Writing Back to the Colonial Representation of the Mutiny in Manohar Malgonkar's The Devil's Wind 1

ABSTRACT The Devil's Wind seeks to critically engage with the British representation of the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny. However, its Indian critics analyse it in terms of its conformity to historical fact rather than its success or otherwise in executing the revisionist agenda at its heart. Conversely, the non‐Indian critics tend to evaluate it within a critical framework whose Eurocentric assumptions, such as the criteria of ‘objectivity’ and ‘universality’, work to its disadvantage, and in the process, they find it unsatisfactory. A more appropriate way to approach the text is to read its revisionist programme through a postcolonial critical framework such as the ‘writing back’ paradigm. In other words, the novel is best read as a postcolonial ‘con‐text’. Such an approach not only considers how Malgonkar revises and thus deconstructs the colonial (re)construction of the Rebellion but also situates the dialogue within the wider context of colonial discourse production and dissemination.