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

However, if the Baroque allegory at least continues to intimate a transcendent divinity, the postcolonial is constrained to seeing the hidden Law as part of worldly political power, and while it may turn nature into history, it cannot let the reverse happen. The decolonising project must abrogate the priority of the historical by exposing it as something other than a natural given. So, although the works of Sealy, Rushdie, Tharoor and Desani may appear to follow the practices of Baroque allegory—offering narratives driven by concepts and subjects determined by point of view which also becomes the “subject of expression” (127)—the function of the works is different, and their exceeding the frame works to expose their own devices in order to disrupt the authority of framing, especially historical framing. History cannot be altogether relinquished—since it is one important basis on which claims to justice and for liberation can be made—but neither can it be allowed to dictate the present and future. So, Slemon may appropriate the ideas of someone like Leibniz, but he does so in order to move away from the Leibnizian project of retaining some theological level of outside ordering principle. (In Deleuze’s reading of Leibniz, the Baroque relinquishes melody, even contrapuntal melody, as a relativising of “horizontal” order, to create “vertical” harmony as a new order: 129–135. Postcolonial allegory must exceed and critically expose even that institution of new dynamic governance.)

One useful notion to emerge from Deleuze’s commentary on Leibniz is that of “concert”. While a postcolonial model would remain suspicious of using words like “absolute”, the idea of “vertical” monads coexisting in concert without modulating into one another or being resolved into a unity (The Fold 133) is perhaps a way of getting around the criticisms of postcolonial studies as a disciplinary frame that erases the difference it purports to define itself by. If we can think of the field as “the relation of a state with its differentials among infinitely small units that are integrated into this state” wherein “[e]ach monad includes the world as an infinite series of infinitely small units” (130, 133), then postcolonial studies (or Indian literary studies) becomes a comparative system in which the units to be compared allow for “harmonious” juxtaposition without surrendering the particularities or giving up their difference to some homogenised composition.