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Reason, in fact, becomes a ruthless emperor, setting the lower passions to work for its own purposes and sacrificing them to its will (33). Passionate postcolonial histories might well rise up in revolt against such an empire, though the empire might not recognise them as History.
Dieter Riemenschneider notes that critical work on Indian English writing may point to fiction’s engagement with history (as does, for example, Meenakshi Mukherjee’s The Twice-Born Fiction), but mostly fails itself to provide a theoretically informed look at historiography or periodisation (The Indian Novel in English 2, 14). This work is not a contribution to that project, but it is an attempt to consider the continued investment in and sometimes attack on the idea of history and the domination of history over literary expression. In the process, it may well critique the received periodisation that separates pre-Rushdie works about the ideals of nation formation from the later generations of writers supposedly distant from or disillusioned with those ideals (Riemenschneider, The Indian Novel in English 16; Khair 55). We might posit as a model for mapping the field a generic affinity rather than a clear chronology insofar as Salman Rushdie alludes to G. V. Desani as a forerunner, thereby confusing the “before and after Midnight’s Children” division of Indian English literary history—although, as Arvind Krishna Mehrotra observes, there is now a developing historiographic line of connection from Desani to Rushdie to Mukul Kesavan (for example) amid the otherwise erratic, scattered movements of Indian English fiction’s development (Riemenschneider, The Indian Novel in English 29–30). In fact, in HomeSpun, a recent novel from yet one more diasporic Indian, a globalised and ironic attitude slips lesbian “cool” into a tale of cross-community, cross-class romance that is also a journalist’s exposé of how an Indian Air Force pilot very probably lost his life under friendly fire during the 1965 war with Pakistan. However, in creating a very modern narrative, the writer continues to rehearse values of Gandhian nationalism and national pride by harking back (comically at times, but still harking back) to a grandfather’s involvement in noncooperation and to the fighter pilot’s youthful transformation into a filmi pin-up boy for Indian liberty (Vachani).