The Introduction establishes the stranger as a figure, and estrangement as a method, as key paradigms for understanding postcolonial modernism in South Asia. After the powerful groundswell of decolonization, the early post-Independence moment is characterized by a sense of disillusion, indifference, disaffection, and a growing chasm between self and other. It is during this moment of self-reckoning that a generation of intellectuals became interested in existential philosophy in all of its forms. Drawing from the multivalent figure of the ajnabi (outsider, the foreigner, the refugee, and the stranger), as well as the various indigenous etiologies of estrangement, the chapter argues for a new way of understanding the “postcolonial,” beyond nation, nationalism, and national culture. For playwrights, poets, and artists in this moment, estrangement becomes a powerful aesthetic and philosophical resource; to see something “in a strange light” offers the potential for a new aesthetic vision. Via the comments of writers, artists, and critics like Sadequain and Girish Karnad, who describe the search for a new aesthetic form, and theories of modernism in the subcontinent, this chapter offers a context for reading via postcolonial literature in light of its new existential challenge and its mystical visions.