Narratives Of Resistance: Political Oppression And Social Rebellion In The Selected Fiction Of Arundhati Roy, Rohinton Mistry, Manohar Malgonkar, And Salman Rushdie
Keywords:
political oppression, social rebellion, Indian English fiction, Emergency, Partition, caste, resistance, counter-historyAbstract
This paper examines how selected fiction by Arundhati Roy, Rohinton Mistry, Manohar Malgonkar, and Salman Rushdie represents political oppression and social rebellion across colonial, postcolonial, and contemporary South Asian history. Through comparative close reading, the study considers Roy’s The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Mistry’s Such a Long Journey and A Fine Balance, Malgonkar’s The Princes and A Bend in the Ganges, and Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Shame. It argues that these novels refuse to isolate political coercion within the formal institutions of the state. Oppression circulates through caste hierarchy, class exploitation, patriarchy, religious majoritarianism, emergency powers, militarization, censorship, and the management of public memory. Yet rebellion is equally dispersed. It appears in revolutionary nationalism and street protest, but also in forbidden love, improvised kinship, testimony, satire, bodily survival, and the recovery of histories excluded from official narratives. The four writers differ significantly in historical position and aesthetic method: Malgonkar tests the moral vocabularies of nationalism; Mistry uses social realism to document the attrition of ordinary lives; Rushdie turns historiographic metafiction and grotesque comedy against authoritarian certainty; and Roy joins lyrical fragmentation to an ethics of solidarity with stigmatized communities. Read together, their works reveal resistance as ethically necessary but politically ambiguous. Rebellion can create solidarity, yet it can also reproduce violence when it adopts the absolutism of the power it opposes. The paper concludes that contemporary Indian English fiction functions as a counter-archive in which private suffering becomes historical evidence and narrative form itself becomes a practice of democratic dissent.
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