I think it's interesting to think about the different types of ways history is rendered from the first narrative Umrao Jan Ada, a real story story, even with the artifice of an orally delivered/written story...to the narratives that are stories but not like The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

There is obviously a shift from older modes of story telling to post-modern modes of story telling and what? post-post modern modes? Is that what Hamid is? and that post-modernism was born out of a need to re-envision the telling of the world or of reality (or lack of) through new forms of literature, but can we think of a historical imperative specific to India that require a re-envisioning of literary form like the kind that we see in Shame or in The Reluctant Fundamentalist? To a lesser extent, we see it too in Reza and Ali (I think)...

I'm not really going to try to understand this too deeply right now.