Postcolonial Fiction: Constructing National Identity through Mythology in Krishna Udayashankar’s The Aryavarta Chronicles

In the roughly four decades since the category of post-colonial literature made its appearance it has become one that is able to encompass within its broad parameters texts emanating from diverse locations and dealing with a multiplicity of issues and themes. The distinguishing characteristics that seem to typify these texts for most critics are those of movement and displacement, hybridity, multiplicity/plurality, alienation and the anguish that accompanies it. At the same time, however, there is a significant amount of fiction written within previously colonized countries that does not focus primarily on the issues of movement or displacement, or the anguish of alienation, hybridity and marginality, and instead turns its attention to the conflicts, struggles and materiality of post-colonial societies dealing not only with the aftermath of colonization but with a host of particular, local, internal problem. To address these questions and their implications for postcolonial fiction, I would like to do a brief reading of Krishna Udayasankar’s trilogy, The Aryavarta Chronicles: Govinda, Kaurava, Kurukshetra, written over the period of 2012-2014. By re-reading the great war in the epic Mahabharat as a people’s war for freedom rather than a religious text Udayasankar is able to re-align the nation’s identity with the values enshrined in the Indian constitution which came into effect soon after India’s independence from British colonialism.