Historiographic Metafictionistic Narration in Four Man Booker Prize Winning Novels of India

Abstract

Historiographic metafiction excentuates writer’s imagination in telling the storey in more conjuring style, as a postmodern tool this literary technique privileged many revolutionary writers in debunking the cannon. Postcolonial writers have the double advantage of this technique in overthrowing colonial constructed histories, and empowering their own forgotten histories. Salman Rushdie in his Midnight’s Children (1981), Arundhati Roy in her The God of Small Things (1994), Kiran Desai in her The Inheritance of Loss, (2006), and Aravind Adiga in his The White Tiger (2008) armed this technique in retelling History of India in the postcolonial overtones. These four novels accredited Man Booker Prize for their critical vision. This paper highlights what is common theme that was adapted in these four novels. It is not only the postmodern narration, not only the magic realism, pungent language, East West encounter, and critique of post independent India that is similar in these four novels, but fictionalizing the reality, erasing history / reconstructing history is common in these novels. This paper focuses on historiographic metafiction as an empowering technique for postcolonial narration in analyzing these four novels, and highlights how these four writers have architected their own language, metaphors, and symbols, in sculpting Indian history.