Advanced International Journal for Research

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Negotiating Cultural Identity in Poetic Canon: Reading select texts of Jeet Thayil

Author(s) Ms. SHRUTI MISHRA
Country India
Abstract This paper examines the negotiation of cultural identity in the poetic canon of Jeet Thayil through a close reading of select poems that foreground questions of language, place, memory, and selfhood. Positioned within the landscape of contemporary Indian English poetry, Thayil’s work resists monolithic notions of cultural identity and instead articulates a fractured, fluid, and often contradictory sense of belonging. Drawing on postcolonial cultural theory and socio-linguistic perspectives, the study argues that Thayil’s poetry constructs identity as a lived negotiation shaped by urban experience, historical residue, spiritual disquiet, and linguistic hybridity. The analysis focuses on how Thayil employs a deliberately unsettled idioms marked by code-switching, vernacular rhythms, allusive references, and stark corporeal imagery to challenge inherited cultural certainties. His poems reimagine the Indian city, particularly Bombay/Mumbai, as a palimpsestic space where colonial memory, indigenous traditions, and global modernity intersect. In this milieu, cultural identity emerges not as an essence to be recovered but as a process continuously re-scripted through language and experience. By foregrounding marginal voices, desacralised rituals, and fractured narratives, Thayil destabilises dominant cultural myths and exposes the tensions between tradition and transgression. The paper concludes that Jeet Thayil’s poetry contributes to the contemporary poetic canon by redefining cultural identity as performative, provisional, and ethically charged, thereby offering a nuanced critique of cultural authenticity in postcolonial and globalised contexts.
Keywords culture, language, identity, poetry, imagery, semiotics
Field Arts
Published In Volume 7, Issue 1, January-February 2026
Published On 2026-01-23
DOI https://doi.org/10.63363/aijfr.2026.v07i01.3049
Short DOI https://doi.org/hbk6x6
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