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Narrating National Allegory- Marvellous Realism in
Qurratulain Hyder’s River of Fire
Pratibha Biswas
Assistant Professor
University of Delhi
India
Abstract
All Third-World texts may not necessarily be ‘national allegories’ yet Fredric Jameson’s assertion
that “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of
the public third world culture and society” may particularly be true to the narrative of Qurratulain
Hyder’s River of Fire (1998), which narrates account of Indian subcontinent’s cultural history
through episodic narrative sweeps, ranging from 4th century B.C to1950s and articulates according
to Kumkum Sangari “ the grand nationalist visions of a pluralist civilization”, through the
experiences of Gautam Nilambar, Hari Shanhar, Abul Mansur Kamaluddin and Champa, who
reappear during the Magadhan period, Sultunate period, British period and post-partition period.
Nikhat Taj identifies History as an “important organizing principle” in the novel which Hyder
employs to “construct her notion of identity of India”, yet History here is not the teleological metanarrative of conquests, victories and defeats instead it “combines mystification and
demystification, primal innocence with an acquired craftiness” as proposed by Edouard Glissant
in “Cross-Cultural Poetics: National Literatures”. This paper attempts to analyze, how River of
Fire, in narrating national allegory, desacralizes the ‘Colonial History’ and sacralizes the Indian
notion of time and history to delineate the idea of ‘Indian nation’ not as a nation –state but as a
‘civilization’ . It also attempts to analyze the use of marvellous realism as narrative technique in
River of Fire under the above mentioned critical framework to show how the technique may indeed
be useful in narrating the nation with a syncretic cultural history like India.
Key Words- nation, narration, imagination, marvellous realism, allegory, history,
historiography, time, representation
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All Third-World texts may not necessarily be ‘national allegories’ yet Fredric Jameson’s
assertion that “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled
situation of the public third world culture and society” may particularly be true to the narrative of
Qurratulain Hyder’s River of Fire (1998), which narrates account of Indian subcontinent’s cultural
history through episodic narrative sweeps, ranging from 4th century B.C to1950s and articulates,
according to Kumkum Sangari “ the grand nationalist visions of a pluralist civilization” (214),
through the experiences of Gautam Nilambar, Hari Shankar, Abul Mansur Kamaluddin and
Champa, who reappear during the Magadhan period, Sultunate period, British period and postpartition period. According to Rakshanda Jalil, “ interspersed with human drama involving the
main caste of dramatis personae, the narrative throws up many questions . . . that look at the ‘idea’
of India from different points of view at different times in history” (179).
To reiterate Robert Strongman’s view, it is true that ‘allegory’ and ‘nation’ are two words that
cannot appear in the same sentence without evoking the debate between Fredric Jameson and Aijas
Ahmad. In “A Caribbean Response to the Question of Third World National Allegories: Jameson,
Ahmad and the Return of the Repressed” Strongman points out the inadequacies of Ahmad’s
argument regarding allegory by proposing that the theory of allegory is completely absent in his
formulations and that when Ahmad mentions the presence of allegorical nature of feminist and
black American literature within the First world , “he unwittingly lends credence to Jameson’s
thesis ” by again associating the term as a mode of representation in the peripheral literatures.
Strongman also proposes that this ‘anxiety’ about allegory may have stemmed from the genres
depreciated status in the west and its negative association with ‘simplicity’. Not subscribing to
Jameson’s pejorative use of the word yet using his reference which Ahmad overlooked, here I
would like to quote Jameson to delineate the sense in which I have employed the term ‘allegory’
in this paper:
If allegory has once again become somehow congenial for us today, as over against the
massive and monumental unification of an older modernist symbolism or even realism
itself, it is because the allegorical spirit is profoundly discontinuous, a matter of breaks and
heterogeneities, of the multiple polysemia of the dream rather than the homogeneous
representation of the symbol. Our traditional conception of allegory- based, for instance,
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on stereotypes of Bunyan- is that of an elaborate set of figures and personifications to be
read against some one-to-one table of equivalences: this is so to speak, a one-dimensional
view of this signifying process, which only be set in motion and complexities were we
willing to entertain the more alarming notion that such equivalences are themselves in
constant change and transformation at each perpetual present of the text (73).
By the term allegory as used here, I refer to the complex and multilayered, symbolic allegory in
which a character or material thing is not merely a transparent vehicle for an Idea, but involves an
interpretative method of reading the text in which, characters or narrative or descriptive details are
taken by the reader as an elaborate metaphor for something outside the literal story, which may
not be explicitly stated. Rakshanda Jalil calls River of Fire “a classic instance of Imagining India
and timeless metaphor for imagining India and 2500 years of its history, in the form of a ceaselessly
flowing river. Jalil purports:
Through it [Hyder] shows how history is a continuum, a coming together of many small
rivulets and tributaries that together make one sweeping river . . . The River of Fire is the
river of Time and Time, like the river . . . by its very nature ceaselessly flowing. Those
who stand or live beside its banks, occasionally watch it pass by; but very few stop to listen
to its wordless story. The river urges those who stand on its banks to travel with it; some
do some don’t. Even those who travel on the river do so only for a short while; then they
must either get off or drown. . . .And while men and women carry on with the business of
their lives, while wars are waged, empires rise and fall, Time is flowing too as ceaselessly
as a river. One can neither hold it nor ride it; one can however try and hear it as it passes
by in the soft ripples of the waters (176).
Nikhat Taj identifies History as an “important organizing principle” in River of Fire which
Hyder employs to “construct her notion of identity of India”, yet History here is not the teleological
meta-narrative of conquests, victories and defeats, instead it “combines mythification and
demystification, primal innocence with an acquired craftiness” as proposed by Edouard Glissant
in “Cross-Cultural Poetics: National Literatures”. In the words of Glissant, literary work in its
widest scope performs two functions:
. . . the function of desacralization, the heretical function of intellectual analysis, whose
purpose is to dismantle the internal mechanism of a given system, to expose the hidden
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workings, to demystify. It also has a function of sacralization, the function of re-assembling
the community around its myth, its beliefs, its imaginary or its ideology. . . .[T]he function
of sacralization would be the product of still- naïve collective consciousness, and that the
function of desacralization is the effect of politicized consciousness (251).
My paper attempts to analyze, how River of Fire, in narrating national allegory, desacralizes
the ‘Colonial History’ and sacralizes the Indian notion of time and history to delineate the idea
of ‘Indian nation’ not as a nation –state but as a ‘civilization’. This paper also attempts to analyze
the use of marvellous realism as narrative technique in River of Fire under the above mentioned
critical framework to show how the technique may indeed be useful in narrating the nation with a
syncretic cultural history like India. To explicate the sense in which I have used the term
marvellous realism (alternately also called magic realism), in this paper , I would like to quote
Luis Leal “. . . more than anything else, [it is] an attitude toward reality that can be expressed in
popular or cultured forms, in elaborate or rustic styles in closed or open structures. In magical
realism the writer confronts reality and tries to untangle it, to discover what is mysterious in things,
in life, in human acts. The principle thing is not the creation of imaginary beings or worlds but the
discovery of the mysterious relationship between man and his circumstances. In magical realism
key events have no logical or psychological explanation. The magical realist does not try to copy
the surrounding reality or to wound it but to seize the mystery that breathes behind things.”
-“Magical Realism in Spanish American Literature”
Imagining the Nation, Identity and History
The term nation has been envisioned variously by primordialists and modernists and is enmeshed
in bewildering contradictions. Moreover its connotations have changed during the twentieth
century rapidly. In trying to articulate answers to questions concerning the rubric of nation and
imagination, (like; “Is nation mere figment of imagination? Is it imagination that conjures up
nation or is it nation that inspires imagination? Is nation constructed by narration or does narration
presupposes the existence of nation?”) C. Vijayshree in the introduction to the book Nation in
Imagination (2007), proposes that Benedict Anderson, calling nation a discursive formation was
the first to envision it as “an imagined political community. . . captur[ing] the power and
resilience of a shared national identity more eloquently.” She purports that though Fredrick
Jameson’s essentialist claim about the Third-World literature that “the telling of the individual
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story and the individual experience cannot but ultimately involve the laborious retelling of the
collectivity itself” has been contested widely for being parochial, yet the link that his argument
forges between nation and imagination holds valid (xi). Here I would like to propose that it is
History not only in the narrow sense of “the human past” but also in the wider sense that is the
“development of civilization”( borrowing the words from Raymond Aron) that works as this link
between the individual identity and the collective imaginaries about nation.
Hayden White, in the “Fictions of Factual Representation” argues that the devices of fictional
writing and techniques of historiography “overlap, resemble or correspond with each other” (121),
as both the historiographer as well as the writer write embedded within a certain ideology. In the
postmodernist fashion, denying the value and existence of ‘objective truth’, White proposes that:
The issue of ideology points to the fact that there is no value- neutral mode of emplotment,
explanation or even description of any field of events, whether imaginary or real, and
suggests that the very use of language itself implies or entails a specific posture before the
world, which is ethical, ideological, or more generally political: not only all interpretation,
but also all language is politically contaminated (129).
The implication of the above argument is that, Identity, History and Nation are all constructs of a
writer’s ‘imagination’ who himself is in turn an ideological construct and since a writer is a product
of his milieu, the ‘collective consciousness’ intentionally or un-intentionally seeps into the
narration. This argument on one hand, corroborates Fredric Jameson’s assertion about the
‘situational consciousness’ and ‘Third-World national allegories’ which is evident in River of
Fire in the use of Indian notion of history and time, which are also the organizing principals of the
heterogeneous, dialogical narratives that abound the text, but at the same time the argument also
problematizes his First- World and Second- World literary categories, which he argues suffer from
“a radical split between the private and the public, between the poetic and the political . . .” (69).
In the book Novel as History (2003) Nila Shah, purports a conceptual difference between
Indian and western notions of History. In her words, “In the ancient India, one would observe
history enveloped in myths and legends; in most of the cases the facts are found to be wrapped in
panegyric fiction and poetical embellishments” (25). In the narrative of River of Fire a similar
blending of myth and factual history is evident throughout the narrative as Hyder introjects
“shloka, doha ,songs, poem and shayari” with paragraphs of “ chunks of textbook history lessons”
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and “historical stereotypes” according to Sangari (206- 217). The mystification that Glissant
proposes is precisely noticeable in the chapter named “Folk Singer’s of Bengal” where Hyder
employs the parable of Prophet Sulaiman and the big fish to narrate the transfer of power from the
Nawab- Nizam of Bengal Siraj -ud- Daulah to Admiral Watson in the eighteenth century. The
allegory in a few words and simple manner retrieves the past and retells the complex tale of
annexation of Hindustan by the English traders from the Moghals, and betrayal of Mir Jafar and
also indicates the leap of time, beginning the story of Cryril Ashley. It must be mentioned that
River of Fire is idiosyncratic in the use of ‘configure narrative mode’ when most of the other
writers were still employing ‘realism’ to document Indian reality; as it was first published in Urdu
in the year 1958 as Aag ka Darya and trans created into English in 1998. Having erupted into
modernity in the sense suggested by Glissant, it preempts many of the postmodernist concerns;
moreover the engagement with history in English fiction by Indian writers came into being only
around 1980s. Nila Shah in Novel as History mentions that whereas the pre-independence Indian
novelist essentially “tried to capture and canonize Indian reality in their own way and have narrated
historical events in their Indian perspective” (31) the novelists since 1980 have tried to counter the
colonial History by writing alternate histories. According to Liyanage Amarakeerthi, River of Fire
“produces
a
strong
critique
of
the
received
notion
of
history” as the “novel works against, parallel to and as supplement to history” (25) by avoiding to
document the teleological macro-narratives of battles and invasions, instead portraying through
the characters, what Sudipta Kaviraj calls “the seamless web of experiences of people” (107). Shah
purports that quite a few Indian novelist like, Salman Rushdie, Rohington Mistry, Vikram Seth; in
their engagement with history in fiction portray “an individual’s history at the center with
gradually enlarging concentric circles depicting her/his stories of family, a community and finally,
or of a nation” (32). In the novel, it is Gautam Nilambar in the first story, Kamaluddin in the
second, Cyril Ashley in the third and finally Kamal Reza; the fictional characters ,who not only
comment upon the macro events of the History as witnesses but also, it is their personal tragedies
that become an allegory of the macrocosmic accounts of History. For instance, capturing the
conflict between Brahmanism and declining Buddhism which is the backdrop of the story of
Gautam Nilambar; Gautam and Champak’s story traces the fall of small feudatories and the rise
of the Hindu Empire under the reign of Chandra Gupta Maurya. The second story depicting the
cultural and intellectual richness of Indian subcontinent through the portrayal of Sharqi Empire of
Jaunpur in the chapter “The University Town of Jaunpur” which provides an ironic commentary
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on the “modus operandi of the Sultan Business”; the intrigues of dynastic politics, the ploys to
invade Delhi and the bloodshed that ensued at Jaunpur under the Sharki Dynasty, in the times of
Bahlol Lodhi. Kamalludin’s episode allegorizes the devastation of Shiraz-i-Hind; the kingdom of
Jaunpur. Nikat Taj suggests that in the fourth episode Kamal Reza’s geographical and Champa
Ahmed’s psychological ‘exile’ allegorizes the effect of partition on the psyche of people, who
suffered a sense of disillusionment and rootlessness due to loss of their homeland. According to
Shah, one of the prime concerns for the writers in reconstructing the official and teleological notion
of history is the making of an image of ‘nation’ by projecting the community free from coercion
or domination of the colonial master. In River of Fire, this is manifested in the way Cyril Ashley,
government officer and Orientalist scholar is portrayed. As insignificant as other characters against
the entire history of the Indian subcontinent, this agent of colonialism meets with a sad lonely
death. Disregarding the Colonial History in this sense Hyder performs the ‘desacralization’ of the
notion that India lacked a sense of history before the coming of Europeans and the British claim
of bestowing India with a sense of historiography. Hyder begins the narrative from Mauryan
period, reconstructing the rich past of ancient India; where travelling Persians came to seek
livelihood; where sixty- two systems of philosophical thoughts flourished portraying the
Upanishad philosophy, through Gautam’s musings about Rup and Arup. The ‘demystification’ is
also performed by the text by including in the narrative the lesser known histories of heroic women
(like Razia Sultan, Bibi Raji, Queen Malika Kishwar and Begum Hazrat Mahal) “which often goes
unheard and unrecorded” , who stood for alternate views and sensibilities and intervened in the
political affairs, acting as agents of history. Hence, the novel demystifies the role to women as
agents of history, which often gets elided in the dominant androcentric historiography, where “men
are the real agents of history and subjects of history” and women “the victims and observers of
male history” (Amrakeerthi 37-39).
Romila Thapar purports the presence of historical consciousness in ancient India by linking
time and history. She purports that in ancient India, two different time frames existed: linear as
well as cyclical, also called the chronological and the luni-solar calendar respectively, which is
evident in some of the early texts like Manu’s Dharmashastra and the Mahabharata. Linear notion
of time implies that the time ‘flows’ into one direction whereas the cyclical notion of time implies
that it is circular in the sense that events reoccur and there is no single beginning and a definite
end, instead an end of an event may signify beginning of another in the same instance. Nikat Taj
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in “A Study of the Organizing Principle(s) In Qurratulain Hyder’s River of Fire” proposes that in
the novel, Hyder presents “a cyclical view of history with recurrent patterns of ‘rise, decline and
fall’, also in recurrent motifs and symbols like Sudarshan Yakshini, coin, river and dreams, vividly
presented in each of the historic episodes” yet at the same time different eras align to create a sense
of linearity within the two millennia time frame as “ [t]he four main plots dissolve into one large
plot in our mind, as we navigate through centuries of Indian history ” (205). But the sense of
cyclical time is reinforced in the last chapter since the reader finds oneself again on the highway
to Shravasti, from where the first episode starts. Amrakeerthi even suggests that the circular sense
of time is further established by the fact that the stories from the four episodes are quite similar, to
the extent that “this novel has essentially one story which happens four times with slight
differences” (30). According to him, the two Gautam Nilambars are quite similar in terms of their
suffering, despite being separated from each other by at least a few millennia. Even the river Saryu
and the river Sarju are the same. The reader is expected to take cognizance of the circular
referentiality, and recognize the similarities between the four stories, to see the thematic
connections between them, which are mythical and irrational, since there are no causal connections
in the narrative. Hyder by documenting the history of Indian subcontinent by privileging this dual
temporality and building around it the ‘idea of nation’ in the novel performs the sacralization of
Indian notion of time and sense of history which is a function of ‘primal innocence’ because the
such a notion of time is embedded in Indian ideology and imaginaire since time immemorial, yet
it is also a function of acquired craftiness since there is “heavy mediation of T.S Eliot in Aag ka
Darya (in the epigraph, the section on the Vedas in the first story, the description of London, the
consciousness and conversations of characters in the fourth story)” (Sangari 206) that evidently
imply influence of modernism on Hyder.
Marvellous Realism in River of Fire
The term ‘magic realism’ has been interpreted variously and has engendered disagreement
since it was introduced by Franz Roh in mid 1920s, to describe a counter movement and tendency
in expressionist art. He used the German phrase Magischer Realismus to denote the way art
rediscovered the charm of the object represented by employing the ‘uncanny’ or fantastical with
the real. It was the Cuban writer Alego Carpentier, who renamed it as real maravilloso or
marvellous realism during 1940s to denote the view of life in the context of Latin American culture
where one does not draw a line between the real and the supernatural instead relies on superstitions,
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primitive faith, popular myth, legends and folklore and oral tradition to accommodate the
supernatural within the realistic conventions of representation. He differentiated it from the
European variety of representation which was purely verbal without an extra –textual reality, had
close affinity with surrealism and was more individualistic, closer to fabulation and meta-fiction.
Scott Simpkins following Roh has enlisted the following features of Realism and Magic Realism
as textual medium:
Realism
Magic Realism
History
Myth/Legend
Mimetic
Fantastical/ Supplementation
Familiarization
Defamiliarization
Empiricism/ Logic
Mysticism/ Magic
Narrative
Meta- narration
Closure ridden/ Reductive
Open Ended/ Expansive
Naturalism
Romanticism
Rationalization / Cause and effect
Imagination/ Negative capability
Under the light of this explication, it can be said that River of Fire as novel employs marvellous
realism in the narrative structure since, as Sangari proposes that the novel incorporates many of
the popular Indian myths like that of yugas, karma, Jatakas and reincarnation, within the narrative
and the notions of recurrences, cyclicity and concurrent time hover beneath the structure of the
novel as nested narratives within narratives, assimilating the varying configural narrative forms
and temporalities. These beliefs and notions are not just displayed and incorporated by the
characters, but manifest in the rhythmic ebb and flow of kingdoms and epochs and each pushes
towards longue duree; the deeper long term patterns. For instance, “when Champavati . . . speaks
to Kamaluddin of their bond’s established in the previous birth, this gently affines Kamal with
Gautam of the first story and resituates the stranger as a familiar, the traveler as an insider” (208).
The novel is littered with mythical and mystical encounters of characters with pirs, jogis ,sufis and
mystics which do not appear out of place since they are very much a part of lived reality of Indians.
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The novel in this sense exhibits how, marvellous realism embodies a specific social relation, where
the improvisation of the arbitrariness, the casting of the strange and incongruous in the real, is not
merely a literary effect but a function of the living world. Sangari also mentions that the novel
draws heavily from legend, epic, songs and especially dastan and in the process of transcreation
of River of Fire from Aag ka Dayra the novel gets significantly transformed. To quote Sangari:
In River of Fire Hari Shankar disappears from the second story; Margaret Tesdale, the
great- granddaughter of the first Cyril Ashley’s liaison with Shunila, is dropped in the
fourth. The relationship of Ruqqaiya is more detailed in the second story but Talat (an
author surrogate figure), an irreverent journalist and self-appointed dastan goh, is
attenuated in the fourth. . . .This reshuffling of narrative arrogates the familiar liberty of
dastan goh: characters, situations, episodes can disappear, change or be reinflected, details
can be dropped or added, some sequences abbreviated and others expanded depending on
the mood and context of the narration. The narrative grid is stable, the embellishments
alter: it has a fixed core and a floating text of elaboration. Such performative restructuring,
which rehearses the interplay between orality and writing, was not only common in oral
narrative but resembles musical improvisation as well. The possibility of housing many
narrative variants in the same structure is analogous to setting a different raga to the same
bandish or the same bandish to a different raga (202).
The novel also invokes the Sufi genre of malfuzat in Kamaluddin’s dialogue with people, when
he becomes a disciple of Kabir. The plethora of reflexive intertextual narratives within the metanarrative which are socially inflected, the cross-generic notations( like- travelogue, Anglo-Indian
fiction, colonial history, poems, shayari ) bind together the literary, oral and performative and
makes the narrative itself a figure for civilization density of Indian subcontinent . It not only evades
the closure of the narrative structure but also of the national identity.
Edouard Glissant in “Cross-Cultural Poetics: National Literatures” proposes that the literary
technique of western realism which is the technique of literal or ‘total’ representation becomes
‘flat’ or shallow in the hands of Caribbean writers since “ it is not inscribed in the cultural reflex
of African or American peoples.” Moreover “realism contains a historical dimension” (256) but
since Caribbean history is not self-evident and realism alone cannot account for it. So, writers must
modify it into marvellous realism as is illustrated in the use of the baroque narrative of One
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Hundred Years of Solitude by Garcia Marquez. I would like to extend the above argument to Indian
context and propose that Indian writers too suffer from the same dilemma since our history
consciousness prior to the colonization by British is not self evident and was essentially oral,
preserved primarily in collective memory in the forms of myths, epic, legend etc. It is a commonly
held belief that realistic novel as a narrative genre, is a peculiarly western import mediated by the
English-educated Indian intelligentsia, during the colonial intervention and prior to the emergence
of this genre, Indian subcontinent had a rich oral tradition of storytelling, with lengthy cycles of
medieval romances which consists of heroic and adventurous tales of great courage and valour that
included deployment of supernatural machinery, magic and enchantment. Meenakshi Mukherjee
in Realism and Reality: The Novel and Society in India, proposes that Indian writers while
adapting the nineteenth- century British novelistic tradition of realism made many modifications
to reconcile the peculiarity of Indian reality, bringing puranic heritage of oral narrative and the
metaphysical and social to determinate a generic, characteristic Indian novel.
River of Fire has often been compared to One Hundred Years of Solitude with regard to the
expansive temporal scope of the novel which spans over generations; in the manner characters
reappear with partly altered names, which gives a circularity to the narrative and also the thematic
concern of the novel, which is the struggle of individual against the politico-historical forces that
thwart one’s desire to live free from their influence or “the tension, conflict and sometimes
harmony between the personal and the historical ”(Amrakeerthi 26). But the term marvellous
realism has rarely been used in association with River of Fire, as strongly as it is used with One
Hundred Years of Solitude, despite the presence of several elements indicative of marvellous
realism within the novel. A few have already been enumerated in the previous paragraphs; the
other elements are the treatment of time and dream like defocalized narration in certain chapters.
According to M. Assaduddin, “time itself assumes the dimension of a character and seems to
participate in the action of novel when it exhorts Champa Ahmed as she scales the deserted and
dreary streets of London”:
Recognise me. . . Every decision, every intention is carried out because of me. Even greater
misfortunes will come your way, but I will equip you to face them. Now make your peace
with me because I am eternally present. (qtd. in “The Novels of Qurratulain Hyder” p.92)
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Here time which is an abstract construct of human imagination comes alive and enters into a
dialogue with Champa which is incongruous. This fantastic emplotment of time as a character, and
narration from its perspective performs ‘defamiliarization’ of the ‘notion of eternity of time’ in
magic realist sense. Another incident in the first episode performs the same function. According
to Nikhat Taj, “Champak’s ghostly experience in the sophist’s Grove is a dream like sequence
wherein the ordinary is synthesized with the fantastical. Standing inside the convent of Golden
Mist and listening to bhikhuni, Champak realizes that she was present in the very corridor of
time”(206). Similar, dream like narration is again used in the fourth episode named Inder Sabha
where ghostly historical figures like Gori Bibi , Nawab Qudsia Mahal , Nasiruddin Hyder’s Queen
come alive and intermingle with Kamal, Champa, Gauatam, Talat and Amir, as the narrative
becomes defocalized and happenings become improbable , the effect produced is that of mystery.
Wendy B. Faris too has identified ‘defocalization’ and ‘remystification of narrative’ as two of the
characteristics of the literary genre of magic realism.
To conclude, I would like to mention that ‘marvellous’ is embedded in the cultural reflex of
people of Indian subcontinent, as in the past prior to the assimilation of the genre of realistic novel,
it had a rich oral tradition of qissa , dastan and epics like Ramayana and Mahabharata ; modes of
narration which deployed supernatural, magic and enchantment and since India as a civilization
has always been multicultural, multi-religious, a conflict ridden nation with ever shifting
boundaries perforated by cross-regional traffic and migrations; an immense and complex
smorgasbord of multitudes of traditions ,cultures and identities and “our creativity has [always]
been dialogic, and our literary discourses marked by the negotiation of a necessary heterogeneity,
advancing the a conception of identity that lives through differences and hybridity” (Aikant 1)
allegorizing it, imagining it and narrating it, as a secular nation with composite culture effectively,
demands a baroque narrative technique like marvellous realism.
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Works Cited
Aikant, C. Satish. Editorial. Summerhill IIAS Review xvii.1 (summer 2011) .Web. 14 April 2014.
“Ancient India had both cyclic and linear time concepts, says Romila Thapar” The Hindu. 8 Jan.
2014. Web. 17 April 2014.
Amarakeerthi, Liyanage. “River of Fire: Critiquing the Ideology of History.” The Annual of
Urdu Studies. Web. 25. March. 2014. 25-44
Asaduddin, M. “The Novels of Qurratulain Hyder” Indian Literature 34.2(142) (March-April
1991) 82-108 .Jstor . Web. 24 March 2014 .
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