The Rape of Parwana: Mukul Kesavan's Inscription of History and Agency

It would not be too much of an exaggeration to claim that, with the odd and honourable exception (such as Amitav Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome), the current Indian English fiction boom-boom depends heavily on two distinctive 'narrative styles' — a kind of domestic realism and a kind of magic realism. Rohinton Mistry, Kiran Desai, Vikram Seth (in A Suitable Boy), Arundhati Roy (to an extent) and so many others usually paint in a more or less 'realistic' idiom on a middle class domestic canvas. On the other hand, Salman Rushdie, Vikram Chandra, Rukun Advani and a few others take recourse to various devices of magic realism even when their framework remains a kind of middle class domesticity. There may