Abstract

In this article, gendered death is explored through two crime thrillers: Ankush Saikia’s 2018 novel More Bodies Will Fall (2018, referred as MBWF) and Kulpreet Yadav’s Murder in Paharganj (2017, referred as MIP). The essay shows that the representation of dead girls within these novels is intricately tied to the Indian nation. Fiction and films have explored nation and nationalism(s) before and have produced narratives deconstructing and restrengthening India’s national image. Indian novel acted as an “imaginative vehicle” (Gopal 5) in producing multiple ideas of Indian nation and Bollywood too “has been central to the creation of India’s national myth (Taseer, “Can Bollywood Survive Modi?”). Additionally, a postcolonial national Indian identity in fiction has been often constructed through male protagonists while figures of women have been utilized for articulation of a homogenous nation, and national uniqueness have been “constituted through the medium of the sexual binary, using the figure of the woman as a primary vehicle” (Boehmer 5). The essay argues that MIP’s Israeli dead girl Sherry Bing consolidates India’s national image as a global defense force while MBWF’s Amenla Longkumer’s plot dives into the ethnic conflicts of India’s North-East, turning it into a more interiorized and complex introspection of ethno-national issues. For the purposes of argumentation, the memorization of the dead girls as represented in both texts are analyzed to comment on the roles these memorizations play in thrillers dealing with national/global and national/local issues.