LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 13:6 June 2013
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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Representation of History in Rahi Masoom Reza’s A Village Divided and Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace
M.Phil. Dissertation

Imran A.K. Surti

Contents
Preface

Chapter 1 Introduction

Chapter 2 History and Fiction as Narratives

Chapter 3 Subaltern Reading of History in Rahi Masoom Reza’s A Village Divided

Chapter 4 Subaltern Reading of History in Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace

Chapter 5 Conclusion

Bibliography

Post-Colonialism, New Historicism and Subaltern Studies have a great distrust for the apparatus of traditional historiography. They find it as an incompetent medium of capturing and representing the bruised memories of human beings, tried and perplexed in real life situations. They attempt to render a more authentic, consistent and interpretative version of history, which is contradictory to the mainstream discourses or official documentation of history. Theirs is a perspective determined by foregrounding the inaudible, marginalized voices in the narrative.

Historians have generally been more interested in making an epistemological break with the past to create the protocol of objectivity, than in producing the “touch of the real”. Counter-histories, in the forms of autobiographies, biographies, interviews, oral history, archives, survivors’ accounts and most importantly literary narratives oppose not only the dominant narratives on history, but also the prevailing modes of historical thought, methods and research.

Subaltern Studies primarily deal with the history of the losers, with the envisioning of counterfactuals and provisional historical worlds, with delayed and alternative chronologies, with the reality of unrealized possibilities. It has made a noteworthy contribution to the discourse on the representation of history. As a form of “counter-history”, it is very often placed in contradiction to mainstream discourses on history like Nationalist narratives, Orientalist images, ethnic stereotypes, and Hindu majoritarianism. It specializes in representing individual and collective histories ‘from below’. Though basically it originated as a theory of social science in order to re-define autonomous, radical class struggles in modern times, I think that it can also be applied to the literary, cultural and historical studies. It inspires bottoming up the studies of people whose history had previously either been subdued or evaded. Though it primarily focuses on peasants’ insurgency, it also takes into consideration the process of reading history from ‘below’, which invariably incorporates the significance of individual and collective histories. Such individual and collective histories are recollected and conjoined with the present with the help of the synthesizing power of creative imagination and memory, amidst the dynamic flux of larger historical forces and events. I have applied the Subaltern Studies’ approach of interpreting

This is only the beginning part of the dissertation. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE DISSERTATION IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Imran A.K. Surti
Lecturer in English
M.T.B. Arts College
Surat
Gujarat
India
imransurti24@gmail.com
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