The novel as a form is argued to be the literary counterpart of an individuating world. In the postcolony, however, the novel as a form will have to find new ways to account for the rupture from history effected by the duplication of the same names across two registers, one in popular memory, and the other in governmental registers. Select works of Vaikom Muhammad Basheer are analysed to decipher how this crisis in historicity was negotiated in terms of the literary.
