Blending of fact and fantasy in Siddhartha Dhanvant Shanghvi’s The Last Song of Dusk.

Abstract

This dissertation is a critical discussion on Shiddhartha Dhanvant Shanghvi’s The Last Song of Dusk as an exposure of how the writer takes factual things from realistic setting and mixes it with fantastic, mythical, and magical elements. Shanghvi believes that history is individual. History, though, is not logical, scientific and even objective, it still can have meaning. In fact history has many meanings. But it is wrong to seek a unified meaning in history. The protagonist, Vardhmann's history then is not an absolute and the final history. His is merely a version and other versions are still possible. The novel replicates a kind of history chronicle and challenges our fixed conceptions of the facts of history by demonstrating that the materials that can be used to validate one version of history can be creatively rearranged to prove another.