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The justification for Indian writing in English was, from the beginnings of its critical promotion, that it was tied to the story of creating an independent state. Thus, despite its colonial origins, English was a tool in the service of defining modern India as much as Tagore’s Bengali or Prem Chand’s Urdu and Hindi. C. D. Narasimhaiah, in The Swan and the Eagle, follows the lead of Srinivasa Iyengar in offering commentaries on the nonfiction writings of Gandhi and Nehru, while Meenakshi Mukherjee, in her landmark study The Twice-Born Fiction, argues “that through the Indian English novel the writer gives expression to a new kind of experience which will ultimately lead to the construction of a nation” (Raveendran 152). One of the critical positions taken in advancing the cause of Indian English writing within the wider teaching of literatures in English is that its themes and aesthetics can only be understood properly in relation to the specifics of Indian cultural and historical contexts, and the whole regional study is itself built on a historicised sense of both creative and critical practice, the rise of university education, global markets, and so on. T. N. Dhar sees critical practice as having to develop a more sophisticated view of connections between history and the literary text (Dhar 284–285). This present study does not attempt a new or complex theoretical model of historical reading, but it does hope to avoid some of the failings outlined by Dhar, and to work in the spirit of P. K. Rajan’s call to accept heterogeneity and
‘I am not here especially interested in the historical novel as such, but rather with the relationship among novel, literary history, and historiography.