Introduction

I. History and Fiction

Historical fiction is a form of fiction that is set in a particular historical period. An imaginary account of important historical events and figures of that period is presented in historical fiction. In the nineteenth century, this form was prominently developed by British and European novelists. Sir Walter Scott used historical novels to promote a sense of Scottish national and cultural identity. In the twentieth century, the World Wars and the fall of the British Empire made the function of historical fiction in British literature more complex. The novelists feh the need to use historical fiction to develop a common set of cultural images. These images were used to establish a national identity. The novelists revisited previous eras of uncontested British cultural and political supremacy. Their works also demonstrated a wish to understand the present condition. The novelists drew parallels between the tragic events of the past and the tragic events of the present and focused on the role of mankind. William Golding’s The Spire (1964) is set in fourteenth-century England. It narrates a story of the construction of the spire of Salisbury Cathedral. The novel focuses on man’s destructive nature and the disregard for the cost of human lives who were involved in the construction of the spire. Iris Murdoch’s novel, The Red and the Green (1965), narrates the events of the Easter Rebellion of 1916. Both the novels revisit the well-known events in British history to ' illuminate the little-known aspects of these events. A lesser known perspective is adopted in their works. Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger (1992) is set in the mid eighteenth century. It narrates the story of the slave trade form the point of view of a surgeon on board a slave ship (Rousselot 174).

Since the advent of postmodernism in the 1960s, the distinction between historical fiction as an imaginary representation of the past and history as a true account of past events has been challenged (Rousselot 174). Hayden White “has emphasized the need for historians to recognize the literariness of their work, its dependence on the principles of narration and utterance, and therefore the ideological implications underpinning their representation of the past” (174). Commenting on the distinction between historical events and fictional events, Hayden White writes that historians focus on “events which can be assigned to specific time-space locations, events which are (or were) in principle observable, whereas imaginative writers—poets, novelists, playwrights—are concerned with both these kinds of events and imagined, hypothetical, or invented ones” (White 121). The discourse of the historian resembles the discourse of the imaginative writer. The strategies that they use in the composition of their discourses are substantially similar. Many works of history can be read as novels, and many novels can be read as works of history. Histories and novels as verbal artifacts cannot be distinguished from each other. The distinction between the two cannot be made on formal grounds. The truths that these two discourses tell are different (121-22). White observes:

But the aim of the writer of a novel must be the same as that of the writer of a history. Both wish to provide a verbal image of “reality.” The novelist may present his notion of this reality indirectly, that is to say, by figurative techniques, rather than directly, which is to say, by registering a series of propositions which are supposed to correspond point by point to some extra-textual domain of occurrence or happening, as the historian claims to do. But the image of reality which the novelist thus constructs is meant to correspond in its general outline to some domain of human experience which is no less “real’ than that referred to by the historian. (122)

Prior to the French Revolution, there was no opposition between history and fiction. Historiography was considered a literary art. It was a branch of rhetoric, and the theorists recognized the imaginative nature of historiography. Although a distinction between fact and fancy was made by eighteenth century theorists, fancy played a role in the representation of facts. Theorists from Bayle to Voltaire and De Mably recognized that Active techniques were used in the representation of real events. In the eighteenth century, historical writing was judged on scientific as well as literary principles. It was recognized that fictional techniques of representation could be used to present different kinds of truths. These techniques included rhetorical devices, tropes, and figures. These techniques were similar to the techniques of poetry. Historians did not equate truth with fact. In order to represent the truth, historians used reason as well as imagination. They needed to know the techniques of fiction making. Historians began to equate truth with fact in the early nineteenth century. Fiction came to be regarded as the opposite of truth. Fiction which was a way of apprehending reality for the historians became a hindrance (White 123). Hayden White observes:

History came to be set over against fiction, and especially the novel, as the representation of the “actual” to the representation of the “possible" or only “imaginable.” . . . Typically, the nineteenth-century historian’s aim was to expunge every hint of the Active, or merely imaginable, from his discourse, to eschew the techniques of the poet and orator, and to forego what were regarded as the intuitive procedures of the makers of fictions in his apprehension of reality. (123)

Historiography was established as a distinct discipline in the West in the nineteenth century because the theorists began to oppose all forms of myth. Mythic thinking was blamed for the excesses and failures of the Revolution. Historians did not want party prejudices and utopian expectations to influence their interpretation. Historians wanted to find an “objective” way among the conflicting claims of the parties that took shape during and after the Revolution. Demythification of any domain of enquiry also meant the defictionalization of that domain. Thus, History, the realistic science, came to be considered the study of the real, and fiction came to be considered the study of the merely imaginable. It was the Romantic novel that Ranke castigated as mere fancy. Like his contemporaries, he also defined history as the study of the real and the novel as the study of the imaginary. Only a few theorists like J G Droysen recognized that history cannot be written without using the techniques of the orator and the poet. It was not recognized that there were different styles of historical representation as there were different literary styles in the nineteenth century. They were under the illusion that history could be written without using fictional techniques. Historians believed that ideological distortions or inadequate factual data produced different interpretations of the same sets of events (White 123-25). White states:

Most nineteenth-century historians did not realize that, when it is a matter of trying to deal with past facts, the crucial consideration for him who would represent them faithfully are the notions he brings to his representation of the ways parts relate to the whole which they comprise. They did not realize that the facts do not speak for themselves, but that the historian speaks for them, speaks on their behalf, and fashions the fragments of the past into a whole whose integrity is— in its /-^presentation—a purely discursive one. Novelists might be dealing only with imaginary events whereas historians are dealing with real ones, but the process of fusing events, whether imaginary or real, into a comprehensible totality capable of serving as the object of a representation is a poetic process. Here the historians must utilize the same tropological strategies, the same modalities of representing relationships in words, that the poet or novelist uses. In the unprocessed historical record and in the chronicle of events which the historian extracts from the record, the facts exist only as a congeries of continuously related fragments. These fragments have to be put together to make a whole of a particular, not a general, kind. And they are put together in the same ways that novelists use to put together figments of their imaginations to display an ordered world, a cosmos, where only disorder or chaos might appear. (125)

The separation of the literary and the historical has been challenged in postmodern theory. The focus is more on what they share rather than on how they differ. Verisimilitude is seen to be common to both. Both are recognized as “ linguistic constructs, highly conventionalized in their narrative forms, and not at all transparent either in terms of language and structure; and they appear to be equally intertextual, deploying the texts of the past within their own complex textuality” (Hutcheon 106). A number of issues regarding the relationship between historiography and fiction have been raised in postmodern novels: “issues surrounding the nature of identity and subjectivity; the question of reference and representation; the intertextual nature of the past; and the ideological implications of writing about history” (117).

Postmodern historical fiction no longer respects historical authenticity and does not abide by the known facts about important historical events and figures. It is more interested in probing the concept of historical truth and its techniques of representation. Linda Hutcheon has commented upon the impact of postmodernism on the writing of historical fiction in the 1970s and 1980s. Hutcheon coined the term “historiographic metafiction” to describe this particular type of postmodern historical novel (Rousselot 174). Linda Hutcheon, in her seminal work, A Poetics of Postmodernism, defines historiographic metafiction as “those well-known and popular novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages” (Hutcheon 5). Midnight’s Children, Ragtime, Legs are given as examples of historiographic metafiction. Narrative has been the major focus of attention in literature, history, or theory: “Historiographic metafiction incorporates all three of these domains: that is, its theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs (historiographic /wetofiction) is made the grounds for its rethinking and reworking of the forms and contents of the past” (5). Patricia Waugh defines historiographic metafiction as “fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality” (qtd. in Butter 626).

This type of historical novel is self-conscious or self-reflexive. The novel is often concerned with the process of historical research and writing. Although this process is centrally staged in the plot of the novel, it does not lead to any historical conclusion. The narrator is not able to reach any conclusion due to the nature of the historical document under examination. The novel demonstrates that these historical documents have been falsified. More personal documents such as letters and diaries are shown to be unreliable sources of information. The novel discourages any attempts at historical resolution. This kind of novel refuses to believe in any fundamental or essential truths. Intertextuality, parody and irony are the major devices in historiographic metafiction (Rousselot 174-75). Elodie Rousselot writes:

Through parody and irony, historiographic metafiction returns to and draws from those historical texts and discourses in an endeavour to emphasize their problematic representation of the past; parody and irony thus become powerful narrative devices that allow the text simultaneously to return to, and to distance itself from, those historical narratives it attempts to question . . . The authority of the latter is both acknowledged and subverted; irony enables historiographic metafiction to appear to be endorsing the historical approaches promoted in those narratives, while at the same time undermining them. Furthermore, as this subversion takes place from within the parodied text/discourse, historiographic metafiction can address the latter effectively but without losing its distance from it. (175)

These novels “not only explore the workings of literature and lay bare its ontological status as fiction. They additionally engage and unveil the parallels between writing literature and historiography” (Butter 626). What these works suggest is that literature and historiography are acts of construction that do not represent the past naively. The past is reinvented and shaped subjectively and ideologically. Different narrative techniques are used to achieve this purpose. The central characters are often concerned with making sense of the past events. These characters are usually historians, detectives, or archivists who study documents and the past records to make sense of what happened in the past. These novels often use a dual time frame (626). Michael Butter writes:

They are set in a fictional present where one or more characters—often first person narrators who address specific naratees - undertake explorations of the past and frequently reflect on their activities and the epistemological problems they face. Simultaneously, however, the novels are set in a fictional past where the events took place that these (amateur or professional) historians are interested in. Sometimes the version of the past presented in the novel is quite obviously a (re)construction by one or several of the investigators in the fictional present, sometimes novels incorporate various conflicting versions about what has happened that stem from one or more of these investigator figures, and sometimes the story of the investigator figure simply exists alongside the historical narrative with both being related by a more or less covert narrator. Invariably, however, such a juxtaposition of past and present “problematizes the very possibility of historical knowledge”. Accordingly, historiograpic metafiction implies that the past remains ultimately inaccessible, that historical narration is necessarily an act of the imagination, and that historiography, therefore, is not a neutral account of what happened but rather a biased story determined by the needs and convictions of those who tell it. (626)

Historigraphic metafiction suggests that the past cannot be known except through its texts. The textuality of history is laid bare through intertextuality. The focus is also shifted “from factual to fictional intertexts to reveal that the distinction between fact and fiction (or, for that matter, historiography and literature) is not an ontological one but is determined by habit and convention” (Butter 627). One of the devices is the use of interventions by narrator figures. A coherent image of the past is disturbed by interpolating the scenes that are dedicated to the exploration of the past. These metafictional devices are used to lay bare the fictionality of the texts. Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra have also pointed out what the postmodern novelists have pointed out: “historians simply do not describe the past but also create stories about if’ (627). These historians have also emphasized the role that ideology and the narrative template play in the creation of stories. The humanist notion of the homogeneous subject and the essentialist and fixed notions of identity have also been challenged by historiographic metafiction (627).

Historiograpic metafiction’s concern with the contestation of the notions of historical truth and historical representation is similar to the concern of the theoretical approaches like feminism, Marxism, and postcolonial theory. Traditional narratives of the past and their patriarchal, capitalist, and Eurocentric constructions of history have been challenged by these approaches. In the same way, historiographic metafiction focuses on “the misogynistic, racist, and class bias within these historical discourses, and enables the views and perspectives of previously unheard minorities to be taken into consideration” (Rousselot 175). Merging the personal and the political, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight's Children (1981) narrates India’s twentieth-century history from the point of view of an illegitimate child bom on the night of India’s independence. Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry (1989) which is set in seventeenth-century London narrates the history of the Civil War through the perspective of a forgotten woman (175).

Fiction, as a genre, belongs to the world of imagination. Commenting on the relation between fiction and history, Rumina Sethi writes; “In its very nature as fiction.

7 and by belonging to the genre of the unreal, fiction can become an enabling medium to carry the message and yet be free of essentialism” (Sethi 186). Sethi argues that fictional counter-histories change our assumptions and, revise history. The novelists use myth, memory, symbol, ritual or tradition in their narratives. Marquez combines the fabulous and the mythological into the historical in his novels. Regina Janes observes: “The well- read reader, properly plumped with information, can distinguish the real from the invented and mark the changes worked on the real. His sense of the difference between an imagined and an actual reality is not blurred, but sharpened” (qtd. in Sethi 186-7). The novelist uses figurative techniques to represent reality, whereas the historian’s approach to reality is more direct. Both represent the realm of human experience which is as real in literature as it is in history. Historical fiction can be ‘history imagined into fiction’, and it can also be well-researched (195-6). Spivak observes: “The writer acknowledges this by claiming to do research (my fiction is also historical) (while) the historian might acknowledge this by looking at the mechanics of representation (my history is also fictive)” (qtd. in Sethi 196). Although the postmodern novelists produce their versions to counter the politically motivated histories of the professional historians, their novels embody politics of a different kind: “they ask for space in the domain of the historical discourse for alternate modes of representation” (Dhar 59). Postmodern novelists do not believe in objective and disinterested recordings of the past. Readers are made aware of the artifice that goes in the making of historical narratives. The tendency of the historians to present totalized views of the past is questioned in postmodernist fiction (59-60). T N Dhar observes:

Postmodernist metafictional historiography, therefore, is reflective of all the significant trends that stress the fluid relationship between fiction and history. By distrusting continuities and recognizing heterogeneous discourses, it also accepts that historical meaning is “unstable, contextual, relational and provisional” . .. In such a framework, novels become either alternative representations of the past, representations of repressed voices in history, or vehicles for suggesting the provisional nature of the whole enterprise of these representations. (60) Salman Rushdie, in his essay, “Imaginary Homelands”, observes: “description itself is a political act. The black American writer Richard Wright once wrote that black and white Americans were engaged in a war over the nature of reality. Their descriptions were incompatible” (13). The novelists redescribe the past. Commenting on how the official version of the past and the fictional rendering of the past differ, Rushdie states:

the state takes reality into its own hands, and sets about distorting it, altering the past to fit its present needs, then the making of the alternative realities of art, including the novel of memory, becomes politicized. ‘The struggle of man against power,’ Milan Kundera has written, ‘is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’ Writers and politicians are natural rivals; they fight for the same territory. And the novel is one way of denying the official, politicians’ version of truth. (14).

II. History-Fiction Interface in the Post-modern Indian English Novel

The works of the Indian English novelists of the 1980s and 1990s show a renewed interest in history. Their novels question the role and methods of historical writing which are based on European models. Nationalist writers used these models in the construction of hegemonic historical narratives. In the Indian English Fiction of the 1980s and the 1990s, “the narrator more self-consciously takes on the role of historian trying to recuperate events of the past that were excluded or suppressed from the official narrative” (Srivastava 110). Recent trends in Indian historiography, represented by the Subaltern Studies Collective played an important role in the development of this novel (110). Commenting on how novels and historiography attempted to recuperate a different form of historical writing, Jon Mee observes:

Historiography and the novel are tied together as genres which continually return to figure the Indian nation as the site of an incomplete or fractured modernity. The desire to find some third form of writing ... to reproduce this fracturing not as a grievous lack in the nation but as something different or as a supplement which challenges the authority of its master narratives of nation and modernity, has been as much a part of the novel - at least Since Rushdie - as it has been a part of historiography at least since Subaltern Studies, (qtd. in Srivastava 111).

In Midnight’s Children (1981), a novel of memory, Rushdie has created an imaginary homeland. He does not claim historical accuracy. What we find in the novel is the truth of memory, and of imagination. Saleem Sinai tells Padma that he is narrating “Memory’s truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, it’s heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events” (qtd. in Juneja 98). Rushdie makes Saleem Sinai suspect in his narration. His mistakes are the mistakes of a fallible memory. Rushdie presents a different perspective on the history of India beginning in 1915 and ending with the Emergency in 1977. Saleem narrates important historical events that happened in recent past. The fictional and the historical intermingle in the novel. Saleem’s birth coincides with the birth of the nation. Saleem, like other Indians, wants to encapsulate the whole reality. He knows that he would not succeed. Therefore, Rushdie uses the grotesque as the technique. Parody is used as the structural principle of the novel. Rushdie parodies Arabian Nights to tell the story of the scandals that shocked India. Political leaders of the Indian subcontinent; Indira Gandhi, Morarji Desai and General Ayub, are parodied. Rushdie also parodies T S Eliot’s poems and James Joyce’s novels (99-100). Commenting on Saleem Sinai and the treatment of history in the novel, Om Juneja writes:

After having retired from active life, Saleem Sinai goes back to his pickle factory for “the chutnification of history: the grand hope of the pickling of time!” (459). He finally obliterates the distance between the author and historical reality, when he tells us that “in words and pickles, I have immortalized my memories, although distortions are inevitable in both methods” (459). In doing so, Saleem-Rushdie is both master and victim of his time (463) as he is both shaped by history and also shapes history. As a historical witness, a post-colonial novelist may not be reliable because he chutnifies history. For him, the historical and the fictional are two sides of the same coin. By his dismantling the historical through the

10 counterculture of imagination, Rushdie promotes polyphony and redefines the past. (101)

Religious and magical events are excluded from the discourse of history as this discourse requires a disciplining of imagination. This restriction does not apply to fictional discourse. Rushdie includes magical events and prophesies in his novel. Commenting on the chutnification of history, Rushdie writes that he is able “to include memories, dreams, ideas, so that once they enter mass-production all who consume them will know what pepperpots achieved in Pakistan, or how it felt to be in the Sunderbans ... Thirty jars stand upon a shelf, waiting to be unleashed on the amnesiac nation” (qtd in Srivastava 119). Different narrative genres-historical writing, fiction, oral tales-have been incorporated in the novel. Passages from Stanley Wolpert’s A New History of India punctuate Saleem’s narrative as he tells his life-story. Wolpert’s book is an official history. Unlike Wolpert’s book which is a standard interpretation of South Asian history, “Rushdie’s narrative of historical events such as Partition shows an interest in recuperating a history from below” (121).

As Midnight’s Children narrates the history of India, Rushdie’s Shame (1983) narrates the history of Pakistan. The novel focuses on the lives of Omar Khayyam Shakil and Sufiya Zinobia. It also narrates the story of the two important architects of Pakistan’s history—Raza Hyder (General Zia) and Iskander Harappa (Zulfikar Bhutto). Commenting on the locale of Shame, Rushdie writes that the country in the novel is not Pakistan. Two countries, real and imaginary, occupy the same space: “My story, my fictional country exists, like myself, at a slight angle to reality. I have found this off- centring to be necessary; but its value is, of course open to debate. My view is that 1 am not writing only about Pakistan” (qtd. in Pathak 218). Rushdie describes the novel as a modem fairy-tale. History and fiction intermingle in the novel. Rushdie observes: “I build imaginary countries and try to impose them on the ones that exist. I, too, face the problem of history: what to retain, what to dump, how to hold on to what memory insists on relinquishing, how to deal with change . . .” (qtd. in Pathak 218). Rushdie justifies his imaginative treatment of history:

11 Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems—but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible . . . tiny details assume grotesque proportions (first); (then) the illusion dissolves—or rather, it becomes clear that the illusion itself is reality” (qtd. in Pathak 219).

A series of young novelists have written historical narratives in order to recuperate “histories squeezed out of the state’s homogenizing myth of the nation” (Mee 132). These novelists have often used a hyperbolic epic mode for which they are indebted to Rushdie. Allan Sealy’s The Trotter-Nama (1988) is an “epic chronicle of a family of Anglo-Indians, a community whose presence troubles the imagining of the nation in terms of the expression of some homogenous cultural authenticity, an idea which the novel suggests is derived from a colonial mentality” (132). The novel depicts how Eugene struggles to include everything in his family chronicle. His inclusive narrative method which is the method of the nama or chronicle can be contrasted with that of European historiography. Sealy’s novel suggests that historiography as a genre is complicit with the colonizing mission of the West. It is critical of European historians who wish to reduce all histories to a universal narrative modelled on their own history. History is novelized in the chronicle form of the novel. The privileged language of truth is not used by Eugene. What Eugene says is continually questioned and interrupted. This narrative strategy has been used to write a kind of new postcolonial history. Sealy uses the nama, a traditional Indian form, instead of western historiography. The genre of the colonizer has been displaced with the genre of the colonized. The novel does not depict any nostalgia for the past, for some precolonial, essential Indian identity. A distinctively Indian version of modernity has been negotiated through this displacement. Sealy has said that many Indian forms can be revived and reworked (132-33).

Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel (1989) also uses traditional Indian forms for the purposes of historical narration. The story of the Mahabharata is adapted to an allegory of modem Indian history. A sceptical view of the development of modern India has been taken in the novel. Sealy and Tharoor have not simply placed contemporary material in traditional forms. They have rewritten the genres of Indian

12 literary tradition. Before Sealy and Tharoor, Raja Rao had adapted the European form of the novel to indigenous literary traditions. In his Kanthapura, the history of the nationalist struggle is told in the form of the sthalapurana or legendary history of the village. Raja Rao did not use the colonial model of historiography. Unlike the novels of Rushdie, Sealy and Tharoor, Raja Rao’s novel does not have an intrusive narrative voice. This novel does not draw attention to the process of telling. Rushdie's idea of the 'chutnification of history’ is that a variety of ingredients are used to make a history. This ^ history cannot be captured by any one representative part. In Kanthapura, the village ^ symbolizes the nation. In the literature of the national movement, the village life was used as the antithesis of western industrialism. The Indian village has been replaced by the modern metropolis in recent fiction. The relationship between the nation and its symbols is no longer stable for these novelists.'The image of Saleem cracking up under the weight of representing the nation is an appropriate example. Unlike the villagers of Kanthapura, Sealy’s Anglo-Indians have a troubled relationship with the nation. Recent fiction illustrates that any particular group as a metonym for ‘the people' cannot be used (Mee 133-34).

Mukul Kesavan’s Looking through Glass (1995) also addresses the issue of translating Indian history into the novel. Kesavan, a historian by profession, uses his own research to examine the relationship between the Muslim population and the nationalist movement. The novel is about the erasure of the Muslim community from nationalist histories. The novel offers an alternative account of the closing years of the struggle for independence. Towards the beginning of the novel, a young photographer takes the ashes of his grandmother to the Ganges. He falls from a railway bridge as he tries to take a picture. When he wakes up, he finds himself in 1942 amid the Quit India movement. He travels across time. He is given shelter by a Muslim family (Mee 134). Commenting on the novel, Jon Mee writes;

In a sense, photography is evoked in this framing narrative as the governing metaphor of the whole story. The photograph promises to deliver unmediated reality to its viewer, but the image is framed and focused in ways which always leave something out of the equation. Kesavan’ s hero becomes mired in history in

13 a way which implies that the historian can provide not a clear window onto the real, but only a lens which frames and refracts what it sees. If all of the novelists (discussed by Mee in the article) share an interest in retrieving suppressed histories, they all at the same time foreground in their different ways the act of narration. The process of examining the exclusions from the national imaginary seems to have brought about a recognition of the nature of history as itself a form of narrative which relies on literary devices such as emplotment and metaphor to create its meaning. (134)

Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance (1995) is a realist text. The novel is deeply critical of the excesses of the Emergency. As opposed to postmodern techniques, the novel uses realism to condemn social injustice and tyranny of the state. The novel depicts how the poorer sections of the population were forcibly sterilized during the nation-wide sterilization campaign. Ishvar and Om, the poor tailors, become victims of this campaign. When they protest, the officials call them ignorant. One of the victims says: “What to do, bhai, when educated people are behaving like savages. How do you talk to them? When the ones in power have lost their reason, there is no hope” (qtd. in Srivastava 90-1). Events are narrated from the point of view of the dispossessed. Mistry does not equate ‘development’ with progress and reason (91). The novel describes the policemen as intolerant and utterly contemptuous of the poor. The two tailors, Ishvar and Om, belong to a lower caste. The upper caste people of the village burn to death their immediate family. When they go to the police station to file a complaint, the police threaten them. When Ashraf, their Muslim friend, intervenes, the police tell him that he should not interfere as the police do not interfere when they discuss problems in their community (134-5). Commenting on the solidarity of the underclasses in the novel, Neelam Srivastava observes:

Muslims and Hindus on the lower social scale are portrayed as having formed alliances that those in authority deride, revealing very clearly their own class prejudices, coupled with a profoundly communal outlook. Realism and authorial identification with the narrative voices are used by Mistry to describe, and hence condemn, the corruptness and ignorance of those in power. (135)

14 III. Indian English Literature and Regional Language Literatures

Indian English writers have been criticized by Indian-language writers since the 1930s. These writers claim that the writers writing in English consciously collaborate with the colonizer. As these writers write in English, they have been alienated from their origins and cultural traditions. Since English in not their native language, their works can only imitate the writings of English writers. The real life of the subcontinent cannot be effectively represented by a foreign language like English (Dharwadker 240). Bhalchandra Nemade, a noted Marathi writer and critic, has been deeply critical of Indian Writing in English. For Nemade, lEL is the expression of Western literary culture, rather than that of Indian literary culture. M K Naik finds this statement naive. Modern Indian literature has also heavily borrowed from western literature. The novel and personal poetry are imported forms from the West. Naik asks: “Who can be more rooted in the Hindu ethos than Ramanujan? Who more steeped in Orissan culture than Jayanta Mahapatra, and more thoroughly immersed in the metropolitan spirit of Bombay than Nissim Ezekiel?” (Naik 174). Another allegation is that the Indian English writer mostly writes ‘tourist fiction’, meant for the foreign reader. Living in metropolitan cities, these writers write novels on impoverished villagers and the Indian freedom struggle. Their knowledge of India is minimal and is acquired through newspaper reports. Naik defends lEL by giving the example of two important works in lEL. Raja Rao’s Kanthapura (1938) presents an authentic picture of the Indian freedom movement in a south Indian village. Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (1935) deals with the life of the untouchables (174-75). Another charge of the regional writer is that the Indian English writer enjoys a wider readership, hogs the limelight and gets fabulous royalties. Naik suggests a remedy. The works of the regional writer should be translated into English for a wider readership. Nemade argues that lEL will become obsolete when a “well planned programme of translation from the regional languages into English is undertaken” (176). Naik disagrees with Nemade. lEL is about two hundred years old. It cannot disappear suddenly, and there are very few translations of the works of regional language writers (176). It is also alleged that Indian writing in English is not original. Vinay Dharwadkar observes that Indian English writing of the 70s and 80s has broken through this scepticism of the West. The works of writers like R K Narayan, Raja Rao, G V Desani, Anita Desai, Nissim

15 Ezekiel, Arun Kolatkar, Jayant Mahapatra, Bharati Mukherjee, A K Ramanujan, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, and Vikram Seth are on par with the best works in the British Commonwealth. The relations between Indian English and the regional Indian languages have changed due to the explosion of high-quality writing of Indian English writers. These writers have shown that they can produce great or original works in English. Indian English literature is no longer viewed as a comprador literature that merely imitates Anglo-American literature without challenging the colonial authority. The prejudice that lEL cannot represent Indian experience authentically has also been undermined. Ironically, some of the models for writing in the Indian languages have been provided by lEL. Allegory, fantasy, and magic realism are commonly used in the works of Indian-language writers (Dharwadkar 240).

G N Saibaba argues that the critics of Indian Writing in English have attempted to prioritize Indian English literature over the literatures from various regional languages of India. He sees this attempt as a perpetuation of the legacy of the colonialist literary discourse. Saibaba observes:

it is a powerful method of institutionalization of literary texts written in English and Indian languages, while attributing a dominant role for Indian English literature in order to prioritise it over Indian languages literature thus seeking to make it represent India as a homogeneous nation for the outside world and for the domestic classes who benefit from India as a monolithic nation. (67)

M K Naik has criticized K N Daruwalla and Salman Rushdie for dismissing the entire body of Indian regional writing. K N Daruwalla did not include a single writer from the numerous Indian languages in an Anthology entitled Two Decades of Indian Poetry, published in 1980. Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West also omitted the works of regional writers in their Vintage Book o f Indian Writing: 1947-1997. Rushdie defends this omission in his introduction:

Prose writing-both fiction and non-fiction created in this period by Indian writers working in English is proving to be a stronger and more important body of work

16 than most of what has been produced in the 16 ‘official languages of India....during the same time... “Indo-Anglian” literature represents perhaps the most valuable contribution India has yet made to the world of books” (qtd. in Naik 177-78).

Naik finds this statement rash. The entire body of Indian regional writing cannot be dismissed. It is nothing but colonialism. Rushdie is not aware of B S Mardhekar’s contribution to Marathi poetry. He does not seem to know the experimental plays of Vijay Tendulkar in Marathi. Works of substantial literary value have been written in many Indian languages. Rushdie deliberately ignores these works (Naik 178). It is because of stances like this that regional-language writers have been alienated from Indian English writers. One more claim is made on behalf of lEL. The claim is that pan- Indian sensibility is represented by the Indian English writer, while the regional writer represents only his/her region. One should not forget that the works of R K Narayan, Jayant Mahapatra, and Mulk Raj Anand are rooted in their respective regions (178). Vilas Sarang also makes a claim similar to Rushdie’s: “. . . English language itself may be in the process of usurping the place of the Indian languages. This would admittedly be a slow process, given the vastness of India; yet, in the twenty-first century, Indian English poetry may be the chief poetry of India” (qtd. in Naik 178-79). Naik finds this claim preposterous. Poetry in regional languages cannot die out. On the contrary, it is flourishing. Modem Marathi Dalit poetry is an example (179).

IV. Indian Literature(s) in English Translation

In the 20* century, Indian writers writing in regional languages began to translate their works. Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Romesh Chundur Dutt, and Rabindranath Tagore translated their works. These works “illustrate the desire to represent India to the western reader as a land of spiritualism, exotica, romance and grandeur. These efforts may be interpreted first as the wish to represent India to the West for all its perceived value, and second to essentialize India for that value” (Rahman 164). Acceptance from the West was sought by these translators. More complicated contexts of translation are offered by the mid- to late 20* century. The translators have felt the need to evolve the definition of Indian literature and to establish its importance. These translators are “concerned to voice

17 postcolonial concerns that include questions of universality and difference, representation and resistance, nationalism and hybridism, ethnicity and indigeneity, production and consumption” (164-5). A new literary culture has been created by these translators. Prominent translators of Indian literatures into English include A K Ramanujan, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, William Radice, Ralph Russell, Qurrutulain Hyder, Agyeya, C M Naim, Mohammad Umer Memon, Girish Kamad, Dilip Chitre, R Parthasarthy, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, and Vinay Dharwadker. Their poetics represents postcolonial concerns. Ramanujan has revived an ancient Tamil poetic tradition in his Poems o f Love and War. Ramanujan writes in the Translator’s Note: “These poems are ‘classical’, i.e. early, ancient; they are also ‘classics’, i. e. works that have stood the test of time, the founding works of a whole tradition. Not to know them is not to know a unique and major poetic achievement of the Indian civilization” (165). The aim of these translators is to revive the Indian literary heritage. Dilip Chitre’s Says Tuka is also an act of revival. Anisur Rahman observes: “Such endeavours involve more than merely translating texts because they require revisiting the classics for contemporary relevance, reliving a tradition and reinventing a form for the modem reader” (165). Spivak’s translations of Mahasweta Devi’s works belong to a different category. Spivak’s translations construct a discourse of resistance. The aim of these translators seems to be the development of a new literary tradition for India (165). Rahman observes:

the distinction between Indian English literature and Indian literature in English is rapidly disappearing in India, particularly in the academy where canons are revised and new frames of references are established. The strength of Indian literatures lies in the heterogeneity of perceptions, narrative forms, crosscultural communications, interconnections and intertextualities. One may now safely assert that postcolonial translation is in itself an act of resistance against the essentialist paradigms of colonialism and colonial writing because it examines the broader question of representation and is able to create a new canonical framework. The translator of Indian literatures in English is rediscovering a past, turning the historical into contemporary and the exotic into the strikingly real. S/he, like all other translators, is seeking a new readership but is doing so with the determination and ability to make cross-cultural representations rather than

18 homogenizing a variety of literary traditions. The translator is contributing towards an understanding of the new dynamics of life that include cultural norms

and political systems. (169)

V. Prosubaltern Indian Literatures

Indian Writing in English has been predominantly middle-class. A distinction can be made between the works written by dominant groups, such as urban, upper class writers, and the works of subordinated groups, such as middle-class women, lower-caste men and women. A distinction can also be made between prosubaltern writing and antisubaltem or elitist writing. The post-Independence left-wing movement in India has produced prosubaltem literature. The writers of this movement are “ from dominant groups, who are driven by the guilt of belonging to a protected and privileged middle class in a country where a very high proportion of the population still lives in dehumanizing poverty” (Dharwadker 239). Literature about the lives of the tribals is included in this literature. Writers like Mahasweta Devi in Bengali and Sitakant Mahapatra in Oriya are the major writers of this group. A large number of activist-writers have also devoted their literary careers to the depiction of the lives of the oppressed. According to Krishna Baldev Vaid, the Hindi novelist, the goals of Indian fiction should be ; “portrayal of poverty, hunger and disease; portrayal of widespread social evils and tension; examinations of the survival of the past; exploration of the hybrid culture of the educated middle class; analysis of the innumerable dislocations and conflicts in a tradition-ridden society . ..” (qtd. in Dharwadker 239). In Indian literatures, there are two movements involving writers who actually belong to the subordinated sections of the society. The women’s movement in the literatures of the Indian languages is one of the movements. The works of these women writers have mainly focused on the unequal distribution of power within middle class Hindu, Muslim and Sikh societies. Amrita Pritam in Punjabi, Gagan Gill in Hindi, and Rajani Parulekar in Marathi are the representative writers of this movement. Their works also deal with “more complicated situations in which gender inequities combine with asymmetries between upper and lower classes, higher and lower castes, urban and rural environments, older and younger generations, and so on” (239).The other movement is that of Dalit writers who write in

19 languages like Marathi, Gujarati, and Kannada. The writings of these writers are anti­ middle-class. These writers defy the norms of traditional literature. Dalit women’s writing is at the bottom of this hierarchy. Dalit women writers challenge gender domination as well as caste and class domination in their works (Dharwadker). Commenting on prosubaltem writing, Vinay Dharwadker observes:

In practically all the cases of prosubaltern writing—whether by subalterns themselves or by their supporters and sympathizers in the dominant groups—we see the articulation of an intricate vision of social justice, not unlike the ones found in the corresponding revolutionary and subaltern movements in, say, Latin American, Caribbean, and African literatures of the postwar period. (240)

VI. The Research Problem

The purpose of the research undertaken is the study of modern Indian Fiction in English and in English translation in the light of Antonio Gramsci’s concept of the subaltern and the recent interpretations of the concept. The study examines the representation of subaltern pasts in the novels of Mahasweta Devi and Amitav Ghosh. The primary texts that I have studied are: Mahasweta Devi’s Bashai Tudu, Titu Mir, and Chotti Munda and his Arrow and Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome, In an Antique Land, and The Glass Palace. Colonialist historiography and nationalist historiography have erased the histories of the subaltern classes. The focus of the study is on how Indian novelists narrativise those experiences and events which have been erased and forgotten by mainstream historians. Gramsci observes that the history of the subaltern classes is fragmentary. The subaltern classes leave very few traces of their lives. The study examines how these novelists use folk-tales, legends, and oral narratives to provide an alternative history of the lives of the underprivileged. The way the novelist reads the colonial archive against the grain in order to open up a space for subaltern pasts has also been examined. The study focuses on how the novelist finds a few fragments of the subaltern past in the official records and builds on these fragments to reconstruct the history of the forgotten people. Since the discourse of history is based on evidence, and the subaltern classes do not leave any written records, these novelists reconstruct their

20 lives through imagination. The study also examines the ways in which the novels question the discourse of history.

21