Challenging the Colonial Archive of Conflict in Kamila Shamsie’s A God in Every Stone

This article reads Kamila Shamsie’s novel A God in Every Stone (2014) as postcolonial historical fiction that seeks to question and complicate colonial archives of conflict – specifically, the British archives documenting the experiences of Indian sepoys in the First World War and inter-war colonial conflict in the Punjab. Taking my cue from the work of scholars such as Karin Barber, Santanu Das and others, I show the value of reading the novel with attention to the way it juxtaposes fictional ephemera on the one hand (letters, photographs, souvenirs) and fictionalised archaeological objects on the other (Gandhara statuary in the Peshawar Museum and stone edicts linked to King Ashoka). By incorporating both kinds of material traces of conflict in her novel, I argue, Shamsie questions distinctions between important and unimportant histories and experiences, and highlights the importance of establishing emotional connection with the past(s) we narrate.