About the Book
In the aftermath of the Rushdie phenomenon, a whole
new breed of Indian writers in English arose in the 1980s, and Amitav Ghosh, with his subtle
experimentation in both his fiction and non-fiction, is one of the most famous.
His formidable literary output, never away from critical gaze, still offers
scope for newer ways of interpretation. The editors of the present volume steer
a time-worthy re-looking into the rich literary wealth of Ghosh
without breaking the critical lineage in Ghosh
studies. A 'new' and valid critical frame can well be structured around the
notion of civilizational crisis that often haunts the
author's search for ethical meaning. The contributors of In Pursuit of Amitav
Ghosh touch upon this compelling aspect of Ghosh's writing in their separate ways. The highlight of
this compendium is a candid and revealing interview with Amitav
Ghosh.
About the
Author
Tapan Kumar Ghosh is an Associate Professor of
English at Tarakeswar Degree College, Hooghly (West
Bengal). He obtained a PhD for his research on the fiction of Arun Joshi and his publications include Arun Joshi's Fiction: The Labyrinth of Life, Salmon Rushdie's Midnight's
Children: A Reader's Companion, Doris
Lessing's The Golden Notebook: A Critical
Study and Chinua Achebe's Things
Fall Apart: A Critical Study, as
also scholarly articles on Rabindranath Tagore, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati
Roy, Shashi Tharoor, Mukul Kesavan, and other writers.
Prasanta Bhattacharya is an Assistant Professor of
English at Rabindra Mahavidyalaya,
Hooghly, and visiting faculty in the department of English at Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata. He received a PhD for
his work on the first wave of English Gothic literature and has also published
over thirty essays, articles and translations.
Preface
AMitav Ghosh
is unquestionably one of the most serious writers crafting fiction in English
today. He is acknowledged by many as the finest practitioner of the genre among
those who emerged out of the post-Midnight's Children boom in Indian English
fiction in the 1980s. He has written consistently good novels and non-fictional
prose works which have won great acclaim both in India and abroad. Amitav Ghosh has been the subject
of many- critical works and many more are likely to be published due to his
growing global popularity. Critics have recognised his extraordinary virtuosity
as a faithful chronicler of the contemporary world, one who has enhanced our
knowledge of buried histories and has borne an eloquent witness to some of the
momentous events of our times.
Ghosh's oeuvre comprises seven major
novels and five important works of non-fiction. His corpus is not only fairly
extensive, but is so splendid in its epistemological ambition and-narrative
scope, that to make a comprehensive assessment is a challenging job. It is not
surprising therefore, that so far no critical work has managed to do justice to
the totality of Ghosh's literary output or
convincingly come to terms with it. The available books dealing with Ghosh's oeuvre do not include a detailed discussion of his
non-fictional prose or recent works like Sea qf Poppies and River of Smoke and are thus neither
comprehensive nor up-to-date. It is exactly here that the importance and
relevance of the current volume lies. In Pursuit of Amitav Ghosh: Some Recent
Readings contains
some serious and significant research articles on various aspects of the
author's works and provides a comprehensive and updated introduction to Amitav Ghosh as a writer. This
volume comprises critical essays on all the works (both fiction and
non-fiction) of Ghosh, including his latest
tour-de-force, River qf
Smoke and, as
such, will prove very useful to students, teachers and research scholars. Many
of these essays provide new perspectives on, and possibly even attempt a reassessment
of, Ghosh as a creative artist. The most
distinguishing feature of this volume is an interview with the author himself
This e-interview, conducted in September 2011 when the author was in Salvador
(Brazil) on a book-launching tour, is perhaps the most recent interview given by
him. The interview reveals little known aspects of this very well-known
author's personality and explores some of his serious concerns which act as a
major creative impulse behind his works.
This volume is a collection of sixteen research
papers, some of which were presented at a UGC-sponsored national seminar on the
author and his works at Tarakeswar Degree College,
West Bengal, in March 2011. These papers have been thoroughly revised and
updated for publication. Critical works dealing with Ghosh's
novels have examined them in the context of his interrogation of national,
linguistic and generic boundaries as well as the theoretical discussion of
subaltern histories, trans-national literature, migration and diaspora. The contributors in the present volume however,
attempt to go beyond the subaltern syndrome and place the author instead, in
different phases of civilisational concerns and in
the search for a kind of civilisational ethic. Their
articles combine meticulous scholarship and detailed textual analysis to
address the multiple issues motivated by Ghosh's
fiction. This volume is also remarkable, as noted earlier, in that it features
a number of essays on Ghosh's non-fictional prose
works. These essays reveal a novelist who is both a formidable thinker and a
man of ideas but available titles have either ignored or only marginally
touched upon this aspect of Ghosh studies. While
selecting the articles for this volume, no compromise has been made with regard
to merit and readability. Unlike other monographs and anthologies of essays on Ghosh's works, the present volume offers no uncritical
accolade. It also analyses Ghosh's drawbacks as an
author and the limitations of his art. In summation, this volume attempts an
objective and impartial assessment of Amitav Ghosh as a creative writer through a critical evaluation of
his entire literary oeuvre, from The Circle if Reason
to River
if Smoke.
A number of people have extended their spontaneous
help and cooperation towards the completion and publication of this volume. But
we must mention the names of Makarand R. Paranjape, Shyamal Kumar Chatterjee, Sajal Kumar
Bhattacharya, Sisir Kumar Chatterjee,
Debabrata Chowdhury and Sipra Ghosh. To them we owe a
very special debt of gratitude.
Introduction
While living in South Africa, Mahatma Gandhi often
quarrelled with his landlord regarding the efficacy of learning English.
Himself an adept user of the language, the Mahatma rigidly resisted the
pragmatic logic of his landlord and stuck to the principle of not giving over
or exposing his children to the benefits of English education. His antipathy
only increased when the struggles for Indian independence reached their peak
and he considered it an unpatriotic act for educated Indians to try to express
themselves in the master's language. This idea was further strengthened when Rabindranath Tagore joined this anti-English campaign as
part of his broader, anti-colonial programme. The English-knowing Indian
intellectuals started to doubt their creative skills while trying to
authentically articulate their feelings vis-a-vis the Raj and its imperial, often very repressive, system
of administration. This doubt can be attributed especially to Gandhi and
Tagore's pronouncements, both of whom were regarded as two of the greatest
political and cultural icons steering the direction of India's emancipation
from colonial rule. Interestingly, however, we should note in this context that
it was precisely Gandhiji's ability to communicate in
English, and that too in clear, lucid terms, which added to his prestige as a
no-nonsense interlocutor at the Round Table Conferences. This held true despite
the British establishment's politically motivated description, cleverly
disseminated by the British media, of his popular image as a sage in terms of a
half-naked, oriental prodigy. Further, his confident dealings with the
coloniser's language through his writings never made him look very
"un-Indian", something he feared about others who were similarly
using English as a medium of expression. In this context, the case of Tag ore
is even more interesting: his Gitanjali (1910)
had to be translated as Song Offirings (1912) with judicious help from
"foreign" friends before he could lay his claim to the prestigious
Nobel Prize for Literature.
It was in this seeming paradox that the future
progress and flourish of English both as a lingua franca and as a literary
language lay.
Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay
is a perfect example of the early brand of Indian English writers whose
diffidence, grammatically correct though stiff English, and imitation of Watter Scott or W. W. Reynolds clearly show that they were
responding to English as a colonial language. Later, both Chattopadhyay,
the author of Rajmohun's
Wife (1864) and
the poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt
made a significant switch and began writing in Bengali thereby indicating even
more clearly how the nationalist debate influenced Indian writers who had first
chosen to write in English. However, this group of late nineteenth- or early
twentieth-century writers were followed by a new group of novelists who arose
mainly during the 1930s and unlike their predecessors, they never thought of
English as a foreign tongue. Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan and Raja Rao
consciously decided in favour of English as their chosen mode of literary
expression because they thought, and rightly so, that after centuries of
indigenisation, English no longer remained a "foreign" language. But
to accommodate the typical Indian spirit and emotional make-up, the English
language had to be freed from its essentially "foreign" moorings.
Thus began the project of de- colonizing English along with the process of
de-colonizing the Indian psyche. The varied and many Indian phrases and turns
of speech were literally translated in order to re-shape the master's language
and to effectively make it a suitable vehicle for writing about the sentiments
and addressing the needs of a non-white community of readers. A certain
regionalism, however, crept into the writings because their authors tried to
write about regions they were most familiar with. But the newest among this
group - Anita Desai, Khushwant Singh and Arun Joshi - mainly in the 1960s and '70s, started
articulating a pan-Indian approach to writing which is wider in scope but has a
distinct urban character about it. Salman Rushdie's
literary ancestry lies in this urbane, pan-Indian mode of novel writing. But
when he burst onto the literary scene with Midnight's Children (1981), he did away with
both the sophistication of a Desai or Joshi and the regionalism so much a
favourite with Narayan, Rao or Anand.
Rushdie's representation of Mumbai as a bustling, chaotic and messy Indian
metropolis with its ingrained cosmopolitanism makes it a miniaturised
metaphoric locale that represents the whole Indian subcontinent where many
languages are spoken and many cultures co-exist.
The bold and highly experimental technique of
Rushdie's writing paved the way for a new breed of Indian writers in English who
arose mainly in the 1980s and in the aftermath of the Rushdie phenomenon.
Writers like Vikram Seth, Rohinton
Mistry and Amitav Ghosh started writing about India as a country which is
globally interlinked with other nations and activities of the world. India's
potential, as one of the most ancient but still persisting and flourishing
civilisations, becomes a literary property with its really interesting story or
stories to tell. The many tellers of this Indian tale take to different routes
of narration. Amitav Ghosh,
for one, is a writer whose style combines the rigours of social research with
the masterly ability of spinning a yarn. As a master storyteller, Amitav Ghosh can effectively
camouflage history, philosophy, science and other social events and concerns
that actually make a 'story' within the surprising turns and twists of a
riveting narrative. But this is common knowledge that we come to hare in our
general appreciation of all the master storytellers of the world like Valmiki, Dickens or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. However, it is
the subtle interplay of all these worldly ingredients that the storyteller
works out, the pattern or design oflife that he or
she weaves, which really creates separate hallmarks to distinguish one writer
from the other. By now, we all recognise that the "story" element has
been a very strong part of Amitav Ghosh's
writings. Even his non-fictional prose is rendered immensely readable through
the use of small anecdotal recounting of events. This should give us a clue
about Ghosh's forte: he is always interested in the
"story" of history or histories, ranging from the very personal to
the transnational. We all know the amount of labour he would put into his
research before embarking upon a new project, but as always, it is the
"story" which would be given a clear, winning priority over the new
and critically nuanced findings of buried history. Even in the interview
arranged for this critical volume, Ghosh
re-emphasises this priority which is set every time he embarks on a journey of
writing.
Ghosh could concentrate on the
"story" because a typical haunting or ghostliness, which he has
sometimes described as "epiphanic" moments,
characterises his writerly search for compelling
fiction. Ghosts have their stories to tell, and of course, in a significant
Contents
|
Preface |
vii |
|
Abbreviations |
ix |
|
Introduction |
1 |
|
Amitav Ghosh: A Bio-bibliography |
16 |
|
An
Interview |
21 |
|
Amitav Ghosh: In Conversation with Tapan Kumar Ghosh and Makarand R. Paranjape |
23 |
|
Ghosh Worldview: Macro Analyses |
32 |
1. |
Mutations
of The Calcutta Chromosome? Amitav Ghosh and the Mapping of
a "Minor" Literature |
33 |
|
Makarand R. Paranjape |
|
2. |
Cosmopolitans of a Borderless
Space |
64 |
Anjali Gera Roy |
||
3. |
The Water Narrative in Amitav Ghosh |
77 |
Samik Bandyopadhyay |
||
4. |
Amitav Ghosh qua Storier-Historian: Some on Thoughts Nation and Race |
86 |
Sumit Chakravorty |
||
|
Amitav Ghosh: Readings of his Fiction |
101 |
5. |
Trapped in the Circle: A
Postcolonial Critique of "Reason" in Amitav
Ghosh's The Circle
of Reason |
103 |
|
Samrat Laskar |
|
6. |
Footprints on Water: The Shadow Lines |
|
|
Sisir Kumar Chatterjee and Abhijit
Gupta |
115 |
7. |
The Calcutta Chromosome: A Study Pradip Ranjan Sengupta |
129 |
8. |
"Live
My Prince; Hold On to Your Life": Issues of Transnational Life and
Identity in Amitav Ghosh's
The Glass Palace |
143 |
|
Sajalkumar Bhattacharya |
|
9. |
The Tides
of History: Changing Currents of History and Identity in The Hungry Tide |
160 |
|
Piyas Chakrabarti |
|
10. |
Sea of Poppies and the Narrative of Exclusion Siddhartha Biswas |
169 |
11. |
Vernacular
Nostalgia to Hybrid Pidgins: A Study of Linguistic Bridges in River of Smoke |
184 |
|
Samrat Laskar |
|
|
Amitav Ghosh:
Readings of his Non-Fiction |
|
12. |
"Subversive
History in the Guise of a Traveller's Tale": A Postmodern Assignation of
Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land |
197 |
|
Saptarshi Mallick |
|
13. |
Dancing
in Cambodia: Nativist Assertion against the
Absoluteness" of Defeat |
220 |
|
Samik Dasgupta |
|
14. |
Countdown: Towards a Crisis of Civilization |
233 |
|
Jolly
Das |
|
15. |
We-ing and They-ing: Othering and Violence in The lmam and the Indian |
248 |
|
Sisir Kumar Chatterjee and Abhijit
Gupta |
|
16. |
Representation
of Violence: Amitav Ghosh's
Incendiary Circumstances |
257 |
|
Sandip Ain |
|
|
Select Bibliography |
273 |
|
The Contributors |
276 |
|
Index |
282 |
About the Book
In the aftermath of the Rushdie phenomenon, a whole
new breed of Indian writers in English arose in the 1980s, and Amitav Ghosh, with his subtle
experimentation in both his fiction and non-fiction, is one of the most famous.
His formidable literary output, never away from critical gaze, still offers
scope for newer ways of interpretation. The editors of the present volume steer
a time-worthy re-looking into the rich literary wealth of Ghosh
without breaking the critical lineage in Ghosh
studies. A 'new' and valid critical frame can well be structured around the
notion of civilizational crisis that often haunts the
author's search for ethical meaning. The contributors of In Pursuit of Amitav
Ghosh touch upon this compelling aspect of Ghosh's writing in their separate ways. The highlight of
this compendium is a candid and revealing interview with Amitav
Ghosh.
About the
Author
Tapan Kumar Ghosh is an Associate Professor of
English at Tarakeswar Degree College, Hooghly (West
Bengal). He obtained a PhD for his research on the fiction of Arun Joshi and his publications include Arun Joshi's Fiction: The Labyrinth of Life, Salmon Rushdie's Midnight's
Children: A Reader's Companion, Doris
Lessing's The Golden Notebook: A Critical
Study and Chinua Achebe's Things
Fall Apart: A Critical Study, as
also scholarly articles on Rabindranath Tagore, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati
Roy, Shashi Tharoor, Mukul Kesavan, and other writers.
Prasanta Bhattacharya is an Assistant Professor of
English at Rabindra Mahavidyalaya,
Hooghly, and visiting faculty in the department of English at Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata. He received a PhD for
his work on the first wave of English Gothic literature and has also published
over thirty essays, articles and translations.
Preface
AMitav Ghosh
is unquestionably one of the most serious writers crafting fiction in English
today. He is acknowledged by many as the finest practitioner of the genre among
those who emerged out of the post-Midnight's Children boom in Indian English
fiction in the 1980s. He has written consistently good novels and non-fictional
prose works which have won great acclaim both in India and abroad. Amitav Ghosh has been the subject
of many- critical works and many more are likely to be published due to his
growing global popularity. Critics have recognised his extraordinary virtuosity
as a faithful chronicler of the contemporary world, one who has enhanced our
knowledge of buried histories and has borne an eloquent witness to some of the
momentous events of our times.
Ghosh's oeuvre comprises seven major
novels and five important works of non-fiction. His corpus is not only fairly
extensive, but is so splendid in its epistemological ambition and-narrative
scope, that to make a comprehensive assessment is a challenging job. It is not
surprising therefore, that so far no critical work has managed to do justice to
the totality of Ghosh's literary output or
convincingly come to terms with it. The available books dealing with Ghosh's oeuvre do not include a detailed discussion of his
non-fictional prose or recent works like Sea qf Poppies and River of Smoke and are thus neither
comprehensive nor up-to-date. It is exactly here that the importance and
relevance of the current volume lies. In Pursuit of Amitav Ghosh: Some Recent
Readings contains
some serious and significant research articles on various aspects of the
author's works and provides a comprehensive and updated introduction to Amitav Ghosh as a writer. This
volume comprises critical essays on all the works (both fiction and
non-fiction) of Ghosh, including his latest
tour-de-force, River qf
Smoke and, as
such, will prove very useful to students, teachers and research scholars. Many
of these essays provide new perspectives on, and possibly even attempt a reassessment
of, Ghosh as a creative artist. The most
distinguishing feature of this volume is an interview with the author himself
This e-interview, conducted in September 2011 when the author was in Salvador
(Brazil) on a book-launching tour, is perhaps the most recent interview given by
him. The interview reveals little known aspects of this very well-known
author's personality and explores some of his serious concerns which act as a
major creative impulse behind his works.
This volume is a collection of sixteen research
papers, some of which were presented at a UGC-sponsored national seminar on the
author and his works at Tarakeswar Degree College,
West Bengal, in March 2011. These papers have been thoroughly revised and
updated for publication. Critical works dealing with Ghosh's
novels have examined them in the context of his interrogation of national,
linguistic and generic boundaries as well as the theoretical discussion of
subaltern histories, trans-national literature, migration and diaspora. The contributors in the present volume however,
attempt to go beyond the subaltern syndrome and place the author instead, in
different phases of civilisational concerns and in
the search for a kind of civilisational ethic. Their
articles combine meticulous scholarship and detailed textual analysis to
address the multiple issues motivated by Ghosh's
fiction. This volume is also remarkable, as noted earlier, in that it features
a number of essays on Ghosh's non-fictional prose
works. These essays reveal a novelist who is both a formidable thinker and a
man of ideas but available titles have either ignored or only marginally
touched upon this aspect of Ghosh studies. While
selecting the articles for this volume, no compromise has been made with regard
to merit and readability. Unlike other monographs and anthologies of essays on Ghosh's works, the present volume offers no uncritical
accolade. It also analyses Ghosh's drawbacks as an
author and the limitations of his art. In summation, this volume attempts an
objective and impartial assessment of Amitav Ghosh as a creative writer through a critical evaluation of
his entire literary oeuvre, from The Circle if Reason
to River
if Smoke.
A number of people have extended their spontaneous
help and cooperation towards the completion and publication of this volume. But
we must mention the names of Makarand R. Paranjape, Shyamal Kumar Chatterjee, Sajal Kumar
Bhattacharya, Sisir Kumar Chatterjee,
Debabrata Chowdhury and Sipra Ghosh. To them we owe a
very special debt of gratitude.
Introduction
While living in South Africa, Mahatma Gandhi often
quarrelled with his landlord regarding the efficacy of learning English.
Himself an adept user of the language, the Mahatma rigidly resisted the
pragmatic logic of his landlord and stuck to the principle of not giving over
or exposing his children to the benefits of English education. His antipathy
only increased when the struggles for Indian independence reached their peak
and he considered it an unpatriotic act for educated Indians to try to express
themselves in the master's language. This idea was further strengthened when Rabindranath Tagore joined this anti-English campaign as
part of his broader, anti-colonial programme. The English-knowing Indian
intellectuals started to doubt their creative skills while trying to
authentically articulate their feelings vis-a-vis the Raj and its imperial, often very repressive, system
of administration. This doubt can be attributed especially to Gandhi and
Tagore's pronouncements, both of whom were regarded as two of the greatest
political and cultural icons steering the direction of India's emancipation
from colonial rule. Interestingly, however, we should note in this context that
it was precisely Gandhiji's ability to communicate in
English, and that too in clear, lucid terms, which added to his prestige as a
no-nonsense interlocutor at the Round Table Conferences. This held true despite
the British establishment's politically motivated description, cleverly
disseminated by the British media, of his popular image as a sage in terms of a
half-naked, oriental prodigy. Further, his confident dealings with the
coloniser's language through his writings never made him look very
"un-Indian", something he feared about others who were similarly
using English as a medium of expression. In this context, the case of Tag ore
is even more interesting: his Gitanjali (1910)
had to be translated as Song Offirings (1912) with judicious help from
"foreign" friends before he could lay his claim to the prestigious
Nobel Prize for Literature.
It was in this seeming paradox that the future
progress and flourish of English both as a lingua franca and as a literary
language lay.
Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay
is a perfect example of the early brand of Indian English writers whose
diffidence, grammatically correct though stiff English, and imitation of Watter Scott or W. W. Reynolds clearly show that they were
responding to English as a colonial language. Later, both Chattopadhyay,
the author of Rajmohun's
Wife (1864) and
the poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt
made a significant switch and began writing in Bengali thereby indicating even
more clearly how the nationalist debate influenced Indian writers who had first
chosen to write in English. However, this group of late nineteenth- or early
twentieth-century writers were followed by a new group of novelists who arose
mainly during the 1930s and unlike their predecessors, they never thought of
English as a foreign tongue. Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan and Raja Rao
consciously decided in favour of English as their chosen mode of literary
expression because they thought, and rightly so, that after centuries of
indigenisation, English no longer remained a "foreign" language. But
to accommodate the typical Indian spirit and emotional make-up, the English
language had to be freed from its essentially "foreign" moorings.
Thus began the project of de- colonizing English along with the process of
de-colonizing the Indian psyche. The varied and many Indian phrases and turns
of speech were literally translated in order to re-shape the master's language
and to effectively make it a suitable vehicle for writing about the sentiments
and addressing the needs of a non-white community of readers. A certain
regionalism, however, crept into the writings because their authors tried to
write about regions they were most familiar with. But the newest among this
group - Anita Desai, Khushwant Singh and Arun Joshi - mainly in the 1960s and '70s, started
articulating a pan-Indian approach to writing which is wider in scope but has a
distinct urban character about it. Salman Rushdie's
literary ancestry lies in this urbane, pan-Indian mode of novel writing. But
when he burst onto the literary scene with Midnight's Children (1981), he did away with
both the sophistication of a Desai or Joshi and the regionalism so much a
favourite with Narayan, Rao or Anand.
Rushdie's representation of Mumbai as a bustling, chaotic and messy Indian
metropolis with its ingrained cosmopolitanism makes it a miniaturised
metaphoric locale that represents the whole Indian subcontinent where many
languages are spoken and many cultures co-exist.
The bold and highly experimental technique of
Rushdie's writing paved the way for a new breed of Indian writers in English who
arose mainly in the 1980s and in the aftermath of the Rushdie phenomenon.
Writers like Vikram Seth, Rohinton
Mistry and Amitav Ghosh started writing about India as a country which is
globally interlinked with other nations and activities of the world. India's
potential, as one of the most ancient but still persisting and flourishing
civilisations, becomes a literary property with its really interesting story or
stories to tell. The many tellers of this Indian tale take to different routes
of narration. Amitav Ghosh,
for one, is a writer whose style combines the rigours of social research with
the masterly ability of spinning a yarn. As a master storyteller, Amitav Ghosh can effectively
camouflage history, philosophy, science and other social events and concerns
that actually make a 'story' within the surprising turns and twists of a
riveting narrative. But this is common knowledge that we come to hare in our
general appreciation of all the master storytellers of the world like Valmiki, Dickens or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. However, it is
the subtle interplay of all these worldly ingredients that the storyteller
works out, the pattern or design oflife that he or
she weaves, which really creates separate hallmarks to distinguish one writer
from the other. By now, we all recognise that the "story" element has
been a very strong part of Amitav Ghosh's
writings. Even his non-fictional prose is rendered immensely readable through
the use of small anecdotal recounting of events. This should give us a clue
about Ghosh's forte: he is always interested in the
"story" of history or histories, ranging from the very personal to
the transnational. We all know the amount of labour he would put into his
research before embarking upon a new project, but as always, it is the
"story" which would be given a clear, winning priority over the new
and critically nuanced findings of buried history. Even in the interview
arranged for this critical volume, Ghosh
re-emphasises this priority which is set every time he embarks on a journey of
writing.
Ghosh could concentrate on the
"story" because a typical haunting or ghostliness, which he has
sometimes described as "epiphanic" moments,
characterises his writerly search for compelling
fiction. Ghosts have their stories to tell, and of course, in a significant
Contents
|
Preface |
vii |
|
Abbreviations |
ix |
|
Introduction |
1 |
|
Amitav Ghosh: A Bio-bibliography |
16 |
|
An
Interview |
21 |
|
Amitav Ghosh: In Conversation with Tapan Kumar Ghosh and Makarand R. Paranjape |
23 |
|
Ghosh Worldview: Macro Analyses |
32 |
1. |
Mutations
of The Calcutta Chromosome? Amitav Ghosh and the Mapping of
a "Minor" Literature |
33 |
|
Makarand R. Paranjape |
|
2. |
Cosmopolitans of a Borderless
Space |
64 |
Anjali Gera Roy |
||
3. |
The Water Narrative in Amitav Ghosh |
77 |
Samik Bandyopadhyay |
||
4. |
Amitav Ghosh qua Storier-Historian: Some on Thoughts Nation and Race |
86 |
Sumit Chakravorty |
||
|
Amitav Ghosh: Readings of his Fiction |
101 |
5. |
Trapped in the Circle: A
Postcolonial Critique of "Reason" in Amitav
Ghosh's The Circle
of Reason |
103 |
|
Samrat Laskar |
|
6. |
Footprints on Water: The Shadow Lines |
|
|
Sisir Kumar Chatterjee and Abhijit
Gupta |
115 |
7. |
The Calcutta Chromosome: A Study Pradip Ranjan Sengupta |
129 |
8. |
"Live
My Prince; Hold On to Your Life": Issues of Transnational Life and
Identity in Amitav Ghosh's
The Glass Palace |
143 |
|
Sajalkumar Bhattacharya |
|
9. |
The Tides
of History: Changing Currents of History and Identity in The Hungry Tide |
160 |
|
Piyas Chakrabarti |
|
10. |
Sea of Poppies and the Narrative of Exclusion Siddhartha Biswas |
169 |
11. |
Vernacular
Nostalgia to Hybrid Pidgins: A Study of Linguistic Bridges in River of Smoke |
184 |
|
Samrat Laskar |
|
|
Amitav Ghosh:
Readings of his Non-Fiction |
|
12. |
"Subversive
History in the Guise of a Traveller's Tale": A Postmodern Assignation of
Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land |
197 |
|
Saptarshi Mallick |
|
13. |
Dancing
in Cambodia: Nativist Assertion against the
Absoluteness" of Defeat |
220 |
|
Samik Dasgupta |
|
14. |
Countdown: Towards a Crisis of Civilization |
233 |
|
Jolly
Das |
|
15. |
We-ing and They-ing: Othering and Violence in The lmam and the Indian |
248 |
|
Sisir Kumar Chatterjee and Abhijit
Gupta |
|
16. |
Representation
of Violence: Amitav Ghosh's
Incendiary Circumstances |
257 |
|
Sandip Ain |
|
|
Select Bibliography |
273 |
|
The Contributors |
276 |
|
Index |
282 |