Between the Lines: Telling Lies, Telling Truths- Unreliable Narrators in South Asian Fiction by Namrata

Published every Friday, Between the Lines is a weekly column by Namrata, where she delves into the cultural, emotional, and thematic intricacies of both classic and contemporary books. In today’s column, she explores unreliable narrators and the truth they reveal.

One of the most fascinating things about fiction is its ability to tell the truth by lying. And nowhere is this contradiction more compelling than in the hands of an unreliable narrator. These are the voices that bend facts, obscure timelines, and filter everything through their own flawed, biased, or unstable lenses. But in doing so, they often end up revealing deeper truths—about themselves, about their worlds, and about the nature of truth itself.

The unreliable narrator is not a new device. From Dostoevsky’s Mad Men to Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, literature has long been fascinated by the storyteller who cannot (or should not) be trusted. But in South Asian fiction, this device takes on particularly interesting dimensions—intertwined with history, trauma, memory, and identity.