Between the Lines: Figures of Speech in South Asian Writing

Published every Friday, Between the Lines is a weekly column by Namrata. This week, she reflects on figures of speech in South Asian writing, and why writers so often turn to metaphor, repetition, exaggeration, and indirection when ordinary language begins to fail.

South Asian literature has always been suspicious of plain speech. Not because it lacks clarity, but because the realities it grapples with are rarely simple enough to survive direct description. Partition, caste, exile, desire, religious violence, migration, and grief are experiences that do not arrive neatly. They distort memory, fragment chronology, and alter the relationship between body and language. It is unsurprising, then, that so much of South Asian writing leans instinctively toward metaphor, repetition, exaggeration, and indirection. Figures of speech become less a literary flourish than a way of approaching experiences that literal language threatens to flatten.

Figures of speech are often taught as embellishment, as the decorative edge of writing, something added to language once meaning is already secure. But in much of South Asian literature, metaphor and simile rarely function as ornament. They emerge because reality itself has become too layered, politically fraught, and emotionally dense to be approached directly. Language bends because the world it is trying to describe resists containment.