Forging Empire and Identity: A New Historicist Reading of Alex Rutherford’s Raiders from the North

Abstract

In Raiders from the North, the first book of a series of novels, the Empire of the Moghul, Alex Rutherford recounts the history of the Mughal dynasty, starting with the life of its founder Babur. The novel is a blend of fact and fiction. In this combination, the novel demonstrates the ways of distribution of power, of dissemination of ideas and of the ways of interactions and impacts of cultures. These concepts are related to the perception of New Historicism by Stephen Greenblatt. In this paper, it is argued that the transformation of Babur between being in exile and becoming the emperor is not depicted as a smooth and direct path to without any challenges. Rather, it is an ongoing struggle between the actual historical events on the one hand, and forces in the surrounding culture on the other hand and it was his struggle to create a self-identity. Using the analysis of the events, war, writing, and reflection, this paper considers how Rutherford demonstrates history as a continuous act of production. The language, ritual and symbolic acts used by Rutherford help the reader to remain engaged to his creation of Empire as a means of ruling politically, as well as to form a culture. In combination with the historical way of writing and the force of imagination, the Raiders from the North is revealed as the story of how human beings make themselves, and generates a bigger history of the world.