Mapping the Reality of Past through ‘Memory Spaces’ - Reading Kashmir between the Lines of History:

An Analysis of Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown

Abstract

The boom of theoretical formulations on the study of human mind and human language led to many essential inquiries in to knowledge system as understood and defined the way it was until the 1950s. The Structuralist and Poststructuralist approaches in such inquiries kindled the human understanding to explore yet another level (a realist plane at that) in search of truth and meaning. The question of truth and meaning posed many crucial problems to be discussed, because language in the form of text assumed many layers of complexity, which was proportionate to the complexity of the human mind itself. Hence the human mind, language and text became the focal points of all the theoretical debates that became prominent in the second half of the twentieth century.

All the scholarly investigations on mind, language and text increasingly emphasized the liminality between truth and reality or fact and perception, and unanimously found a target in history, in its knowledge, methodology and truth claims. This dynamics in the understanding of human experience brought a remarkable change in the philosophy of history. F.R.Ankersmit marks, “History is the first discipline that comes to mind if we think of disciplines attempting to give a truthful representation of a complex reality by means of a complex text” (F.R. Ankersmit)