Tale Share: The ICHR's Ayodhya Visit

Recently the new ICHR (Indian Council for Historic Research) chief visited Ayodhya, and then went on to make some controversial statements. This of course let to a lot of media coverage and opinion clashes and basically a lot of negative air. However, some expressed their opinion through humous, and one such blog post, by a certain Rajat Datta made my day. I have shared some of the snippets here below.

Tale Share: The Dead are Real

The one question that bothers me a lot is about how real or fictitious historical fiction is. I mean, think about it, if one wanted to talk about historical figures, tell their tales, then why not write biographies? Obviously historical fiction is different, allows the author some agency into the lives of historic entities. But then, what right does one have to change the way someone lived, or died? Perhaps the best way to understand historical fiction is to think of it as set within the realms of history, aligned to the reality of the time, and yet allowing agency to the author to take their characters through the story they have chosen to tell.

A famous personality who has made historical fiction her life, is Hillary Mantel. In 2012, the New Yorker's Larissa MacFaquhar talked about Hillary and the agency of historical fiction. I have quoted a few snippets of this enlightening article below, but for the full article, click on this link.

Tale Share: Why Historians should Write Fiction

When a novel is set in the past, we often have to build a world to support the story that we tell. If we set it in our actual past, then we have to take elements of history and fit to the plot itself. This brings forth the field of historical fiction. But how do we define historical fiction anyway? The following is an essay by Ian Mortimer, a famous historian, who writes historical fiction under the pseudonym of James Forrester, and it tries to address the question from the point of view of the authors who write these stories. This article written at the IHR conference is an insightful look at how historians view the genre, and how we could possibly define it. The following are some snippets that I found really relevant to the conversation.