All fiction, arguably, is thought experiment. Fiction, that is, may be held to perform certain crucial tasks that have conventionally been assigned to the domain of the sciences (see Mach 1897 on the Gendankenexperimente). By offering us characters, histories, and geographies that, by definition, do not exist in – or alter in subtle and significant ways – the observable scenarios around us, fictional texts invite us to imaginatively theorize crises or problems in the world so that we “re-cognize” them anew.

A central raison d'être of fiction, in short, is that it is an experiment with the conventions and constructs of truth-telling. Genres such as the novel typically require us to consider counterfactual universes and present us with hypotheses that seek to “explain” the phenomena around us. It is in this sense that fictions have trained us in theory down the ages. For example, when the Indian epic Ramayana tells us that the three distinctive stripes on the back of the Indian palm squirrel (species Funambulus palmarum) owe their origin to the grateful Rama stroking the back of this creature in a gesture of gratitude because squirrels helped him build a bridge between India and Sri Lanka, it not only offers us an explanation of these markings but also affords us glimpses into a possible ecological worldview that is culturally grounded. Kipling might be said to make a similar move when he asks how the leopard got his spots. These may be prototype “just so” stories, but in their search for causal explanations, they exemplify attempts at theory-building of a novel sort. The present chapter argues that the sophisticated experiments with storytelling conducted by Indian English novelists in the past three decades (namely, the 1980s to the present) extend further a long and distinguished lineage of “experiments with truth” – to use a phrase that Mahatma Gandhi made famous. They seem, however, to possess a generic advantage over Gandhi's autobiographical methods in that they are out-and-out fictions. Thus, their play with history – self-reflexively and artfully using the colonizers' own tongue to construct alternative accounts of recent colonial and postcolonial history – possesses a sort of “wicked freedom” that was perhaps not available to Gandhi. How that freedom is used to meet certain authorial ends will be a central question addressed in this chapter.