Reading Fakir Mohan Senapati's Six Acres and a Third and Premchand's Godaan from a comparative perspective, this paper shows how some stories write the world in a more realistic way than others by providing a better "epistemic access" to it. Godaan presents a moving human document and social panorama but Six Acres considerably deepens the "referential" function of its own discourse by rewriting reference as "epistemic access" to the structures of domination. The novel of a tyrant and of a tyrannical system thus becomes the product of a complicit social ideology and discourse, encouraging scepticism about what is given. It problematises the real so that the rules of this world can be rewritten, unlike Godaan, which settles for the familiar reality of psychodrama.
