ABSTRACT
The ‘inert mass of feudal culture’ even in the post-revolutionary age weighed down the Romantic reaction to the essential irony in enlightenment historiography so that ‘the ascent of thought in a given line of inquiry [was raised] to a level of self-consciousness on which genuinely “enlightened” – that is to say, self-critical – conceptualization of the world and its processes has become possible. This reflective mode takes individual beyond desirably scientific comprehension of social reality as a sum total of productive processes; it is also key to understanding Rushdie’s historicism. The historical consciousness, if it faithfully represents both forward and retrogressive movements, simultaneously typified by the metaphor of Janus, cannot materialise without realising those sociological elements Rushdie attributed to it; the form, as the peoples will see, is both lyrical and modern. For Rushdie, Islam never matured beyond perpetual revolution. That societies ought to discover optimum beyond turmoil of revolution is a pre-requisite Rushdie shares with Nehru’s ‘discourse of order’.
