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‘The truth is that once we have left our childhood places and started to make up our own lives, armed only with what we have and are, we understand…not that ‘there’s no place like home’ but rather that there is no longer any such place as home: except for

Postcolonial Literature - Historical , Political and Cultural contexts

Generally , ideologies of nation and nationalism together with theories of modernity and postcoloniality are explained through the recordings of history in all their political , economic , cultural , historical , and archeological implications . It is the analyses of these implications that postcolonial scholars find useful in holding empire accountable , if not for anything else , at least for querying history . Romila Thapar in "The Past and the Prejudice " foregrounds the intellectual impetus behind the colonial method of writing history . She begins by saying There is a qualitative change between

the traditional writing of history and history as we know it today . The modern writing of history was influenced in its manner of handling the evidence by two factors . One was the intellectual influence of the scientific revolution , which resulted in an emphasis on the systematic uncovering of the past and on checking the authenticity of historical facts . The other was the impact on the motivation of history by the new ideology of nationalism , with stress on the notion of a common language , culture and history of a group . Indeed , historical studies the world over have assumed special significance in proving the background of nationalism

Thapar also acknowledges that the Enlightenment agenda and the European mode of writing the nation in tracing nationalist trajectories were structurally manipulated to fashion the history of the colonized peoples . Going beyond such an overtly fictive telling , the Subaltern Studies Group argues that there is another layer of colonial domination by showing that historiography of newly emergent nations (as in the writing of nation /nationalist struggles ) borrows heavily from pejorative , imperial methods to often ignore , even delete subaltern historiography in to privilege elitist , official versions . In fact , this argument echoes one of Frantz Fanon 's most brilliant insights , wherein he excavated and scrutinized the damaged psyche of the colonized people to show how the native mirrors the desires of the colonizer . Recently , in "Absences in History " Aloka Parasher has foregrounded that debate by posing a challenge to scholarship which relies on poststructural vocabulary to decode colonization and re-encode a new historiography . She says that

in our new post-modern consciousness we apparently privilege the margins of the past by constructing a new difference of the other "other " which has all the elements of heterogeneity , multivocality , and open-endedness , but the space and item where these margins of the past meet are the center of history . In a study of pre-modern society [colonized nations] then , where history as we understand it today was an alien concept , we privilege a modern notion of history [that of a de-colonized nation] and all that it entails so that it becomes central and the object of study to remain distant and marginal

Salman Rushdie 's Satanic Verses presents a cacophony of voices , most of them "unfamiliar " a polyphonic babble contesting the right to speak Far from valorizing "verse " and its ideology , The Satanic Verses demonizes it . This text asserts the centrality of the margins transgressing and interrogating boundaries of...

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