HISTORY AND LITERARY TEXT; A NEW HISTORICISTIC STUDY OF KAMILA SHAMSIE’S A GOD IN EVERY STONE

Abstract

This study aims to analyze Kamila Shamsie’s A God in Every Stone through the new historicist perspective in order to address History and Literary text go in parallel with the context in the novel. The story of the novel deals with colonization, its social, cultural and historical background pre-partition of India. This study aims to trace and analyze colonial violence, anti-colonial non-violent resistance took place during British Raj in All India. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the role of the events happened in between the colonizers and colonized nation in the movement of decolonization of All India. The cultural discourse entrenched in New Historicist approach is to be employed to explore the primary text. This research purely focuses on Stephen Greenblatt`s four tenets of New Historicism which are: literature is oriented from history, literature as another version of history, literature cannot surpass history, and literature should be transcribed in terms of history. In the light of these tenets, the researcher aims to identify the political and social concerns of the era covered in the text. Furthermore, the overall historical background of the novel is related to the colonial violence of British and the struggle for independence of all India. However, this study mainly focuses on evaluation of the events happened in the text as well as in real life before the partition of All India.