The Other Side of History: Why “What If?” Matters

By Tyron Devotta

History records the road that was taken. Yet those who lived through it stood at crossroads without knowing where the roads would lead. To understand their world, we sometimes need to recover the possibilities that our knowledge of the outcome has obscured.

That is the starting point of Day of the Sun God, my novel set against the Japanese attack on Ceylon on 5 April 1942. Drawing on events, anxieties and political currents of the period, it constructs an imagined explanation for an invasion that never came. Its purpose is to explore how fiction, grounded in historical circumstances, can make us look again at a familiar past.

The question is straightforward: can something that did not happen help us understand what did? The answer depends on the discipline of the imagining.

Changing Conditions 

Counterfactual history begins by changing a condition, decision or event and asking what might plausibly follow. A warning goes unheeded. A commander chooses another objective. A political alliance takes a different form. The exercise tests the relationship between a particular cause and its consequences.

There is a useful distinction here. Inventing an explanation for an actual outcome is not automatically counterfactual: it may be speculative historical fiction. Counterfactual storytelling begins where the imagined account departs from what occurred. A novel can combine these approaches, preserving the broad outcome while inventing or altering the events that lead to it. Readers should be able to recognise that distinction.

Artistic License 

This does not diminish the novelist’s freedom. It clarifies the agreement with the reader.

Ceylon in April 1942 offers a powerful setting for such an investigation. Singapore had fallen, British authority had suffered a devastating blow, and the island’s ports and position gave it considerable strategic importance. A British planning assessment of February 1942 explicitly considered an attack on Ceylon either as a carrier raid or a general assault. The prospect of invasion therefore belonged to contemporary strategic thinking; it is not simply a fear invented afterwards.[1]

But a British fear of invasion cannot establish a Japanese intention to launch one. Nor does the absence of an invasion prove that some concealed intervention prevented it. An air and naval raid, an invasion proposal and an approved occupation campaign are different things. Historical fiction gains credibility when it respects those differences.

For my novel Day of the Sun God, the creative opportunity lies in that distance between apprehension and outcome. The island was attacked. It was not invaded. Within a clearly identified fictional account, the novelist can explore an alternative chain of causes connecting those facts, while accepting that the narrative does not establish the historical explanation.

In  Retrospect 

Now as we read the history books, we know which empires survived a particular year, which campaigns failed and which warnings proved accurate. People making decisions at the time possessed no such certainty. They acted on incomplete intelligence, institutional assumptions, personal loyalties and competing fears. A novel can return the reader to that uncertainty: to the moment when an approaching fleet still represented several possible futures.

Counterfactual inquiry can also sharpen our understanding of causation. Asking “what if?” makes that assumption visible. Would a different order really have mattered? A plausible alternative can expose the strength of an explanation and its weaknesses.

The strongest imagined history therefore encounters resistance. Submarines need fuel. Armies need transport, supplies and troops to hold the territory they seize. Political movements contain disagreements. Commanders answer to institutions and face obligations elsewhere. A fictional intervention must operate within those constraints or explain convincingly how they changed.

Possibility alone is insufficient. An author can imagine almost anything. The more demanding question is whether the imagined sequence belongs recognisably to the world of its time.

There are reasons for caution. Counterfactual narratives can become wish fulfilment, arranging events to vindicate a nation, an ideology or a favourite individual. In his discussion of Richard J. Evans’s critique of counterfactual history, historian Gavriel D. Rosenfeld identifies plausibility and politicisation among the central concerns surrounding the field.[2] Those objections deserve an answer through the quality and honesty of the work.

A novelist should also resist treating every gap in the record as evidence of concealment. An undocumented conversation may be excellent material for fiction; its dramatic usefulness does not make it historical evidence. Likewise, a convincing invented plot demonstrates the writer’s skill, rather than proving that the plot occurred.

These boundaries allow imagination to become an instrument of inquiry.

A story set in wartime Ceylon can ask how imperial vulnerability appeared to people living under colonial rule. What did loyalty mean? How did fear interact with resentment, ambition or hopes of political change? Fiction can explore such questions through individual lives without claiming that one character represents an entire community.

The parallel universe of counterfactual fiction is best understood as a thought experiment. We enter an imagined world close enough to the documented one that its differences become revealing. Looking across that distance, we can ask which events depended on choice, which were constrained by circumstance and which apparent turning points mattered less than we assumed.

If history is a coin, its recorded outcome is the face we most readily recognise. Turning it over does not reveal a second, equally factual past. It reveals the questions, alternatives and uncertainties through which that outcome becomes more intelligible.

That is the ambition behind Day of the Sun God. Its imagined explanation must stand as fiction. Its historical value lies in the attention it directs towards the circumstances from which that fiction grows.

The past happened once. Understanding it requires us to remember that those who lived it could not know what would happen next.

Edited with Artificial Intelligence 

Sources

1. Rob Stuart, “Air Raid Colombo, 5 April 1942: The Fully Expected Surprise Attack,” Royal Canadian Air Force Journal, Fall 2014. Reproduces contemporary British assessments of threats to Ceylon.
https://www.canada.ca/en/air-force/corporate/reports-publications/royal-canadian-air-force-journal/2014-vol3-iss4-06-air-raid-colombo-5-april-1942.html

2. Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, “Whither ‘What If’ History?”, History and Theory 53, no. 3 (2014): 451–467.
https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/history-facultypubs/104/