Debate on Historiographic Metafiction: Reading Midnight's Children and Ragtime

Abstract

Midnight's Children and Ragtime, the versions of Indian and American history respectively resist the official history as single, absolute and final history by blurring the boundaries between history and fiction. The novelists both Salman Rushdie and E.L. Doctorow have used historiographic metafiction as narrative technique throughout their novels to fulfill their politics; to let the marginalities to be expressed. Believing in both the history and fiction as human construct, they can not remain untouched by the writers' prejudices and preoccupations, this research study comes to the conclusion that the so-called objective official history is impossible and that is power construct. As history, fiction is also a product of certain socio-political situations of certain time period. Therefore, history and fiction both are equal, relative and subjective. There can be many versions of history. Intermingling history and fiction together Rushdie and Doctorow has redrawn the boundaries of Indian and American history including marginalities in Midnight's children and Ragtime respectively that undermine the so-called official history of India and America.