Fiction as Archive: A Source-Critical Study of Subaltern Voices in Select Modern Indian Literature

Аннотация

This article examines modern Indian fiction as an alternative archive of subaltern experience
through a source-critical and quantitative content-analytical study of four selected literary texts: Mulk Raj
Anand’s Untouchable, Mahasweta Devi’s Draupadi, Bama’s Karukku, and Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance.
The study begins from the premise that institutional archives often preserve the documentary memory of
power, while fiction frequently preserves the affective, social, and embodied memory of those excluded from
dominant historical narration. A total of 200 coded textual passages, with 50 passages selected from each text,
were analysed using SPSS. The study examined archive type, subaltern group, voice mode, violence type,
resistance level, source value, emotional intensity, and mediation level. The results reveal that caste
humiliation, poverty, state violence, resistance, and mediated testimony emerge as major archival categories
across the selected texts. The chi-square analysis shows a statistically significant association between selected
literary text and archive type, indicating that each text preserves subaltern experience through a distinct
representational pattern. The findings also demonstrate that most passages possess high source value and high
emotional intensity, although mediation remains a major critical factor. The article concludes that fiction can
function as a powerful counter-archive of subaltern life, but only when read critically as a mediated,
constructed, and historically situated source rather than as transparent documentary evidence.