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

Mondal sees Raja Rao’s Kanthapura attempting to maintain the hegemonic narrative of cultural tradition while having to reflect the bind Gandhi himself got into—that economic arguments against Raj exploitation invoked a historicised modernity which ultimately dominated politics and resulted in Nehru’s ascendancy. So, if Rushdie plays between history and myth, he is not altogether ushering in a new literary mode, but merely continuing a dynamic around the national project in a new, flashy style.

Indian writing in English inherits this problematic. As a body of work existing only because of historical “accidents”, Indian writing in English can do no other than attest to modern historicity. In witnessing to its own foundational circumstances, however, it also contests claims of writing in other Indian languages to primordial authority—since it must either reflect them, by contrast, as “pre-historic” in their close ties to tradition, or show them, by comparison, to be equally historically determined. On the one hand, we can see how Indian writing in English helped to create a sense of the historical coeval with the nation (overtly signalled in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, where the nation is founded on a moment in historical time, and less obviously evident in R. K. Narayan’s work, which is peppered with references to colonial times and Gandhian resistance campaigns); on the other, Indian English writing has continually to advert to cultural continuity to affirm its own belonging, and in doing so (as with Rushdie’s ageless boatman Tai and his magic “abracadabra” enchantments, and Narayan’s circling around dharma and rebirth and divine grace) is led to the mythic, if not specifically to the Hindu classics. In more recent times, this produces the interesting contradiction of a class and generation of writers inclined towards Nehru’s secular democracy that keeps citing religious concepts and/or texts as organising principles. As Khushwant Singh, Chaman Nahal, Nayantara Sahgal, and others have shown, to be a modern nation is to be plunged into history, which is also to participate in conflict and tragedy. However, if the nation is an “imagined community”, then it requires some imagined ideal to keep it together—one that can sit beyond the contingencies of everyday politics, offering hope and inspiration. This is the dialectic facing all Indian literature, but perhaps that in English most particularly.