Disability, Myth and History in Midnight’s Children and Shiva Trilogy: A Comparative Study
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Abstract
Disability, Myth and History are concepts fraught with ambivalence and contestations. Still, they are important modes of cultural perception and ‘re-presentation’. While as an academic discipline Disability Studies is quite new, the use of myth and history in Indian novels in English is quite old. This paper wants to bring out the presentation and interrelation of these concepts in two sets of disparate novels, one, “Midnight’s Children”, the watershed novel in Indian writing in English and the other, “Shiva Trilogy”, the hugely popular novels of Amish Tripathi. My textual analyses concentrate on the ways in which differently-abled characters are rendered ‘abnormal’ in their involvement with religion, nation and culture and how myth and history are manipulated by these postcolonial writers to present a different view of reality. This enables us to make ‘situated readings’ of how disability, myth and history may be experienced in particular settings and contexts. This also makes us capable of making a cross-cultural analysis that brings to the fore the aspects of ‘re-presentation’, management and construction of the concepts of disability, myth and history for certain purposes. Within this context, the scope of my study is broadly comparative. It shows that though these two writers are completely different in their style, mode and narrative techniques, they are bound by their common concern with the ‘politics of re-presentation’ and the post-colonial revisioning of reality through the interrelated concepts of disability, myth and history.
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