Lineages of the Present: Mukul Kesavan’s Looking Through Glass and India’s Embattled Secularism
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Someshwar Sati
Abstract
Mukul Kesavan’s Looking Through Glass (1995) is a remarkable piece of historiographical metafiction that imaginatively reconstructs the final years of India’s national movement. For this reason, it provides us with rich material to explore the relationship between the postcolonial narrative of the Indian nation and the anticolonial energies of the independence movement. But more importantly, as the present article argues, Kesavan’s novel locates in the national movement’s inability to resist the communal interpolation of its politics the genesis of contemporary India’s “embattled secularism,” particularly after the sudden rise into prominence in the 1980s and ‘90s of a right wing Hindu nationalist political party. How does this narrative deconstruct the ‘nationalist’ projections of this movement as a revolutionary spectacle? Why and how does this narrative seek to undermine the language of high theatre usually used in ‘nationalist’ accounts of this movement? These are some of the other questions which my article seeks to critically engage with.
© 2014 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co.
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Inhalt
- Editorial
- Confessions of a Thug: The Voice of the Criminal in Colonial Crime Fiction
- Stowe and Brown Revisited: Fiction-Made Characters in Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada
- Where Is the West-Running Brook Flowing? Robert Frost in Taoist Perspective
- A Complex Kind of Feminism: Margaret Drabble’s “A Success Story”
- “Remember, or now know”: Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker and the Politics of Melancholia
- Lineages of the Present: Mukul Kesavan’s Looking Through Glass and India’s Embattled Secularism
- Buchbesprechungen
- Bucheingänge
- Die Autoren dieses Heftes
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Inhalt
- Editorial
- Confessions of a Thug: The Voice of the Criminal in Colonial Crime Fiction
- Stowe and Brown Revisited: Fiction-Made Characters in Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada
- Where Is the West-Running Brook Flowing? Robert Frost in Taoist Perspective
- A Complex Kind of Feminism: Margaret Drabble’s “A Success Story”
- “Remember, or now know”: Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker and the Politics of Melancholia
- Lineages of the Present: Mukul Kesavan’s Looking Through Glass and India’s Embattled Secularism
- Buchbesprechungen
- Bucheingänge
- Die Autoren dieses Heftes
