"India is a land of great linguistic, cultural, geographical, and religious diversity. It is, thus, also natural that there are several different ways in which the different groups of people who call this country home perceive their shared past. History has often been manipulated to further divisive, narrow nationalist politics. Historical fiction set in India, when well-researched, and written with nuance and without prejudice, can play an important role in the humanizing of the people that a traditional historical narrative may have permanently cast in the role of the villainous or subhuman other.
Many Indian languages have rich literary traditions that have been experimenting with the format of historical fiction over decades, even centuries. Writers from modern-day Pakistan and Bangladesh, with whom we share all of our history until the partition of India in 1947, are also examining and re-examining the past in their fiction."
