The paper deals with the ways in which the South Asian diasporic authors Michael Ondaatje and V.S. Naipaul explore national freedom in their novels Anil’s Ghost and Magic Seeds. In these novels, the authors examine how individual and national freedoms are compromised by terrorism and civil war in their motherlands, Sri Lanka and India. As diasporics, they are in a sense ‘the other’—the observers of the crises—and offer a powerful world-view of national liberation and peace that is at odds with nationalist (insider) ideologies. This paper will seek to draw out these alternative philosophies.