From Repression to Resistance: The Freudian Uncanny in Meghna Pant’s The Man Who Lost India

Abstract

Meghna Pant’s The Man Who Lost India (2024) presents a chilling vision of a near-future India fractured by authoritarian rule and civil conflict. This paper offers a psychoanalytic reading of the novel, arguing that it stages a critical movement “from repression to resistance” by mobilizing the affective and structural logic of Sigmund Freud’s uncanny (das Unheimliche). In Pant’s dystopia, the familiar—homes, streets, language, and bodies—becomes terrifyingly estranged, manifesting as doubles, spectral hauntings, and compulsive repetitions that signal the return of politically and historically repressed traumas. However, this study moves beyond a purely Freudian framework by placing it in critical dialogue with postcolonial theory (Bhabha’s “unhomely”), trauma studies (Caruth’s “belatedness”), and feminist theory (Butler’s “precarious life”). Through a method of close reading that combines semiotic and phenomenological interpretation, this paper demonstrates how the uncanny, when transposed to a South Asian context, operates as more than a psychological category; it becomes a cultural and political grammar that exposes structures of gendered and national repression. Crucially, the analysis shows how Pant’s narrative reclaims the uncanny, transforming its inherent anxiety into a catalyst for insurgent memory, feminist solidarity, and linguistic subversion. The novel is thus positioned as a “critical dystopia” where the return of the repressed does not merely terrorize but opens seams for resistance, making it a significant contribution to the emergent field of Indian speculative fiction and a powerful commentary on the psychodynamics of contemporary political life.