IWE Online

Amitav Ghosh is perhaps the most distinctive and influential writer to come out of India since Salman Rushdie. He was born on 11 July, 1956 in Calcutta and grew up in Calcutta, Dhaka, and Colombo. He  received a BA (with Honours) in History from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi in 1976 and an MA in Sociology from Delhi University in 1978. Ghosh received a diploma in Arabic from the Institut Bourguiba des Langues Vivantes, in Tunis, in 1979 and then a D.Phil in Social Anthropology from the Oxford University in 1982. In 1980, he went to Egypt to do fieldwork in the village of Lataifa. His experiences in the Egyptian villages are embedded in his debut novel The Circle of Reason and later formed the crux of In An Antique Land.

After beginning his career as a journalist for The Indian Express, Ghosh taught at the Centre for Social Sciences at Trivandrum, Kerala (1982-83), and then at the Department of Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics. He has been a Visiting Professor of Anthropology in multiple universities across the world including the University of Virginia (1988) and  the Columbia University (1994-97).  He has also served as Visiting Professor in English at Harvard University in Spring, 2004.

Amitav Ghosh’s works have received critical acclaim and recognition both at home and abroad. The Shadow Lines (1988), perhaps his most acclaimed masterpiece, won the Sahitya Akademi award, as well as the Ananda Puraskar in 1990. In 2007, Amitav Ghosh was awarded the Padma Shri by the Indian Government. In 2018, he became the first English-language writer to be awarded the Jnanpith. At the international stage, his first novel The Circle of Reason (1986) won the Prix Médicis Étranger, one of France’s top literary awards; it was also hailed as a Notable Book of the Year (1987) by The New York Times. His fourth novel The Calcutta Chromosome (1996) won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for the best science fiction novel in 1997. The Glass Palace (2000) too has received international recognition including the Grand Prize for Fiction at the Frankfurt International e-Book Awards and  the best book award for the Eurasian region of the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2001. Interestingly, Ghosh spurned the award on ideological grounds:

I have on many occasions publicly stated my objections to the classification of books such as mine under the term ‘Commonwealth Literature’. Principal among these is that this phrase anchors an area of contemporary writing not within the realities of the present day, nor within the possibilities of the future, but rather within a disputed aspect of the past. (Ghosh, “Letter to the Commonwealth Foundation” 1)

His repudiation of the Commonwealth Prize springs from his anticolonial position which he states in unambiguous terms:

That the past engenders the present is of course undeniable; it is equally undeniable that the reasons why I write in English are ultimately rooted in my country’s history. … The issue of how the past is to be remembered lies at the heart of The Glass Palace and I feel that I would be betraying the spirit of my book if I were to allow it to be incorporated within that particular memorialization of Empire that passes under the rubric of ‘the Commonwealth’. (1)

No wonder he rejects the post-colonial writing movement which reconfigures the historical project of invasion and exploitation as a symbiotic encounter. Sea of Poppies (2008) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2009; River of Smoke was shortlisted for the Man Booker Asian Prize in 2012. He was also elected as a Fellow of the Royal Literature Society. He also received the Grizane Cavour Award in Italy for his achievements as a writer. He won the Dan David prize jointly with Margaret Atwood in 2010 and was awarded the Grand Prix of the Blue Metropolis festival in Montreal in 2011. In 2019 Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the most important global thinkers of the preceding decade. He has also been conferred Honorary Doctorate degrees by Queens College, City University of New York in 2010, University of Sorbonne, 2011, University of Puget Sound, 2014, and most recently, by Maastricht University.

The key to understanding Amitav Ghosh lies in his double inheritance. By Ghosh’s own declaration, his mother was a staunch nationalist, whereas his father (first a Lieutenant Colonel in the army and, later, a diplomat) served in the British Indian Army, and fought in the Second World War in Burma and North Africa. He was thus “among those ‘loyal’ Indians who found themselves across the lines from the ‘traitors’ of the Indian National Army” (The Glass Palace 552). The young Ghosh grew up on patriotic stories of India’s freedom struggle, heard from his mother, which he found more appealing than the idyllic stories of his father’s life in the British Indian Army. Then one day, towards the end of his life, Ghosh’s father told him a completely different story of racial prejudice and humiliation in the army and the dismayed son was exposed to the  grim reality. These two conflicting strands found a confluence in the psyche of the impressionable, adolescent Ghosh, stimulating his quest for his own identity. In a revealing confession to Dipesh Chakrabarty, Ghosh portrays himself as an incurable amphibian, hinting at the elusiveness of his determinate identity and claims that “to look for agreement is really futile, since … it’s quite a struggle even to agree with oneself” (10). It would, however, be a mistake to think that he is in a quandary about his sense of identity; on another occasion, Ghosh asserts his position as an “Indian” writer. It is just a result of his “being an Indian” (Chambers 34). He thinks of himself “as an Indian writer” for his work has its roots in the experience of the people of the Indian sub-continent, at home and abroad. Accordingly, “‘Indian Writing in English’ seems to me to be a perfectly acceptable categorization of my work” (Hawley 169).

In his debut novel The Circle of Reason (1986), Ghosh explores alternative ways of constructing the world based on connections that dismantle the rigid binaries and empiricism of Western modernity. Displacement and migration, dislocation and inter-cultural crossings are a recurrent motif in Ghosh’s oeuvre which is introduced quite intriguingly in The Circle of Reason. The novel is an elaborate exercise in puncturing the Janus-faced Enlightenment’s worship of Reason and its concomitant racism. Conceived as an objective, disinterested and truth-seeking institution, Western science turned out to be a tool of colonization and of world domination. In the first section of The Circle of Reason significantly titled “Satwa: Reason”, Ghosh systematically interrogates what constitutes scientific methodology by exposing the limitations of the reason obsessed Balaram’s deviant science of phrenology. It explores the limitations of the dogmatic ideals of the Enlightenment and their incommensurability with the demands of practical life and presents migrants who were uprooted from their homelands because of political upheaval. The second part “Rajas: Passion” presents a vast gallery of people who migrate because of economic pressure. Ghosh thus constructs an unrecorded, and so marginalized, subaltern history of the people displaced by artisan guilds, marriage brokers and labour racketeers. They create stories and personalized myths which are on the borders of reason. The third part “Tamas: Death” aims at a negotiation between science, humanism and religion in post-colonial Algeria. The novel is also about subalterns on the move, their strategies of survival, and efforts to construct and represent themselves as a community against oppressive political and bureaucratic machineries.

Each of Ghosh’s novels is concerned with migration and displacement which becomes a “mode of being in the world” (Carter 101). The task that primarily concerns Ghosh then is “not how to arrive, but how to move, how to identify convergent and divergent movements; and the challenge would be how to locate such events, how to give them a social and historical value” (Carter 1992: 101). The unnamed narrator’s Hindu family in The Shadow Lines (1988) fled from their home in Dhaka to Calcutta during the Partition of India in 1947. During the Second World War they befriend an English family, the Prices, and the series of cultural crossings that the two families are involved in are seamlessly interwoven in the narrative, as are the three major locations in which they live: Dhaka, Calcutta, and London. Far from being moored in a single location, the narrator occupies a discursive space that transcends spatial, political and even temporal boundar­ies, thereby interrogating essentialist notions of self, community and the nation. Within this context, the narrative creates a dialectical interplay between the narrator’s grandmother Thamma’s search for patterned orderliness and stability and exclusivist nationalism which sets the self against the other and Ila’s peripatetic lifestyle that has extended her mastery over physical space but foreshortened the temporal perspective in her life. In stark contrast to both is Tridib whose imagination enables him to think beyond the boundaries of cultures and na­tions, time and space. He longs for a transcen­dental state outside ordinary human experience, beyond the realm of distinctions where opposites cancel each other. Ironically, Tridib, who always craves for a place beyond history, gets killed in a riot in Dhaka. Not to speak of communal tensions, micronationalist factions subvert the myth of homogeneity of the Indian nation-state. The narrator’s uncle Robi reflects on how terrorist and separat­ist outfits in Assam, the north-east, Punjab, Sri Lanka, and Tripura utter the rhetoric of freedom to fragment the nation: “And then I think to myself, why don’t they draw thousands of little lines through the whole subcontinent and give every place a new name? What would it change? It’s a mirage; the whole thing is a mirage. How can anyone divide a memory” (The Shadow Lines 247)? Territorial space can be demarcated by lines but the collective unconscious remains indivisible.  Amitav Ghosh experienced a similar situation when riots broke out in Delhi in November, 1984 after the assassination of Indira Gandhi. What he remembers is not only “the horror of violence” but also “the affirmation of humanity…the risks that perfectly ordinary people are willing to take for one another” (The Imam and the Indian, 61). Such people demonstrate “the indivisible sanity that binds people to each other independently of their governments” (The Shadow Lines 230). Eventually, The Shadow Lines “became a book not about any one event but about the meaning of such events and their effects on the individuals who live through them” (The Imam and the Indian 60).

The two parallel narratives in In An Antique Land (1992) create a dialectic between an idyllic, medieval Middle-East and a contemporary trouble-torn Arab world. While the primary narrative focuses on the narrator’s fieldwork experiences with the fellaheen in contemporary Egypt, the secondary narrative reconstructs an obscure, fragile subaltern subject, the slave of MS H.6. The two narratives presenting parallel human experiences are intricately interwoven. The slave is a paradigmatic subaltern whose experiences are to be reconstructed from the fragments available to the narrator-historian. By acknowledging the erased histories of the medieval oriental world, the narrator embarks on a project to affirm the existence of this Indian slave of antiquity who virtually becomes the narrator-historian’s second self. A generic amalgam, Ghosh’s next novel The Calcutta Chromosome (1996) presents a dialectic between Western scientific epistemology and an alternative eastern counter-science bordering on mysticism. The narrative revolves around the Nobel Prize winning Surgeon-Major Ronald Ross’s discovery of the malaria parasite in Calcutta in 1898 and subverts it. Ross’s Eurocentric heroic self-projections in his Memoirs are dismantled by marginalized Oriental mystics whose modus operandi is silence. Writing back against Western scientific discourse, Murugan, the principal investigator in quest of this counter-scientific cult,  claims that Ross was an unwitting instrument in the hands of a secretive, subaltern agency. Continuing the legacy of the anthropologist narrator in In An Antique Land who pursues the traces of an elusive twelfth century slave, Murugan tries to retrieve an alternative, subaltern voice and an enigmatic epistemological system.

In The Glass Palace (2000), Ghosh engages directly with colonialism and its aftermath. It spans several generations and charts the lives of Indian families exiled in Burma and their migration. The novel is partially based on the life and experiences of Jagat Chandra Dutta, a timber merchant in colonial Burma. The narrative begins with the British invasion of Burma and the expansion of the Empire. While British colonial expansionism seizes the political powers of Burma and annexes it into its Indian empire, it also opens up wonderful private opportunities for native entrepreneurs. The narrative traces the dynamics of collaboration and complicity of these local capitalists with the Empire and their meteoric rise. It is their ability to absorb the colonial worldview and internalize the logic of capitalism that shapes the lives of Saya John and Rajkumar and explains their success. It also represents the way colonial discourses (primarily the military discourse) have moulded native identity and resulted in severe self-alienation in the Collector Beni Prasad Dey and the soldiers in the British Indian army like Arjun. The liberation struggle of the Indian National Army serves as an instrument of cultural resistance for these dehumanized soldiers against a racist colonial discourse. Dinu’s discourse in post-independent Burma articulates the failures of Burmese nationalism after the assassination of Aung San. A series of insurrections on ethnic grounds have belied the aspirations of the post-colonial nation state. In his collection of prose pieces Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma, Ghosh dismantles the exclusivist ideology of the nation-state and craves for the compositeness and inclusiveness in pre-independent Burma which interweaved all clans and tribes: “In a region as heterogeneous as South-East Asia, any boundary is sure to be arbitrary. On balance, Burma’s best hopes for peace lie in maintaining intact the larger and more inclusive entity that history, albeit absent-mindedly, bequeathed to its population almost half a century ago”(100). It is this concept of syncretism, of a national reconciliation of all opposing ethnic insurrections that is the liberating idea in a crumbling nation. This ideal is expressed both by Dinu and by the democratic voice of Aung San Suu Kyi who realize that although “politics has invaded everything, spared nothing … religion, art, family … it cannot be allowed to cannibalize all of life, all of existence” (The Glass Palace 542). It is this assertive voice of Suu Kyi that expresses the democratic aspirations of the Burmese against the oppressive menace of the military junta.

In stark contrast to the diasporic peregrinations that dominate the bulk of Ghosh’s oeuvre, the action of The Hungry Tide (2004) is located in the swampy mangrove forests of the Sundarbans at the mouth of the Gangetic delta. Commenting on this marked shift, Ghosh confesses that the novel, intimately related with his family, initiates the return of an expatriate writer: “This is my first book that is completely located and situated in Bengal and it was very important to me for exactly that reason … I feel in some mental and emotional way that I’m in a process of returning – which will take me a long, long time – and it is currently underway” (The Chronicle Interview 3). The elusive Gangetic delta forms the background of the intricate interrelationships between three individuals from different parts of the globe: Piyali Roy, a young American cetologist; Kanai Dutt, a middle-aged translator from Delhi; and Fokir, a young illiterate fisherman from the Sundarbans. The narrative also recounts the erased history of the Morichjhapi Massacre and the dehumanizing nature of state machinery in India and its brutalities through the idealist Nirmal’s eye-witness account of the decimation of the commune of refugees. It also raises the issue of how tigers and humans can coexist in the Sundarbans but leaves it unresolved. The extent to which non-human forces can intervene with human thought and uproot human settlements can be traced in the demographic dislocations caused in the delta region of the Sundarbans. Climate change has been a matter of particular urgency for Amitav Ghosh as he explicitly states: “The Bengal delta is so heavily populated. . . . If a ten-foot rise or even a five-foot rise in the seas were to happen. . . . Millions of people would lose their livelihoods. … It is not something that we can postpone or think about elsewhere; it is absolutely present within the conditions of our lives, here and now” (UN Chronicle 51). The inconceivably vast forces of nature are inextricably intertwined with the language of fiction. This interrelation between what were once considered unbridgeable binaries: living and the non-living, animate and the inanimate, establishes the human-nature continuum. Human life is about becoming, but a becoming-with other life forms; a non-anthropocentric conception of life in which human life has always been intertwined with multiple life forms and technologies. Amitav Ghosh therefore questions the restrictive nature of the Western tradition of the novel and also expands its scope in Gun Island (2019). The novel also deals with the most urgent and fraught theme of refugees and illegal migration, displacement and renewal. In this tide country where the landscape is constantly transformed, nothing is certain and stable. It is a location perennially ravaged by violent storms, none more violent than the cyclone Aila which struck the region in 2009. The narrative chronicles how communities had been devastated and families dispersed—with the youth drifting to cities and the old becoming beggars. Gun Island not only delineates the miserable condition of these “climate refugees” (The Great Derangement 192) but also charts the impact of the oil industry on nature and animals.

Cutting through the limitations of space and time, what interweaves Ghosh’s Sundarbans trilogy — The Hungry Tide, Gun Island and Jungle Nama (2021) — is the legend of Bon Bibi. Jungle Nama retells in verse the core story of the folk narrative of the Sundarbans, the Bon Bibi Johurnama, available in two late 19th century versions, one by Munshi Muhammad Khatir, the other by Abdur-Rahim bearing the title Bon Bibir Keramati or Bon Bibi Johurnama (“The Miracles of Bon Bibi or the Narrative of Her Glory”). It is intertextually related to the 17th century Raymangal of Krishnaram. Raymangal introduces the tiger god Dokkhin Rai, who is defeated and makes peace with Gazi Khan and Gazi Kalu, agreeing to share human homage with them. This syncretism is incorporated into the Bon Bibi cult, a unique example amidst clashing fundamentalisms of interfaith solidarity in a shared, inhospitable environment. This myth consolidates the community life of the primitive society of the tidal people as they “enter into ritual, acquiring in this new contest a magic significance (which is in general highly specific as regards its cultic or ritualistic meaning). Ritual and everyday life are tightly interwoven with each other” (Bakhtin 12). The Bon Bibi cult and the histories of the Sundarbans are thus seamlessly interwoven. There is no “overarching censoring/limiting/defining systems of thought that neutralize and relegate differences to the margins” (Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe 86). Every life-world has its own particular rules of functioning which produces what may be called ‘affective histories’ that cannot be assimilated to some abstract universal.

The Ibis trilogy is based on comprehensive historical research about the mid-nineteenth century opium wars between China and the Western powers led by Britain. The European powers, cloaking their greed with the rubrics of free trade and internationalization of commerce, attempted to open the Chinese markets to the vicious opium trade. The first book of the trilogy, Sea of Poppies (2008), depicts the politics of subjugation of the West and the efforts at resistance of the East in an inclusive diachronic version of history which incorporates the unheroic wretched of the earth. It chronicles the lives of a motley group of people who, after many upheavals, board the Ibis. The schooner, formerly a slave carrier between Africa and America, now transports indentured, colonial labourers, the girmitiyas, to new colonies. The narrative traces the destruction of indigenous agricultural practices when the native peasants were forced by the colonizers to cultivate opium. This ecological imperialism was aggravated by the transportation of a pauperized pool of landless labourers to Mauritius, leading  to the development of the capitalist world economy. River of Smoke (2011) presents another aspect of this pillage of peripheral natural resources through the British naturalist Frederick ‘Fitcher’ Penrose’s money-making ambitions to extract rare Third World flora and fauna and sell them in the West. His imperialistic greed considers China as a country “singularly blessed in its botanical riches, being endowed not only with some of the most beautiful and medicinally useful plants in existence, but also with many that were of immense commercial value” (River of Smoke, 101). Flood of Fire (2015) is exclusively concerned with the first Opium War in 1840 when the British invaded Canton to resist China’s blockade of their opium trade and demanded compensation for their losses when Chinese commissioner Lin destroyed their goods. The novel explores the life of Mrs. Burnham—Cathy—always hungry for love, ultimately finding a place of refuge in the arms of the free trader Zachary Reid who  exploits her emotions in his quest for survival and revenge.

Ghosh’s most recent works investigate the ways in which the intertwining forces of capitalism, empire, and the processes of decolonization have created an unprecedented climate crisis and produce climate refugees who cannot be confined within national territories. The 20^th century has witnessed artists and writers playing roles of activists “not just in aesthetic matters, but also in regard to public affairs” (Great Derangement162) in a period of accelerating carbon emissions. He launches a scathing attack on Francis Bacon’s sanction for the extermination of “certain groups” of non-Europeans in his An Advertisement Touching on Holy War: “Bacon’s advertisement for a holy war was thus a call for several types of genocide, which found its sanction in biblical and classical continuity” and “it continues to animate the workings of empire to this day” (The Nutmeg’s Curse 26). Ghosh concedes that “capitalism and empire are certainly dual aspects of a single reality” but asserts that the “relationship between them” has never been “a simple one” (Great Derangement 117). In “Histories,” the second section of The Great Derangement, he develops a “genealogy of the carbon economy” (145) that finds resonance in theories of postcolonialism, environmental justice, and modernity. Disagreeing with Naomi Klein, Ghosh argues that it is not capitalism per se but rather the unequal operations of the Empire that are responsible for global dysfunction. Amitav Ghosh’s latest work of fiction The Living Mountain: a Fable for Our Times (2022), an allegory for capitalism’s dominance and anthropogenic control over natural resources and indigenous livelihoods, has at its core a “living mountain” called the Mahaparbat, which is a source of sustenance for indigenous people, “something that cannot be traded” (The Living Mountain 12). Their lives are disrupted by intruders into the valley who treat the mountain as nothing but a resource. Capitalistic ideology and western anthropocentric episteme entangle non-western modalities of perception and knowing, thereby silencing other forms of knowledge and consciousness. The Living Mountain thus interrogates the ways in which the Western colonial episteme has commodified ecology.

A recurrent figure in Ghosh’s writings is an ethnographer/historian who enters into a democratic dialogue with the past with his profound imaginative empathy to recover the traces of marginal and suppressed stories. The humanist anthropologist in In An Antique Land, for instance, retrieves “the last testament to the life of Bomma, the toddy-loving fisherman from Tulunad” (349) and captures the full-lived truth about the Slave, underlining the limitations of a scientifically pure social anthropology. Quite often the textured histories that the historian excavates are external to the paradigm of either colonial conquest or anticolonial resistance and imagine a utopian world preceding the violence of western imperialism. Intent on interrogating and subverting the hegemonic position of a western-originated discourse as also the bourgeois historiography of a decolonized state, the ethnographer-historian considers his subaltern subjects not as ‘other histories’ or ‘other knowledges’. He rather imagines their discursive-epistemic spaces as forms of openness for a genuine transcultural open-ended dialogue. To ‘recover’ the history of the subalterns, the historian ‘translates’ discrepant ‘life-worlds’ and experiences through secular explanatory modes and constructs the subjectivity of his historical subject in a two-dimensional narrative process. The narrator/historian thus imaginatively interprets and interweaves the textual traces from the scraps of manuscripts he has found in archives through his narrative process as well as relates his search for these documents. The exhaustive Notes section at the end of the novels testifies to the empirical and philological research he has also conducted on the documents. The subaltern subject that is put together from textual traces gains agency in the very process of being narrated into existence. In order to overcome the limitations of historical archives, Ghosh’s writings build up a complex series of intersections between material documents like personal diaries, fragments of letters, schedules as well as individual memories to re-construct the past. Evidently, Ghosh tries to reconcile the ‘analytical’ histories based on rational categories and the ‘affective’ histories based on the plural ways of being-in-the-world. By stretching the limits of history, they open up new possibilities for the emergence of different ‘life-worlds’. Ghosh does not use anything like the Rushdian chutnified or Sanskritized English to represent the language of the lower-class narrators.  Everything is translated into English grapholect, with an indication in the text of the kind of variety in question. It is in the Ibis trilogy that Ghosh achieves this linguistic virtuosity with his representation of the lascari language and Chinese pidgin.

Ghosh’s antipathy towards traditional western political nationalism and  the idea of the nation springs from his deep-seated ideological affiliations with Tagore and the mid-nineteenth century Bengal Renaissance. Hence his efforts to carve out a specifically Indian modernity out of the encounter between the indigenous cultures and the western model. Though recognized as a major postcolonial voice, he himself disavows that rubric. So ingrained is his anticolonialism that he devotes himself to examining the impact of the west on its erstwhile colonies and the universal process of globalization. He thematizes the migrations of people(s), the importance of connections between the past and the present, the changing status of the nation-states, the fluid nature of boundaries, intercultural communication beyond nationalism, the spread of western modes of production and the encounters between different cultures, all of which are the results of the fallout from globalization. Interestingly, the intricate relationship between love and death that recurs throughout Ghosh’s oeuvre denotes his humanist vision. Ideas and ideals, theories and philosophies, fettered as they are by time and place, are pretty ephemeral compared to the staying power of man’s fundamental experiences and elemental emotions. The chances of Ghosh’s going down to posterity lie not so much in the theoretical as in the emotive components of his works.

WORKS CITED

PRIMARY SOURCES

Novels

Ghosh, Amitav. Flood of Fire. Penguin Hamish Hamilton, 2015.

———. Gun Island. Penguin Random House, 2019.

———. In An Antique Land. Ravi Dayal Publisher, 1992.———. River of Smoke. New Delhi: Penguin, 2011.

———. Sea of Poppies. Penguin, 2008.

———. The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium and Discovery. Ravi Dayal Publisher, 1996.

———. The Circle of Reason. Ravi Dayal Publisher, 1986

———. The Glass Palace. Ravi Dayal Publisher, 2000.

———. The Hungry Tide. Ravi Dayal Publisher, 2004.

———. The Living Mountain: a Fable for Our Times. Fourth Estate, 2022.

———.The Shadow Lines. Oxford University Press, 1988.

Non-Fictional Prose

Ghosh, Amitav. Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma. Ravi Dayal Publisher, 1998.

———.The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Penguin Random House India, 2016.

———.The Imam and the Indian: Prose Pieces. Ravi Dayal Publisher, 2002.

———.The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. Penguin, 2021.

Interviews and Correspondence

Ghosh, Amitav. “The Chronicle Interview: Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide. ” Interview by

Hasan Ferdous and Horst Rutsch. UN Chronicle 42.4, 2005: 48–52. Online Edition www.un.org./Pubs/chronicle/2005/issue4 .

———.Correspondence with Dipesh Chakrabarty. www.amitavghosh.com The official

website of Amitav Ghosh 2002 2 September 2006

———. “Letter to the Commonwealth Foundation.” Iaclals Newsletter, July 2001.

SECONDARY SOURCES

Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhalovich. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Edited and translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Carter, Paul. Living in a New Country: History, Travelling and Language. Faber and Faber, 1992.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Oxford University Press, 2000.

Chambers, Claire. “‘The Absolute Essentialness of Conversations’: A discussion with Amitav Ghosh.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 41,no. 1, May 2005, pp.26-39.

Hawley, John C. Amitav Ghosh. Foundation Books,2005.