Through a close reading of the littoral, coastal, and maritime in the three novels that comprise the Ibis Trilogy, I hope to show the ways in which Ghosh’s interest has subtly shifted from land and territorial structures for articulating and critiquing contemporary political events (The Calcutta Chromosome, 1995 The Shadow Lines, 1998) to the sea and to maritime frameworks for understanding the deeper, more genealogically complex currents of human interaction across time and space, a move that marks such works as In An Antique Land, 1992 The Hungry Tide, 2004 and the Ibis Trilogy, 2008-15. Indeed, where much postcolonial writing remains centred on issues of land, dispossession, and diaspora, Ghosh has shown remarkable dissidence in his interests in the sea and, in what I, adapting the Latin American philosopher Enrique Dussel, call, “maritime transmodernities” in order to launch his critique of both Eurocentrism and its equally problematic agon, critical postcolonialism. Thirdly the study aims to observe the third world cultural texts and context in view of the writer’s historical and political dimension.Īmitav Ghosh remains an atypical member of the postcolonial club (as it were) because of his insistent focus upon the sea (rather than land) in a number of his works as the locus for viewing/understanding the historical and cultural encounters between the West and the non-West. The study deals with the question how the interior reality is marginalized by placing the individual within a historical context i.e.
The present study proposes to study the seas/river symbolism as the creative power of nature and time. His novel exhaustively examines expeditions, encounters, exploitation and escapes of criminals/ indentured labourers/underclass off the coast of Canton, Hong Kong, Macao and Indian migrants travelling through ships to seek indentured labour for plantations in Mauritius and in British West Indies.
His novels are reactions to the questions of the chaotic, pluralistic, or information-drenched aspects of postmodern society which depicts the theme of fragmentation and a metaphysically unfounded, chaotic universe of the people’s life on the banks of the holy river Ganges in Calcutta in context of trans-historical phenomena happened prior to the First Opium War/ Anglo-Chinese War during 1839-42. He embraces the fact that the myths and the ways of the seas/rivers purports the reality of culture, the creation of challenges, fabulation and skilful time shifts, sense of paranoia and hyperreality past the industrial age. Amitav Ghosh explores subjectively the people’s consciousness as regards culture, myths and existence.
0 kommentar(er)
