Itihasam of/as Legend: Time, Space, and Narrative Consciousness in The Legends of Khasak

Abstract

Truth is light splintered through a prism and that gave me the idea of the astrophysicist who turns away from the outer universe to the space within.

V. Vijayan, ‘Afterword’, The Legends of Khasak

The Legends of Khasak (1969) by O.V. Vijayan has enjoyed a cult readership in the Indian subcontinent. The dominant critical or scholarly strain has been to read it as a literary symptom of the postcolonial imaginary. However, this has restricted the thematic potentialities of the text. While it employs the conventional postcolonial contestation between modernity and tradition as its framework, it far exceeds the binary in the forging of a novel consciousness and form. Using this as the theoretical springboard, the paper will attempt an exploration of Vijayan’s revisioning of the postmodern novel through the reconfiguration of the coordinates of time and space. This reconfiguration occurs through the lens of magic realism in so far as the experience of space – or Khasak as a site of the legendary – is conditioned by the experience of time. The aim of the paper is to look at the protagonist Ravi and his experience of the liminal boundary between history and myth, and the concomitant form of the novel through its reconceptualization of the Eurocentric theoretical paradigms of novelistic and epic time. This anticipates the emergence of a new spatio-temporal and narrative consciousness symptomatic of the fragmentary postcolonial condition.