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

Here we have something that distinguishes postcolonial fiction from the enclosed magic realism of other imaginings and from the traditional conceptions of literary history or even history itself. In the words of Deleuze/Leibniz, “Space-time ceases to be a pure given in order to become the totality or the nexus of differential relations in the subject” (The Fold 89). The totality aspect allows the artifice of encyclopedic range, while the nexus aspect prevents that from ever being more than a moving signal of possible arrival: history is unfinished business, not an object for analysis, not a book of rules governing the present. In this, difference is not merely a self—other binary in which we strive to recover the other (or our own otheredness) in order to (re)install it as self, but a constant process of discovering “the other side, not as exterior to the monad, but as the exterior or outside of its own interiority”, the “in-between of the fold…the zone of inseparability that produces the crease or seam” (Deleuze, “Foldings” 111, 120). This formulation echoes Derrida’s enabling “tain”, Radhakrishnan’s vision of “axial” identity, and Bhabha’s “third space” of negotiating newness, but it adds to these a conception of the historical as itself a site of process that is not, in Walter Benjamin’s phrase, the tyranny of History as “homogeneous empty time” (263).

What follows is a collection of readings broadly informed by the notion of the fold as a way of rethinking the place of Indian English writing within the corpus of contemporary Indian literary expression, and by the evident engagement of Indian English fiction (and the critical debates around it) with national history. Is it true that this writing is “handcuffed to history”? Does being handcuffed give one a certain pull on the things one is handcuffed to? Is history, in any case, the solid restraint suggested by the word “handcuff ”, or is it and its national frame more a fabric into which we are folded and which texts can reconfigure?