Shweta Saxena

Historicity / Fictionality of History in Indian Writing in English: an Overview of Partition and Emergency Shweta Saxena

History and fiction have existed as mutually dichotomous branch of studies from time immemorial. History is conventionally thought to be 'realist,' 'empiricist,' 'objectivist,' and 'documentarist' in nature. However, the onslaught of deconstructive notions of postmodernism brought about paradigmatic shift in the realm of historiography by essentially underscoring the narrative aspect of history. Critics like Hayden White, Linda Hutcheon, Keith Jenkins, and Alun Munslow expostulate that the textualisation of both history and fiction is hinged upon narrative structure in which the disordered events of the past are emplotted in a coherent form through a subtle but meticulous constructive process.