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

Sometimes the relationship can be the other way around, but all of the texts discussed in this study reveal a mutually disruptive layering of this kind.

In India, the historical is a major site of conflict: What did occur in the making of the Babri Masjid and the Ayodhya Ram temple? Whose nation came into being post-Raj and how is it justified by the facts of historical record? How can its citizens feel themselves part of the history of a new formation? Subaltern history emerges out of the construction of a national history and its accompanying canon construction, plus the exclusions that these entail. We see middle-class hindutva advocates claiming victim status in the light of historical invasions and the right to remake and own one historical narrative of subcontinental history (Nandy). We also see how underclass (dalit and women’s) voices are excluded from official histories and how they are reclaimed under either a rubric of contestation and correction within the field of the national, or of different epistemologies that not only correct historical record, but also lie beyond the reach of History and its Enlightenment rationalist narratives (Chakrabarty). This idea of incommensurable difference is, to some extent, a critique of the formation of History itself (that is, of the narrative construction and modes of study of the events of the past), but also leaves the historical still installed in a hegemonic position: History now recognises other narratives only in order to inspect its own limitations. It cannot altogether account for—or admit to its own processes—the emergence of a thoroughgoing counter-discourse.

Nonetheless, the concept of epistemological difference introduces to the literary historical field a new model—not of singular trajectories of maturation, nor of plural relativities of the same kind of story (such that more of the same kind of anthologies proliferate as each minority sets up its own canon and tale of emergence), but of contiguous but unassimilable, discontinuous rather than seamless, accounts of new expressions of particular experiences and local histories. The ideal of a “universe of discourse” in which claims for equality can be made is not lost, but it is reconceived in ways that no longer imply subjection to one national or historical master narrative.