Arun Joshi’s The Foreigner (1968) stands as a seminal narrative interrogating the fractured psychology of post-colonial subjectivity. The protagonist, Sindi Oberoi, embodies the condition of cultural in-betweenness that Homi K. Bhabha conceptualizes as hybridity and liminality within a post-colonial framework. Rooted in colonial historical legacies yet exposed to Western modernity, Sindi navigates existential emptiness, ethical fragmentation, and emotional detachment. This article examines Sindi’s identity crisis not merely as existential alienation—as previous critics have often emphasized— but as a post-colonial condition characterized by cultural mimicry, displacement, and an oscillation between Western individualism and Indian cultural consciousness. Through close reading and theoretical grounding in Bhabha’s concepts of mimicry, hybridity, and the “third space,” this study interrogates how The Foreigner reveals the psychological and cultural consequences of colonial encounter and post-colonial modernity. It argues that Sindi’s alienation emerges from a fractured self, shaped by colonial cultural aspirations yet haunted by ancestral belonging. Thus, Joshi’s text extends beyond existential philosophy to unravel the subtle violence of cultural dislocation experienced by post-colonial subjects navigating globalized identities.
University Department of English Vinoba Bhave University, Hazaribag
