| "Working Through Indian History: Historiographic Intervention in Fiction of the Subcontinent, 1935--1985" is a study of Indian and British literary works that revisit several crucial moments in the history of India's decolonization and its establishment as an independent nation-state: the Gandhian agitation of the thirties, the achievement of national independence and the tragedy of territorial partition in 1947, and the consolidation of state power at the center that culminated in the Emergency of 1975. Adopting a critical perspective that combines postcolonial studies, psychoanalysis, and narrative theory, I theorize a mode of fictional narrative that intervenes into Indian historiography by bearing witness to the traumatic processes of anti-colonial insurgency, decolonization, and state repression. By inviting readers to view Indian history therapeutically rather than objectively, this literature of historiographic intervention uses history not as the ultimate product of archival research and reportage, but instead as part of the process by which traumas of the past are encountered and understood. Drawing on the Freudian concept of transference as a starting point---and then broadening my discussion to include such concepts as mourning, melancholia, paranoia, fetishism, and narcissism---I explore the ways in which texts not only restage historical events, but also gesture towards a psychodynamics of postcolonial subjectivity, both of the individual and of the nation. My argument develops through three major texts that reflect on specific moments in Indian history---Raja Rao's Kanthapura, Paul Scott's Raj Quartet novel sequence, and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children ---as well as a number of translated Urdu, Hindi, and Bengali works, for which I discuss the possibilities and limitations of using strictly Freudian psychoanalytic models to describe the narrative structures of Indian as well as English fiction. Thus, my project has a dual goal: to assess the impact of colonial and postcolonial traumas as they are figured in the literature of the subcontinent, and to participate in an ongoing evaluation of how implicitly universalizing discourses of the Western academy might be used to discuss non-Western texts in ways that do not subordinate or silence them. |
