Border Traffic: Between Canon and Archive in Anuja Chauhan’s The Zoya Factor and The House That BJ Built

Cultural memory is not merely concerned with what is remembered; it is also influenced by what is emphasized and what remains on the periphery of awareness. This phenomenon becomes particularly evident in Anuja Chauhan’s novels, The Zoya Factor (2008) and The House That BJ Built (2015), where two legacies shaped by the colonial past, cricket and a family house in Delhi, serve as sources of affection, belonging, and continuity. However, the histories underlying these inheritances do not simply vanish. Instead, they permeate the narratives through fleeting references, family legends, arguments, jokes, and recollections, even though they seldom receive the narrative focus necessary to transform the meanings associated with the forms they have generated. This paper analyzes the uneven allocation of attention using Aleida Assmann’s distinction between canon and archive. The canon consists of what is actively selected, valued, and consistently brought into cultural discourse, whereas the archive retains what is available for retrieval and reinterpretation. Through close reading and textual analysis, this study explores how both novels repeatedly highlight affirmative forms while relegating their historical contexts to a lesser narrative prominence. Assmann’s concept of border traffic is subsequently employed to consider whether these marginalized histories can ascend to the forefront and reshape the values presented in the novels. Although these histories surface, they do not significantly reorganize the prevailing narrative. The study thus interprets this situation as backgrounding rather than erasure: the past remains present and accessible, albeit with a limited ability to disrupt the present.