Historicity, Politics of Culture, and Self-Fashioning: A New Historicist Reading of Shashi Tharoor Riot

Abstract

Adopting a New Historicist lens, this paper contends that Riot: A Love Story by Shashi Tharoor operates as a complex literary intervention into the entangled terrains of historical construction, memory, and mythmaking. Engaging theories of historicity and the politics of cultural representation—wherein history is conceived as a narrative forged within structures of power and ideological hegemony—Riot interrogates the intricacies of national belonging amidst India’s fraught postcolonial condition. Through its polyphonic and fragmented narrative form, the novel resists linear historiography and exposes the cultural politics underlying communal violence, simultaneously foregrounding the enduring legacies of colonialism, partition, and religious polarization. Central to this inquiry is the notion of self-fashioning, which the novel deploys as a means of identity negotiation within contested cultural landscapes. By fusing personal testimony with national trauma, Riot destabilizes official historical discourses and rearticulates Indian secularism through a lens that is at once critically historicized and culturally embedded. This paper situates Riot as a disruptive literary artifact that reimagines the intersections of power, memory, and identity in postcolonial India.