Modernity, Narrative and History in KiranNagarkar’sCuckold

Abstract

“The last thing I wanted to do was to write a book of historical veracity”1 “...all storywriters are liars”2
(Kiran Nagarkar, Afterword, Cuckold)
“History is the object of a construction whose place is formed not in homogenous and empty time, but in that which is fulfilled by the here-and-now”3 “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “the way it really was” ”4.
(Walter Benjamin - On the Concept of History) Benjamin believed that history need not be written the “way it really was”5.He positioned historical materialism in opposition to historicism - he wrote that the latter “gives the eternal image of the past”6, which puts “its faith in the infinite extent of time and thus concerns itself only with the speed, or lack of it, with which people and epochs advance along the path of progress”7, imagining events as a continuum spanning “homogeneous, empty time”8 whereas the former “supplies a unique experience with the past”9, in which past events are seized from the historical continuum. For Benjamin, the task of the historical materialist is to “brush history against the grain”10.Kiran Nagarkar, in his novel entitled Cuckold, does exactly that. He does not give himself to the “whorecalled “Once upon a time” ”, in Benjamin’s words. But, he “remains master of his powers: man enough, to explode