Abstract

WORKING THE GAP: AMITAV GHOSH AND THE POSTCOLONIAL LABOUR OF HISTORIOGRAPHY

Pankaj Sharma

Volume: 4 Issue: 3 2014

Abstract:

Amitav Ghosh’s fiction, from The Circle of Reason to Flood of Fire, returns again and again to a single wager: that the novel can recover what history has misplaced, discarded, or never thought worth recording. This paper reads that wager against the theoretical ground prepared by Hayden White, Ranajit Guha, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, for whom history is itself a mode of narrative construction rather than a transparent window onto the past. Ghosh belongs, by temperament and by timing, to the generation that came of age alongside Subaltern Studies, and his novels share its founding suspicion: that the archive speaks chiefly in the voice of the victor. Reading The Shadow Lines, The Glass Palace, The Calcutta Chromosome, and the completed Ibis trilogy together, the paper traces three related operations in Ghosh’s method: the recovery of erased anti-colonial networks, the excavation of a counter-scientific knowledge that imperial epistemology worked to suppress, and the reconstruction of an opium economy that colonial record-keeping preferred to leave undocumented. The argument is not that Ghosh writes history in place of fiction, but that his fiction performs, deliberately, the historian’s own labour of emplotment, polishing what it excavates into narrative sense.

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References

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