A Critical Analysis of Meghna Pant's The Man Who Lost India: Applying Roland Barthes' Codes to Examine Dystopian Allegory, Resistance, and Cultural Erasure

Abstract

This paper uses the five-code semiotic model of Roland Barthes to analyze how the hermeneutic enigmas, proairetic sequence of actions, semantic connotations, symbolic oppositions, and cultural allusions create multifaceted significances of geopolitical anxiety and cultural resistance and feminist agency in The Man Who Lost India (2024) by Meghna Pant.^[1] By analyzing the novel in qualitative textual research, the paper exposes the complex "writerly" form of the novel with occupation dehumanising surveillance opposed to mystical Shiv Linga resistance which requires the active reader interpretation as opposed to narrative closure.^[2] The analysis of Positioning Pant within the context of the South Asian dystopia traditions and as a reflection of Orwell (1984), Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale), and Rushdie (Midnight's Children), shows how speculative fiction can simultaneously encode current tension between India and the Chinese border, as well as the postcolonial identity crisis in several semiotic codes at once.^[3] Some of the critical readings provide insight into under researched areas of Indian dystopian, and the Barthesian approach of the textual analysis has been seen as an important instrument in the analysis of mechanisms of resistance as operationalised by the formal innovation and thematic complexity and cultural referentiality of post-colonial literature.^[4] The holistic interaction of Barthes codes in the invasion-occupation-resistance trajectory of the novel demonstrates feminism as a ubiquitous aspect of the novel and female agency as all-encompassing as well as an agent through all five interpretive ordering of the novel.^[5]