Historiographic Metafiction, Paratext and the Politics of Retelling in the Bharat Novels of Ashwin Sanghi

Abstract

This paper approaches Ashwin Sanghi's Bharat Collection not primarily as an instance of mythological fiction, as most existing criticism does, but as a body of historiographic metafiction in Linda Hutcheon's sense: fiction that is at once self-consciously artificial and insistently anchored to verifiable historical and mythic referents. Reading Chanakya's Chant, The Krishna Key and The Ayodhya Alliance through this lens, the paper identifies a recurring palimpsest structure in which a modern character or plot is laid, almost stencil-like, over an ancient one, so that the present is legible only as a repetition or completion of the past. It further examines the paratextual apparatus author's notes, bibliographies, acknowledgements of historians and archaeologists through which Sanghi stakes a rhetorical claim to historicity that his fiction's postmodern self-reflexivity simultaneously destabilises. The paper argues that this tension between claimed authenticity and acknowledged invention is the central, productive contradiction of Sanghi's project, and that it is this contradiction, rather than mythological content alone, that accounts for both his popular success and his ambiguous critical standing as the writer often labelled ‘the Indian Dan Brown.’