Jones, 

the British author, talks about “the importance of affective investment” while examining 

the concept of home, and she associates it with the idea of “cultural belonging” (59), 

thereby emphasising the layers of social and emotional meaning that surpass its mere 

material and physical structure. Later studies began to incorporate the conflictual and 

contested nature of home by throwing light on the confining and imprisoning 

experiences that it offers to the inhabitants due to socio-political and cultural shifts, 

altered temperaments, ideologies, and attitudes. M. Jackson in his work At Home in the 

World (1995) states that home “always begets its own negation” and that it “may 

evoke security in one context and seem confining in another” (qtd. in Mallett 70). 

González also shares the ideas of the site as holding dualistic sentiments, where the 

house is imagined “as a prison, as a stressful place” but also that which evokes 

“peace and tranquility” (203). In Locating the Destitute: Space and Identity in 



 
 

 

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Caribbean Fiction (2014), Stanka Radović mentions Anthony Vidler’s work The 

Architectural Uncanny (1992), a study on the uncanny and unhomely domestic 

spaces of the nineteenth-century narrative by delving into the spatial production of 

meaning. Radović records Vidler’s opinion that there are spaces such as houses - 

tagged as uncanny by the author - that provide their inhabitants with the 

contradictory psychological experiences of familiarity and threat, of safety and 

slaughter (52). In a similar line, Alison Blunt and Ann Varley state that home is “a 

space of belonging and alienation, intimacy and violence, desire and fear”, where 

“meanings, emotions, experiences and relationships that lie at the heart of human 

life” are largely invested (3). 

In the light of these observations, the engagement of the protagonists of the 

selected texts with their respective domestic spaces is analysed and their comforting 

and conflicting influences on them are highlighted laying specific focus on the role 

of the same in shaping their identities. How the earlier conception of the domestic 

space as static and fixed is challenged by this will be evident through the analysis. 

Apart from the take on home as a site of hybrid emotions, it is also studied as a 

space of active remembrance, where its role in determining and devising a person’s 

identity in peculiar ways through the transmission of narratives such as 

intergenerational family stories, myths, folktales, traditions, and beliefs is brought to 

the fore. 

Environmental Psychology is a discipline corollary to Humanistic 

Geography that seeks the functioning of the intricate relationship between man and 

his place/space when geographers began to resort more to the social side of 

subjectivity. Evident from the term, human psychology in relation to the 



 
 

 

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environment is the central field of analysis here. It is Environmental Psychology that 

proposes and explores the concepts of place attachment, place-identity, sense of 

place, and place dependence. Marco Antonsich observes that “there is no general 

agreement among psychologists about the definition of each of these concepts” 

(122), yet some common characteristics and features of the terms emerge.  

Propounded by Harold M. Proshansky and colleagues during the early 1980s, 

“place-identity” refers to the ways in which a person's sense of self and personal 

identity are shaped by the places they inhabit or feel connected to. Proshansky et al. 

call place-identity “a sub-structure of the self-identity of the person consisting of, 

broadly conceived, cognitions about the physical world in which the individual 

lives” (“Place-identity” 59). In the article “The City and Self-Identity”, Proshansky 

states that it is precisely “those dimensions of self that define the individual’s 

personal identity in relation to the physical environment by means of a complex 

pattern of conscious and unconscious ideas, feelings, values, goals, preferences, 

skills, and behavioral tendencies” (155). “Place Attachment” is closely related to 

place-identity, signifying “a positive, affective bond people form with particular 

places where they feel comfortable and safe and desire to maintain their connection” 

(Cross 494). Various theorists and thinkers have explicated the term as indicating a 

sense of belongingness, for its existence as a space of security, stability, peace, and 

comfort for the individuals on both physical and symbolic planes (Giuliani and 

Feldman 271; Seamon 12). It also points out the emotional, affective, and cognitive 

psychological association that people maintain with the land they reside in and it is 

essentially a symbolic relationship. Attachment to a place is evoked through a 

transformative experience whereby a neutral space is rendered culturally significant 



 
 

 

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and meaningful. Setha Low, the American anthropologist, in her article “Symbolic 

Ties That Bind: Place Attachment in the Plaza”, proposes six kinds of place 

attachment, such as “genealogical linkage”, “linkage through loss of land or 

destruction of community, economic linkage”, “cosmological linkage”, linkage 

through religious and cultural events, and “narrative linkage” (166). What is relevant 

to the present research is the narrative linkage. According to Low, “Narrative, that 

is, the telling of stories, usually origin myths, but also family histories and political 

accounts, can function as a type of cultural place attachment in that people's linkage 

to the land is through the vehicle of the story and identified through place naming 

and language” (173-174). This essentially throws light on the significance of stories 

and oral tales in the construction of one’s selfhood. Andrés Di Masso, John Dixon, 

and Kevin Durrheim record the crucial role narratives play in moulding a person’s 

identity by citing Robert Sabin who proposed the “narrative principle of 

emplotment”, whereby the formation of “a coherent sense of self” through 

storytelling by a self-location “in material and symbolic environments” is referred 

to, and also mentioning William Riley who focused on how people construct an 

internal narrative by setting private tales of fantasy connected with the occupied 

landscape (78). Evidently, these propositions indicate the function of language in 

constructing the inhabited or lived experiences of people in connection to their 

respective places. The interrelationship between storytelling and identity is a 

significant focal area in all three texts under study. How place-identity and place 

attachment are formed in the protagonists through the stories imparted by ancestors 

– mythical and historical accounts – and how this produces topophilia in them is 

attempted to be traced in the study.  



 
 

 

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Relph is widely known for his formulation of theoretical concepts connected 

to the lived, experiential realm of human life. He classifies and categorises various 

kinds of spaces such as perceptual space, existential space, and sacred space, and 

conceptualises human-centred experiences with a place through the terms 

“behavioural insideness”, “existential insideness”, and “existential outsideness” (51-

55). Of these, ‘existential insideness’ is relevant to the study for its formulation of 

the relation between a person’s identity and place. According to Relph, existential 

insideness is the “most fundamental form of insideness in which a place is 

experienced without deliberate and self-conscious reflection yet is full with 

significances” and “the insideness that most people experience when they are at 

home and in their own town or region.” It “characterizes belonging to a place and 

the deep and complete identity with a place. . .” (55). Another concept that lies close 

to this is “sense of place” coined by Cresswell, another humanistic geographer, 

which is defined as “the meanings, both individual and shared, that are associated 

with a place” (113). What Cresswell underscores through the term is the way an 

inhabitant engages in a meaning-making process through his/her interactions with a 

place and the integral bond one maintains with it. Closely connected to these two 

terms is Casey’s formulation of the term “geographical self”. Casey’s focus is on the 

bodily experienced place, “the bodily basis of [the] self’s inhabitation of places in a 

circumambient landscape”, and by integrating the disciplines of Geography and 

Philosophy, he employs the term to refer to “the nature of the human subject who is 

oriented and situated in place” (“Between Geography and Philosophy” 683). In this 

research, where the mobility of the protagonists across various spaces within the 

larger socio-cultural space is looked into, these concepts gain immense significance 



 
 

 

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as they draw the interrelationship between identity and attachment built with the 

inhabiting place.   

Another set of theories employed for the study belongs to the Marxist and 

urban geographers Lefebvre and Soja who radically redefined the conventional or 

traditional conception of spaces through their momentous works, The Production of 

Space (1974) and Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-

Imagined Places (1996) respectively. Lefebvre, the Marxist social theorist and 

spatial analyst, makes a notable contribution to the existing epistemology of space 

by analysing the process of urbanisation through a postmodernist lens and 

developing a spatial theory for contemporary urban geographical research. He 

proposes a triadic conception of space through the coinages, “spatial practice”, 

“representations of space” and “representational space”. Spatial practice, also tagged 

as the “perceived” or the “physical” space, refers to the ways in which inhabiting 

subjects interact with the social space that “secretes that society’s space” and that 

“propounds and presupposes” the space “in a dialectical interaction” (Production 

38). The second category of space that Lefebvre propounds, alternatively labelled as 

“conceived space” and “mental space”, arises from the domain of urban planners, 

engineers, and other technocrats who delineate and design spaces through maps and 

similar media. He therefore calls it a “dominant space” (39) and a space that 

constitutes “the history of ideologies” (116). The third category of space is the 

“lived” or "social space", “the space of social practice, the space occupied by 

sensory phenomena, including products of the imagination such as projects and 

projections, symbols, and utopias” (12). Also labelled as “representational space or 

spaces of representation”, Lefebvre conceptualises it as “the space of ‘inhabitants’ 



 
 

 

44

and ‘users’,” such as writers, artists, and philosophers, and as the one “directly lived 

through its associated images and symbols”; for him, it is “the dominated - and 

hence passively experienced - space which the imagination seeks to change and 

appropriate” by rising to the state of a counterspace (Production 39) and hence 

linked to the “clandestine or underground side of social life”, as Soja cites in 

Thirdspace (67). All revolutionary initiatives and social movements against the 

order of dominance that create significant repercussions sprout from this lived, 

social space that occupies the periphery or marginality, and hence it is envisioned as 

“the terrain for the generation of ‘counterspaces,’” and as the space “for struggle, 

liberation, [and] emancipation” (Soja, Thirdspace 68). Soja sees Lefebvre as 

breaking down the binary thinking in spatial discourses – such as “subject-object, 

mental-material. . . local-global, center-periphery, agency-structure” - as 

distinguishable from the physical and mental spaces and facilitating an all-

encompassing mode of spatial thinking (60).  

Geographers, urban theorists, and literary scholars have been extensively 

using Lefebvre's spatial critique in political, social, and literary discourses and it is 

also a popular theoretical tool in interdisciplinary fields of study. Anzaldua’s 

concept of the “borderlands”, hooks’s theory of “margin”, and Bhabha’s notion of 

“in-between” space and hybridity have all been influenced and inspired by 

Lefebvre’s lived space. Despite its wide acceptance, the notion is not devoid of 

criticism. The abstract, vague, and complicated presentation of Lefebvre’s spatial 

theory, as pointed out by Andy Merrifield in Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction 

(108-111), is an example in this regard. Even though Lefebvre’s core text carries 

complexity and vagueness to a certain extent, many interpreters and reviewers - Rob 



 
 

 

45

Shields, Stuart Elden, Nathaniel Coleman, Don Mitchell, and Isabel Armstrong to 

name a few - have systematically studied the text and reduced its explicit 

unreadability. The spatial triad has been universally adopted in non-European 

contexts – in regional literary and urban studies in African, South Asian, Latin 

American, and Australian contexts - with the major emphasis on the politics of 

spatiality. Spaces of Global Cultures: Architecture, Urbanism, Identity (2004) by 

Anthony King, where African, Asian, and Latin American cultures are focused, 

Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (2012) by David 

Harvey, and Cities and Inequalities in a Global and Neoliberal World (2015) edited 

by Faranak Miraftab, David Wilson, and Ken Salo are some of the works that utilise 

Lefebvre in non-European contexts. While employing the concept in other cultures, 

the unique, individualised socio-cultural specificities of the place are reflected in the 

way the different spaces are produced. Even though there is no explicit or direct take 

on the notion of human agency in Lefebvre, it is noteworthy that in the lived space, 

there is a considerable exercise of human agency and individualism, through which 

the transformation of the perceived and conceived spaces into an active 

counterspace is brought into effect. Despite the criticisms raised, Lefebvre’s works 

are highly cited and adopted for contemporary studies on urban, global, and 

literary/fictional spaces. 

Soja’s formulation of the “Thirdspace” is inspired by Lefebvre’s notion of 

lived or social space. For him, Lefebvre’s formulation of the spatial triad by “linking 

historicality, sociality, and spatiality in a strategically balanced and transdisciplinary 

““triple dialectic”” is an extraordinary attempt at foregrounding space unlike any 

other theorists till then (Thirdspace 6). He also admires Lefebvre for redefining the 



 
 

 

46

social relations of production using a Marxist lens, for reconceptualising the centre-

periphery relations of power, and for disrupting the logic or practice of binary 

thinking on spatial relations that had existed until then (Thirdspace 62). Drawing on 

Lefebvre’s central argument – which Soja states as “the ontological, 

epistemological, and theoretical rebalancing of spatiality, historicality, and sociality 

as all-embracing dimensions of human life” – and clubbing it with the critical 

methodology named as “thirding-as-Othering” devised by himself, Soja proposes a 

“trialectics of spaces” which is “not just a triple dialectic but also a mode of 

dialectical reasoning that is more inherently spatial than the conventional 

temporally-defined dialectics of Hegel or Marx” (10). He resorts to critically 

explaining and evaluating Lefebvre’s rather vague and abstract description of the 

spatial triad by introducing three forms of spaces such as the “Firstspace” 

(physical/concrete/perceived space), the “Secondspace” (imagined/conceived/ 

abstract space), and the “Thirdspace” (lived space). In tune with the first two spaces 

envisioned by Lefebvre, the firstspace is defined as that which is “fixed mainly on 

the concrete materiality of spatial forms, on things that can be empirically mapped” 

(Thirdspace 10), and the secondspace is composed of the “ideas about space. . . 

[and] thoughtful representations of human spatiality in mental or cognitive forms” 

(10).  

For the research, the third category is of immense importance. Soja terms 

Lefebvre’s third category as “an-Other term, a third possibility or “moment” that 

consists of both the perceived and conceived spaces but indicates not just a position 

of in-betweenness or a combination of the two but an “all-inclusive continuum” that 

deflates all sorts of binary formulations as the “either/or” to include “the logic of 



 
 

 

47

both/and also” (Thirdspace 60). The lived space is thus conceived “as a strategic 

location from which to encompass, understand, and potentially transform all spaces 

simultaneously” (68). Rooted in this concept, the thirdspace is imagined as a 

liberated platform that incorporates and holds together mutually conflicting and 

contradictory ideas, visions, and thoughts - “a space of extraordinary openness, a 

place of critical exchange where the geographical imagination can be expanded to 

encompass a multiplicity of perspectives” (5) – and is devised to radically transform 

the existing two-dimensional or binary-logic of spatiality. Soja defines the term as 

the space where all places are, capable of being seen from every angle, each 

standing clear; but also a secret and conjectured object, filled with illusions 

and allusions, a space that is common to all of us yet never able to be 

completely seen and understood, an “unimaginable universe” or as Lefebvre 

would put it, “the most general of products.” 

Everything comes together in Thirdspace: subjectivity and 

objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the 

knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and differential, structure and 

agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined 

and the transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history. (56-57) 

As evident, Soja’s complex conception of the thirdspace is, on the one hand, 

distinguishable from the first and the second, and on the other hand, is a 

transcending composite of all spaces. Soja cites the spatial conceptions of Anzaldua, 

hooks, and Foucault (heterotopia) in connection with the discussion on the 

thirdspace to draw parallels and underlying relations (Thirdspace 127-133). There is 

a conspicuous underlying strain of resistance in the formulation – a scope for 



 
 

 

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generating counterspaces as Soja himself interprets Lefebvre’s lived space – and this 

makes it an effective tool in evaluating and analysing specific spatial constructions 

in real, urban societies as well as in fictional worlds. 

The notion of thirdspace faced both wide reception and criticism as soon as it 

gained the attention of the scholarly world. It became a popular theoretical tool in 

the fields of urban planning, architecture, cultural and literary studies with wide-

ranging applications. Some of the major lines of criticism that the thirdspace had to 

face were the abstract, vague, and complicated delivery of the ideas, and the 

complexity of language employed in the text. Massey, in Space, Place, and Gender 

(1994), places the argument that Soja's formulation of the spatial divisions is 

abstract (and not specific) and that it restricts one from applying it in concrete 

analyses of space (129-130). The employment of the theoretical formulations and 

contributions of Lefebvre and Soja have both been praised and critiqued; while they 

are found to strengthen his theoretical base, critics like Merrifield argue that there is 

overemphasis of theories in Soja that result in incoherence. In “The Extraordinary 

Voyages of Ed Soja: Inside the “Trialectics of Spatiality” (1999), a  review of Soja’s 

Thirdspace, Merrifield raises his voice against the ambiguous, remote, and indirect 

expression of ideas in the work, finds a problem with his mode of equating 

Lefebvre’s notion of spatial practice with his coinage of the firstspace, and wonders 

how one can exercise the theory in a Baudrillardian universe (simulacra-

simulacrum) where the distinction between real and imagined spaces becomes 

difficult (346-348).  

Despite the threads of criticism directed against the concepts of thirdspace 

and lived space on the grounds of abstraction and vagueness, they form useful tools 



 
 

 

49

in the spatial analyses of modernist and postmodernist texts. Any theory that seeks 

to condense the lived world in theoretical, philosophical, and metaphysical words 

would bring along vagueness and abstraction to a certain extent, but this does not 

prevent one from employing it in spatial studies and evaluating spatial discourses of 

varying kinds. In the present study, the primary texts are works of fiction – products 

of art and imagination that consist of abstract and elusive elements – that are far 

from ‘real world’ or empirical world but are largely faithful, ‘realistic’ 

representations of it. Therefore, the employment of the concepts in the research is 

found to be valid and relevant. Soja’s stance on the utility of the thirdspace - “all 

spaces can be seen as Thirdspaces or heterotopias depending on the scope of one's 

critical geographical imagination, the perspective one has on how far one can reach 

with a critical spatial perspective” (“Interview” 114) – throws light on the possibility 

of critical application that the concept provides in any spatial discourse. Lived space 

and thirdspace are efficient tools in negotiating the production of meaning by the 

protagonists in the select texts as they engage with various spaces. How do the 

individuals construct meanings and engage in a ‘place-making’ process through their 

interpretative acts can be effectively grasped through these effective tools. An 

approach of this kind will help one understand the production of their identity or 

selfhood as well.  

Other formulations of Lefebvre such as “deviant or diverted space” and 

“appropriated space” (Production 383, 164-166) are also found useful for the study. 

Armstrong, in her study of nineteenth-century English novels, states the definitions 

of the terms (originally described vaguely) with appreciable clarity. According to 

her, diverted space is conceived as the “space wrenched from power by individuals 



 
 

 

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and groups, almost always the dispossessed” and as “the space made by the outsider 

and the outcast” (19). Lefebvre grants such spaces a progressive aura projecting 

their possible potential for initiating emancipation or revolution. Armstrong notes 

that the notion of appropriated space, which is “adapted from Marx’s understanding 

of the self’s work on the world”, is the “space of limited freedom within the 

capitalist project”, for which Lefebvre displays the example of “a house owned by 

capital and the tenant’s freedom to decorate it” (20). Lefebvre’s delivery of the 

terms is rather vague and abstract, yet they can be employed to evince valid insights 

into certain spaces under consideration in the selected texts.  

Foucault is a towering figure of the twentieth century who redefined the 

notions of space, power, and knowledge in his structural-poststructural analysis of 

contemporary society. In Foucault’s oeuvre of spatial studies, the formulation of 

heterotopia is of immense significance and is considered a path-breaking 

contribution to the corpus of modern and postmodern epistemology. The term 

originated in his lecture titled “Des Espaces Autres” delivered in 1967 which was 

published posthumously in 1984 in the French Journal Architecture /Mouvement/ 

Continuité, which was later translated as “Of Other Spaces” by Jay Miskowiec in 

1986. In his radical revision of the medieval theories of emplacement and the 

Galilean postulation of space of extension, he considers the epoch of space as “the 

epoch of simultaneity. . . the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of 

the side-by-side, of the dispersed” (22). Foucault also conceives of spaces as 

heterogenous in opposition to the existing notion of homogeneity and subverts all 

kinds of binary oppositions (such as profane and sacred, open an