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Historical Fictions and Postcolonial Representation: Reading Girish Karnad's Tughlaq

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Aparna Dharwadker
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Abstract

Recent antiorientalist and subaltern critiques of colonial and neocolonial historiography elide the interdependence of “true” and “fictive” modes in historical writing. I use Girish Karnad's Tughlaq (1964), a contemporary Kannada play about a fourteenth-century Islamic ruler in India, to chart that interdependence and to demarcate the textual, political, and cultural contexts of postcolonial historical fictions. I show that Karnad's fiction is informed by a complex historical narrative mediated by medieval Muslim historians, who disapproved of Tughlaq's religious unorthodoxy, and by nineteenth-century orientalists, who treated the turmoil of Islamic rule in India as a justification for British colonial rule. The play's ironic representation of history also participates in a dialectic of heroic and satiric discourses that has shaped European and Indian constructions of India since the early colonial period. Using religious difference as its central problematic, Tughlaq develops a resonant parallel between premodern and contemporary Indian political and cultural experiences and reenacts the country's postindependence crisis of secular nationhood.

Type
Special Topic: Colonialism and the Postcolonial Condition
Information
PMLA , Volume 110 , Issue 1: Special Topic Colonialism and the Postcolonial Condition , January 1995 , pp. 43 - 58
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1995

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