Published every Friday, Between the Lines is a weekly column by Namrata. This week, she reflects on autofiction in South Asian writing, with its uneasy intimacies and refusals.
There is a kind of writing that does not begin with the confidence of invention, nor with the assurance of recollection, but with a return to how it continues to live within the body. It does not seek to stabilise memory into narrative, nor to distance it into fiction. Instead, it moves in a space where the act of remembering is already an act of shaping, where the self that writes and the self that is written cannot be cleanly separated, and where what matters is not the accuracy of detail so much as the persistence of feeling. This is the uneasy terrain autofiction occupies, though it rarely announces itself as such. It unfolds slowly, often hesitantly, allowing contradiction and incompleteness to remain visible rather than resolved.
In South Asian writing, this hesitation carries a particular weight. The self here is never singular, never detached from the histories that constitute it. To write I is to write through layers of inheritance of caste, language, migration, and gendered expectations that do not recede simply because the narrative turns inward. If anything, they become more insistent. This is why the recent turn toward autofiction across South Asian literatures feels less like a borrowed form and more like an inevitable pressure, a need to find a way of writing experience that does not force it into coherence too quickly, that allows the self to remain porous, unsettled, in conversation with forces that exceed it.