(By Aryavart International University, India)
Dr Deepak Upadhyay
Vol. 11 Jan-Jun 2021
Abstract:
New Historicism is a mode of critical analysis that focuses on the text as a site of power relations. It believes that texts mask social conditions just as social conditions are informed and shaped by textual representations. It tries to explore the complicity of cultural forms with ideologies that support and reinforce the interests of the dominant classes and thus participate in circulating the specific representations of the state for the society to view/read and accept. Githa Hariharan’s Fugitive Histories lend itself to a new historicist reading in terms of its thematic and narrative technicality. Writing in this postmodern/postcolonial era, Hariharan centres her text on the issue of communal disharmony embedded in post-independence nation state that India is with its claims of secularism as its democratic principle. It mirrors the plights and predicaments of Muslim women victims of Godhara riots and its aftermath. Hariharan in this novel attempts at reconstructing history which has been written by those who are in power, and thereby challenging the narrative and its ideology as the single truth. This short paper is a modest attempt to see that the textual discourse does not exist in a vacuum, but it is influenced by the discourses of historical/social/cultural/political milieus. Githa Hariharan by looking at the Gujarat riots has endeavoured to rebuild/reconstruct the entire event through various other viewpoints mainly those of victims, and thereby reinstating the New Historicist theory that history is not homogenous, it is rather fleeting, shifting and constructed by those who are in power.