“INDIA, THE NEW MYTH”: Fictional Challenges to Official Historical Representations of the 1947 Independence and Partition of India

<p><strong>This thesis argues that fictional narratives centered around the 1947 Independence and Partition of India capture a greater nuance and holistic understanding of the events and their aftermath in comparison to their “official”, non-fictional counterparts. Primarily, this is because fictional narratives re-evaluate master narratives of Indian history and their validity to determine fixed notions of Indian identity and nationhood. However, more broadly, the form of fiction challenges the rigid historiographical approaches of “official” narratives to history, as fiction self-awarely incorporates the subjectivity of individual memory, experience and critical perspective in a way that emphasises history’s fluidity and ambiguity. These arguments are contextually underpinned by historical teleologies of the 1947 Independence and Partition of India that were adopted by both India and Pakistan as their official, master narratives of history. These purpose-driven narratives not only dilute and simplify historical events to fit a particular ideological prerogative, but validate the subcontinent’s present-day enforcement of minority marginalisation, religious separatism, cultural hegemony and national uniformity as predetermined by a historical “destiny." In an analysis of Saadat Hasan Manto’s “Khol Do” (1948), “Toba Tek Singh” (1955) and “The Dog of Tithwal” (1987), Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997), this thesis examines fictional representations around the dual historical events across diverse chronological points, critical theories, and literary genres. In doing so, the established “facts” of the events’ official teleological versions are exposed and reevaluated by new discourses. These fictional texts creatively highlight the inherent contextuality, ambiguity and absences of historical representation, thus embodying fiction’s more realistic search for historical truth rather than Indian historiography’s assignment of a concrete, objective purpose to the past. In undermining master narratives of history, and thus their claim to a totalising, statist form of nationhood, the collectivity of these fictional narratives reaffirm India’s identity as diverse, subjective, and multidimensional.</strong></p>