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If this study has a theoretical base, it is in the broad area of New Historicism, wherein history is not seen as an extratextual given to be transcribed more or less accurately into fiction, but is itself textually constructed, just as texts are historically situated and produced. Inside and outside not only overlap, but also interfuse—in this case especially because they are both part of the project of building nation and national culture. Thus even the most quotidian detailing of present life in Amit Chaudhuri’s A Strange and Sublime Address contains a scene of two boys playing out a generic “goodies and baddies” struggle that is not cowboys and Indians or cops and robbers, but “freedom fighters”, with Gandhi opposed to Subhas Chandra Bhose (78–79). There is no point trying to categorise such a work within the genre theories descended from Georgy Lukács, but nonetheless, this is still a fiction subtly “handcuffed to history”.
My emphasis is not particularly original, though it may have a special relevance to writing from India, given that, as Rukmini Bhaya Nair observes, “[h]istorians, not critics, are the missionaries of interpretation in India” (“The Pedigree of the White Stallion” 45), thanks to the interventions of the Subaltern Studies group. I would argue that an understanding of the nature and workings of History is vital to postcolonial literary studies in general, since someone’s sense of the historical and how to process it lies behind the critical judgement and placement of texts in literary histories—lies behind the constructions of canons and the creation of cultural values. If Nair is correct in seeing Subaltern Studies as a radical corrective to Literary studies, it is nonetheless true that postcolonial literatures are defined by most writers and critics as wrestling with the collective rather than the individual, and the political over the aesthetic. This takes in the study of the historical framing of texts and their processing of historical events and ideas within analysis of politics of difference and of representing “subaltern” difference to/in “mainstream” culture. For Subalternist historians and colonial novelists alike, “[d]ocuments are the surest signs of power” (48)—even when they sign the vacancy of the subaltern (witness Amitav Ghosh’s search for the elusive Bomma in In an Antique Land and Nair’s own discussion of the importance of paper in Kim).