CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN HISTORY AND LITERATURE: SHOWCASING INDIAN FICTION IN ENGLISH

Abstract

Although history and literature are two diametrically opposing disciplines as there is a difference between the  natures of  the  two, yet  there is cementing bond between them. History relates what has happened while literature tells what may happen or what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity. History tends to express the particular while literature the universal. By the  universal, here means how  persons of  certain types will on occasion speak or act according to the  law of probability or necessity (Aristotle 126). When a writer responds to history, he sees there  something unsaid or implicit and in order to do justice the writer transcends the dry account of  history. He, now becoming impersonal or sahrdaya,¹ makes this message more eloquent.

in literature. He infuses universal appeal  in the persons, places and things  of  certain types by stressing what they have in common with all persons, all places or all things in the same set of circumstances. The paper aims at  viewing as to  what is the dynamics of this correspondence between Indian history and Indian English Novel, what are the factors that have contributed to the historical consciousness among Indian novelists,  and what are the aims and value of their novels.