Travels Outside the Empire: The Revision of Subaltern Historiography in Amitav Ghosh

Abstract

In Indian novels written in English of the last two decades (what John Hawley has termed the “boom” in the subject) Jon Mee has distinguished an interest in common with Indian historiography, during the same period, in rewriting modern Indian “national history without reproducing the categories of colonialism” (134). As Neelam Srivastava puts it, “Rushdie did for the novel what the Subaltern Studies collective did for historiography” (85). But Mee, while giving the undoubted influence of Rushdie on the boom in the Indian novel in English due recognition, has illustrated that the project of developing a “post- Nehruvite” history, which challenges the consensus view of the unity of the Indian nation by “recuperating histories squeezed out of the state’s homogenising myth of the nation” (132), is the expression of a deeper generational tide than the wake of Rushdie’s fame alone explains and is a product of the recognition of the necessity to develop an indigenous historiography that even antedates the generation of “midnight’s children” in Raja Rao’s understanding, as long ago as the 1930% of the “need to tell the history of the nationalist struggle in a form which looked beyond the colonial model of historiography to the sthalapurana or legendary history of the village” (133).