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R. Radhakrishnan, along with Homi Bhabha and others, looks for an activist programme that works in tandem with postcolonial and postmodern deconstruction of the oppositional binary. In terms of social and literary histories, they theorise “axiological temporalities”—in which the “before” and the “after” of any foundational midnight of political and cultural dawning spin around each other. The restraints of history are not ignored, nor is the move to break them negated, but in addition, the dynamic envisions a pre/posterous utopic ideal in which the tyranny of history (particularly in its teleological “end of history”, neoimperialist triumphalism) can no longer be imagined.
Salman Rushdie is now famous for imagining the history of at least two nations. Indeed, he suggests that history is, in some parts of the world at least, so overwhelming that it has to be imagined into manageable, humanly bearable shape. The nation is one such comforting shape, but that can either expand to dizzying, explosive proportions or shrink into a terrifying claustrophobia that also threatens to explode under its own pressure. So, to deal with postcolonial history, Rushdie moves progressively from history to myth. Perhaps, as history pushes him into a “house arrest” that he has to imagine himself out of, there is an added impulse towards the abstraction of the historical—but even in a later work like The Ground Beneath Her Feet, the drive to mythification is shot through by a preoccupation with historical events. The book mentions Gianbattista Vico for his ideas on myth (83), but Vico is also a foundational figure in establishing History as a distinct kind of knowledge. Sir Darius Xerxes Cama and William Methwold, harmlessly muddling about in comparative mythology and the idea of all things originating in ancient India, suddenly find that the Aryan myth has become a politically loaded idea: “History had captured their field, and their love of it had placed them on the wrong side” (44). They forsake their intellectual pursuits for physical activity. The racial essentialism of Aryan fantasy is taken over by Piloo Doodhwala, who sees Indian Muslims as converts who have lost their connection to history, thereby rendering them inauthentic (74), but Umeed Merchant, the young international photographer who exposes Doodhwala’s dairy farm scam, tries to be “not over-attached to history” (78) because he knows that the triumphalism of being linked to origins and destiny also means, for many, the tragedy of being destroyed by history.