Oceanic Narratology: Narrative Strategies and Literary Representations in Indian English Fiction

Abstract

This paper articulates the conceptual and formal architecture of Oceanic Narratology within contemporary Indian English fiction, challenging the entrenched land-centric paradigms of postcolonial literary criticism. By shifting critical attention from terrestrial landscapes to fluid, littoral, and transoceanic geographies, this study investigates how Indian English novelists construct water not merely as a passive backdrop or allegorical symbol, but as an agentic, structuring force that reorders narrative form, temporality, and spatial ontology. Drawing upon the theoretical intersections of the Blue Humanities, posthuman feminist phenomenology, wet ontologies, and hydrocolonialism, the paper analyzes key literary representations across subcontinental, estuarine, and archipelagic spaces. Special emphasis is placed on how writers such as Amitav Ghosh, T.S. Pillai, and Tara Menon deploy tidal poetics, non-linear chronotopes, vernacular sea-lore, and interspecies ethics to counter imperial cartographies and Anthropocene climate crises. The study demonstrates that oceanic narratives dismantle national borders, foreground subaltern and nonhuman agencies, and construct fluid epistemologies essential for navigating contemporary planetary crises.