Arun Joshi, The Strange Case of Billy Biswas

Pier Paolo Piciucco (Università Degli Studi di Torino)

Ed. by John Thieme, University of East Anglia
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 10.3.1.03: Indian Writing and Culture: Post-colonial, 1947-present.
Vol. editors: Claire Gallien (Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3), Pavan Kumar Malreddy (J W Goethe University of Frankfurt), Delphine Munos (Université de Liège)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1971

Places

India (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

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Three years after his literary debut, Joshi published

The Strange Case of Billy Biswas

, possibly his most famous work. While in

The Foreigner

Joshi analysed the impossibility of a merge between the East and the West, and thereby dealt with a topic other postcolonial novelists have also been concerned with, in this second novel he significantly amplified the focus on this polarization, bringing to the fore the concept that India itself is split between two irreconcilable extremes. The gap is in fact not so much representative of the distance between New York and Delhi, the two alternative backdrops at the beginning of the story, but rather between the so-called “civilised” and the “primitive” world.

Billy (Bimal) Biswas, Joshi’s most rebellious hero, is introduced early on as an

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1043 words

Citation: Piciucco, Pier Paolo. "The Strange Case of Billy Biswas". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 05 February 2004 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=14902, accessed 26 April 2024.]

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