The paper is intended to find relevance in the academic scenario of the postcolonial world—India being a part of it—in which, academic politics has often tended to relocate the blames for social, political and economic problems, inherent in the societies of these countries, to their respective colonial histories. However, texts like Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Baby Halder’s A Life Less Ordinary or Shekhar Kapoor’s film-text Bandit Queen locate the evils at home: inherent in the indigenous societies. Of the three, one is an African novel, the second is a translated autobiography of an Indian domestic maid and another is the cinematic biography of a famous Indian dalit woman, literally the bandit queen, Phoolan Devi. Despite their thematic and generic differences, these texts have two fundamental similarities: first, they unveil the realities which are, in effect, hidden from the everyday experiences of the urban postcolonial academician; and second, they offer potentially severe criticism of the patriarchal societies in which they are set. This paper seeks introspection through the alternative lenses provided by these texts.