In Part 1, we saw how anxieties in historiography about the eventual order of things temporal were pre-figurative. In literary form, these manifest themselves as resolutions that no longer require the same species of analytical vigilance about the nature of history and its relationship to the truth that historians have had to grow accustomed to as a kind of sovereign rite for their vocation. Not only are we susceptible to the explicitly fabulist form of literary practice when it uses historical content but the resolution of tendencies ideological – whether formal, rhetorical, mythical, even psychological – that remains an impossible motivating factor for the historian is a prerequisite of novelistic practice. The reasons for this state of affairs among historians have been explored thus far. The truth of historical fictions is not the same as the truth in historiography; yet, as Guha notes, the ‘conceptual affinity’ between colonial and Indian narratives about the Indian past led to a site of antagonism that left a profound and shaping mark on nationalist thinking.2 I have examined the reception of these definitive modalities by Indians concerned with formulating visions of freedom from colonial rule when they have gone in search in the long Indian past to ‘reclaim’ a world and time that is at least potentially free of domination. Naipaul’s writing is a complication in this enterprise. For Naipaul, colonialism as Pax Britannica is preferable to the native forms of danda. He scrupulously ignores the systematic violence that the colonial discourse of improvement implied. Before turning to his non-fiction writing on India, I want to explain a little more of what is meant by the resolution or antagonism between kindred modes where these are conceived first as ‘rationalist, evolutionalist and progressivist ideas’ and an Indian historical thinking that had assimilated the spirit of these fundamentals of ‘the post-Enlightenment view of world and time’ without its substance and therefore, tragically, failed to deliver the promise of this teleology under

‘the force of nationalism itself’. The implication is that, far from being consistent with each other, as the philosophes had imagined, nationalism is a deviation or, at best, an aberrant moment in the career of Reason. Guha concludes:

Historiography was one of the two principal instruments – the other being literature – which would henceforth be put to increasingly vigorous use for such reclamation [of the Indian past]. In other words, historiography would, from this time onward, construct the Indian past as a national past that had been violated and appropriated by colonial discourse. The indigenous historian’s mission to recover that past was therefore to acquire the urgency and sanctity of a struggle for expropriating the expropriators.3