15 - Some Uses of History: Historiography, Politics, and the Indian Novel

Summary

A foundational assumption of conventional literary history is that, like any other cultural or physical institution, the novel can be plotted through a more or less linear trajectory of formal change. In other words, within the disciplinary project of literary history it is assumed that “history” will describe a certain temporally structured developmental narrative about how the novel has evolved (in this case in an Indian national context). Yet a history of the novel is not quite the same thing as a study of the novel in – or in relation to – history, nor does it always give us the scope to ask questions about how literature interacts with or intervenes in history. Rather than placing the Indian novel in a literary-historical frame, then, this chapter argues for the equal importance of understanding how Indian fiction reflects on history. How, for instance, does the Indian novel relate to variant (and highly culturally specific) modes of knowing history? How has it supported particular historiographies and interpretations of history? And how does the novel position itself textually in relation to contested or overwritten historical narratives?

A. K. Ramanujan's poem “Some Indian Uses of History on a Rainy Day” from the collection Relations (1971) promises some answers to these questions and suggests, somewhat whimsically, that Indian “uses of history” might be localized and culturally specific. Structured in three stanzas, the poem presents three particular “uses” of history: in the first of these vignettes of historical consciousness, set in Madras in 1965, bank clerks waiting in the rain to get “the single seat / in the seventh bus” remind themselves of the religious devotees who waited, more patiently, for a ceremonial gift from “Old King Harsha” and, as they eventually give up and begin to walk home, console themselves with the measured reflection that “King Harsha's / monks had nothing but their own two feet.” In the second stanza, which moves the poem's setting to Egypt “every July,” Ramanujan pictures Indian Fulbright scholars, “faces pressed against the past / as against museum glass” in a Cairo museum, “amazed” at the sight “of mummies swathed in millennia / of Calicut muslin.”