Three years after his literary debut, Joshi published
The Strange Case of Billy Biswas, possibly his most famous work. While in
The ForeignerJoshi 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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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 21 November 2024.]
