Challenging World Wars’ epistemology of Existentialism in Selected Western and South Asian War Fiction

Abstract

This paper aims to challenge and set out critique, interrogation, and reframing of dominant World Wars’ Epistemology of Existentialism of in selected South Asian and Western war fiction through the Indigenous and decolonial lens by aligning it to the theoretical orientation of Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Research and Indigenous people. One of the Research objective is to examine the way dominant Western war narratives shape west-centric epistemology of Existentialism in Western war fiction, A Farewell to Arms by the way marginalizing or ignoring Indigenous perspectives of war. This research also aims to cross-examine the way South Asian war experience from Indigenous perspectives offers different narrative and epistemologies in the novels Across the Black Waters by adopting alternative ways of knowing war. By emphasizing relationality, material purpose, and epistemic justice, Indigenous war literature like reconceptualizes war and highlights that war literature is far from a neutral intellectual activity rather a deeply political and epistemologically charged engagement. In this sense, war literature is not merely a record of human conflict but a site of debate over historical memory epistemological legitimacy.