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Rushdie’s phrase “Handcuffed to history” suggests the argument that Indian modernity is the product of a series of historical moments (1757, 1835, 1857, 1919, 1948, and so on) and the nation is an invention derived, in part, from overseas ideas of proper governance. From a literary perspective, it also hints at the submission of one kind of textuality and constructed reality (Literature) to another kind (History) accorded a far greater priority (in both senses of the word). Without history—the succession of past events—there would be no Indian novel, and certainly no Indian novel in English. Without History—the codified narrative of those events—our understanding of Literature and of the place in it of Indian English writing might appear quite different. Unconscious acceptance of literature as framed by the historical produces a corresponding set of contestations. These lie at the centre of postcolonial literary studies, since Matthew Arnold’s rejection from the arena of aesthetics of historical-based judgements entrenched an uninspected high-culture ideal of pure literature that led to the institutionalising of a powerful idea of canonical universal value. Ironically, as Gauri Viswanathan has shown, this was made possible by the entirely pragmatic decision to teach English Literature in the colonies as a “neutral” means of equipping a new native class of middle management. (It is not unlike the move nowadays to locate British and American call centres in India and educate staff accordingly.) However, until this contradiction can be seen (through historical research!), the historical contingency of universality and the canon is not visible, and the work of “colonials” (or Anglophone “postcolonials”) is doomed to eternal imitation, secondariness, and rejection.
So, we find in postcolonial studies a progressive theorising of the place of history in literature and in culture in order to clear a space for, first, the “children” not of an Indian midnight alone, but of the Commonwealth in general, and then of a host of minority and subaltern voices from around the globe and inside the centres of metropolitan postcolonial power. Bruce King makes the point that there is no one master narrative of any national literary history, since works emerging from new nations (even fiction in regional languages from protonational formations, like the stories of Prem Chand or Tagore) arise from both their own local traditions and those of the genres adopted and adapted, whether they be found in Dickens or Balzac or Chekhov.