Representational Politics and National Ideological Discourse: A Discursive Analysis of the British, American, and Indian Fictional Narratives of the Wars of Independence

Abstract

The present study is grounded in the polemical fictional narratives apropos the wars of independence waged against the British Empire, in India and America, with the aim to understand the literary dialogue between the colonial and postcolonial versions, discourse and counter-discourse. For analysis of the fictional matrix vis-à-vis the revolutions, four of the representative novels, two for each colonizer and colonized, have been selected. Louis Tracy’s The Red Year (1907) and Bernard Cornwell’s The Fort (2010) represent the English colonial discourse. For representation of the perspectives of the postcolonial nations, The Sun behind the Cloud (2001) by Basavaraj Naikar, the Indian anglophone novel, and The Glorious Cause (2002) by Jeff Shaara, the American one, have been taken. The selected bellicose novels have been approached from the postcolonial perspective coupled with the relevant new-historicist postulates. Although Postcolonialism and New Historicism include non-literary – history, journalism, politics, official archives and much more – alongside the literary, the researcher has eschewed the former and delimited focus on the latter. The study of the intriguing concatenation of fictional narratives has exposed how colonial fictional discourse has maneuvered to provide an epistemic rationale to its encroachments and how postcolonial fiction writers have recorded their remonstrance against the lopsided colonial discourse. The textual analysis has identified the unbridgeable breaches and unfathomable fissures between the factional visions and fictional versions of the colonizer and the colonized. The teleological trajectory ratifies that these fictional narratives are not honest histories, rather the apocryphal accounts, political prognostication, ideological inferences, racist reverberations, and fallacious fantasies. The study has uncovered the inherent parochialism under the guise of universalism, recalcitrance in the semblance of generosity, and heterogeneity under the discursive cocoon of historical homogeneity. The similarities and differences between the American and Indian postcolonialisms have also been identified by juxtaposing the representative fictional narratives of the wars. Despite the marginal differences, the literary representations of the revolutions have the fundamental nexus, that is, the anti-colonial aura. Furthermore, the discriminatory discontinuity in the British rhetoric has been brought to the limelight: the essentialist approach for the Indians and tolerance and ambivalent tentativeness accompanied by the expression of affiliation towards the Americans. However, the Native Americans not only share their name with the Indians but also the state of being discursively vilified by the British. The peripheral alternative literary voices of the dissidents, who remain the least heard raconteurs amidst the collective politicized buzz, have been ignored due to delimited ambit of the study. Summarily, the fetish fallacy of focusing fiction as a transcendental literary discourse encompassing humanity in totality and the monolithic metanarratives of universality of literary representations have been disrupted as their latent and manifest ideological, national, and political anchorages have been explored and exposed. Thus, the research is going to have an augmentative impact on understanding of the students and researchers in the field of historical fiction, war writings, postcolonialism, new historicism, and discourse studies.