Salman Rushdien Keskiyön lapset ja sen kirjalliset perilliset länsimaisen historiankirjoituksen haastajina ja Intian historian uudelleenkirjoittajina

• Raita Merivirta Tampereen yliopisto

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30665/av.74923

Abstract

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Its Literary Heirs as Challengers of Western Historiography and Rewriters of Indian History

This article discusses Indian English historiographic novels of the 1980s and 1990s and asks how Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) and Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel (1989) among others challenged Western historiographical models (in Indian historical context) and highlighted Indian traditions of accessing the past. I suggest that these novels demonstrate the European models of historiography to be historically and culturally specific, not the necessary master-narratives of all histories. The novels also challenge the essentialist, teleological and conclusive aspirations of (realist) fiction and history-writing. In addition to being critical re-evaluations of twentieth-century Indian history, these historiographic novels thus attempt to problematise traditional Western historiography and historical knowledge. Many of them can be characterised as historiographic metafiction as the narrators ponder questions of historical truth and the validity of historical knowledge, and even present Indian alternatives of writing history for the dominant European ones. These novels, which deal with modern Indian history, problematise the matter of India and question some of the established conventions of traditional historical writing by using ancient Indian myths, oral tradition and such literary means as satire, magic realism and/or metafictional devices. This does not mean substituting myths for facts but freeing historiography from its Eurocentric constraints. Midnight’s Children, The Great Indian Novel and other Indian English historical novels also challenge European notions of linear and universal time and juxtapose them with classical Indian notions of time, reminding Western readers of the Eurocentricity of our thinking and how we tend to take our concept of time as universally valid.