Postmodern Dialogics and the Politics of Representation in Indian Subcontinent Literature

Abstract

This paper critically explores the deployment of various literary devices in fictional narratives that engage with human decadence and sectarian violence, particularly the communal holocausts surrounding the 1947 division of the Indian subcontinent and the demolition of the Babri Mosque in the early 1990s. These historical events, though marked outwardly by religious fervor, are revealed in the selected novels—Taslima Nasreen’s Lajja (1993), Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas (1988), Shashi Tharoor’s Riot (2001), Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1988), and Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India (1988)—to be primarily constructed by human agency, political manipulation, and collective hysteria. Employing narrative strategies such as the dissemination of rumor, grotesque and black humor, structural and verbal irony, allegory, and the evocation of pathos, these writers vividly render the degeneration of individuals into mere communal signifiers and the ensuing rupture of the social fabric. These literary devices, when viewed through the theoretical frameworks of Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism and Jean-François Lyotard’s micronarratives, expose the constructedness of dominant ideologies and dismantle grand historical narratives, thereby validating multiple subjectivities and subaltern voices. This dialogic structure, as evident in the polyphonic interplay of narrative perspectives, effectively critiques monologic national discourses and presents these historical ruptures not merely as isolated events but as continuing postcolonial traumas encoded in collective memory.