Western Imprints in Indian Contemporary Novels: An Analysis of The White Tiger, The Inheritance of Loss, and The Lowland

Abstract

The present paper investigates the Western footprints in three major Indian contemporary Arts novels-the White
Tiger by Aravind Adiga, The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai and The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri. Western
hegemonic presence in these texts isn’t just a point of imitation and foreign lifestyle or physical migration. It
works as a pressure of ordering that reorganizes desire, class imagination, language, family and selfhood. Using
qualitative textual and comparative literary analyses, we illustrate how neoliberal capitalism skews Balram
Halwai’s entrepreneurial violence, how colonial education and Anglophilia produce psychic displacements in
Desai’s Kalimpong, and how migration to America transforms Lahiri’s characters into divided subjects
manipulating memory, guilt, and belonging. The theoretical framework adopts postcolonialism, cultural hybridity,
mimicry, globalization, and transnational identity. The analysis concludes that the promise of Western modernity
works ambivalently in all three texts: while it guarantees freedom, mobility, education, and self-making, it also
intensifies alienation, moral rupture, class inequality, cultural homelessness, and uprooted life. Thus, these novels
portray Indian modernity as a conflicted space in which the West is internalized, resisted, localized and
reimagined, not simply embraced or rejected.
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