Analyzing the Identity and Cultural Crisis of Protagonists in Githa Hariharan's the Thousand Faces of Night and Bharati Mukherjee's Wife

Abstract

This paper examines the identity and cultural crisis experienced by the protagonists in Githa Hariharan’s The Thousand Faces of Night and Bharati Mukherjee’s Wife, situating their struggles within a cross-cultural and postcolonial framework. Drawing on feminist, psychoanalytic, and cultural studies perspectives, the study explores how cultural displacement, patriarchal constraints, and the erosion of indigenous values shape the protagonists’ fragmented sense of self. Both novels portray women caught between tradition and modernity, indigenous culture and alien environments, leading to psychological alienation and existential uncertainty. The protagonists’ inner conflicts reflect the broader twentieth-century crisis of identity marked by colonization, migration, and the breakdown of stable cultural norms. By highlighting themes of alienation, cultural dislocation, and the search for selfhood, the paper argues that Hariharan and Mukherjee present identity not as a fixed entity but as a fluid, contested process shaped by social, cultural, and psychological forces. Ultimately, the novels reveal how the assertion of selfhood becomes an act of resistance against cultural homogenization and patriarchal domination.