Introduction

Since Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) South Asian postcolonial literature in English has not merely become a major publishing success, but it has also acquired the hallmark of academic respectability owing to its exuberant intertextual playfulness, self-reflexive toying with the narrator–reader relation, its sheer inventiveness and expansive magic realist fabulation. Two labels helped to place Rushdie and his followers like Shashi Tharoor, Sunetra Gupta or Arundhati Roy among the literary elite: the affinity to the already canonized magic realism of South American provenance (Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes) and the postmodernist narrative techniques employed by Rushdie and others (selfreflexivity, parody, extensive use of analepsis, metalepsis and paralipsis, montage, subversion of ontological distinctions, metafiction). In fact, in hindsight, Rushdie’s (and Tharoor’s) works can now, more specifically, be categorized as historiographical metafictions, a prominent subcategory of postmodernist writing.