Re-reading History, Re-membering the Nation

Post-colonial fiction by Indian authors writing in English attempts to recover the marginalized history of the struggle of minority populations which has been rendered invisible in the dominant historiography of Partition and Independence. Mukul Kesavan’s Looking Through Glass, published by Ravi Dayal in 1995, attempts to recover and re-member a history that is not easily available to his generation, yet one that plays a powerful role in shaping the nation's identity through its very unavailability and suppression. One of the problematics that he interrogates in his novel is that of the disempowerment that results from unquestioningly accepting the historiography that has been constructed for the nation by the ruling powers. Kesavan attempts to disturb the settled national historiography through his narrative technique of ‘fabulous realism’ through which he aims to revise history in order to probe its potential for possibilities for change other than those emerging in the present. The novel attempts a re-vision of the events from 1942-1947 from a different angle, using the trope of the camera and zoom lens, through the sensibility of the post-colonial/post-Independence/post-Partition citizen who is living through the aftermath of these events but chooses to disregard the weight of the past in the shaping of his present identity. Kesavan is emphasizing the need to understand, or experience, the past as opposed to simply knowing the facts in order to construct knowledge about the nation, and to make a dynamic connection between the past and the present. Kesavan re-constructs history by literally putting it back together piece by piece, re-membering it, illustrating how the present has been slowly and painstakingly built on the sites created by the past. By alienating the readers from the taken for granted familiarity of mundane, everyday landscape (and events) he is forcing them to deconstruct its present form and re-vision it as rising out of the past

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