Magic Realism has been a significant influence on major postcolonial writers. Evolved as a separate movement in literature, the term ‘Magic Realism’ comprises of the binaries of opposition -‘Magic’ and ‘Realism’ characterized by the use of fantastic and marvelous events in a mundane setting. The term came to be increasingly associated with colonial histories and the postcolonial politics. Magic Realist novels are deemed to be fundamentally ‘historical’ and ‘political’ texts observing the geo-political margins and colonial histories of the world. As a postcolonial discourse, magic realist texts are characterized by hybridity, questions of identity and fusion of the binaries of fact and fiction, space and history and the personal and the political or national. Nina Sibal’s Yatra acknowledges the imperial history of colonization and nationalistic politics through the magic realism narrative. Yatra is a political novel that facilitates the fusion of Indian partition history and politics of imperialism through the technique of magic realism. The paper is an attempt to witness magic realism as a ‘postcolonial device’ to analyze the elements of hybridity, redefine Indian identity by forging a point of view specific to the historical events of India and to explore the role of the ‘postcolonial female’ in nationalistic politics by establishing a link between the ‘personal’ and the ‘national’ in Sibal’s Yatra.

Keywords: History, Hybridity, Magic Realism, Partition, Politics, Postcolonial Feminism