Postcolonial Literary History and Indian English Fiction By Paul ...

‘Magnanimously, he slips them a mythic germ of hope (which is also the last word in Amitav Ghosh’s panoramic foray into national and global labour history, The Circle of Reason). This sits against our rueful awareness that Kesavan’s narrator is, for all his privileged time travel, deluding himself: his hindsight only goes so far, and then he becomes another puppet in the play of time (as he is, in fact, a puppet in the writer’s story). This metahistorical sensibility is, I think, a feature of Indian writing in English. It holds out both the existential gloom of being “handcuffed to history” but, as a literary “take” on the historical, it knows that there are still things you can do even in handcuffs: The story is not over until storytelling ends, until time itself is done with us. “I’d learned from Ammi that there was no past or future, just one continuous life where everything happened now…the present was time enough for me” (349).

Bankimchandra Chatterjee decries his country’s unpreparedness for nationhood in terms of its premodern lack of historicity: “Bengal has no history!…Proud nations have an abundance of historical writing; we have none” (qtd. in Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought 82). V. S. Naipaul, years later, derides his grandfather’s homeland for its lack of historical consciousness. In the India of An Area of Darkness, a ruin is anything from a Mogul palace to a fortress of the Pandava (139–142); Gandhi’s social activism fails because he is absorbed into the ahistorical otherworld of myth (68–82). Gandhi himself, according to Anshuman Mondal, struggled to reconcile the “historical discontinuity of modernity” with “the organic continuity” of cultural tradition. Although he opposed the disruptive immorality of individualism and machinery, he did “smuggle in” ideas of Western modernity under the guise of Indian tradition as humane civilisation, allowing Hindus to self-correct in a modernising way without losing hold of their cultural connections, and removing from the British their claim to “owning” civilising influences (83–85).