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HISTORIOGRAPHIC MOTIFS AND TRANSCULTURAL
ISSUES IN THE NOVELS OF AMITAV GHOSH
My fundamental interest is in people individuals and their
specific predicament
...

- Amitav Ghosh
Historiographic motifs and trans-cultural issues, is a theme that manifests as
cultural conflict or synthesis in many Indian novelists of pre-independence and
post-independence era
...
M
...
It will be pertinent to find out
why it is such an important theme in the novels of Anglo-Indian and British
authors
...


We may concede the point that language is no issue in Narayan also and that in
the bulk of his fiction thereis only the east
...
it may be attributed to what Mukherjee calls,

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the complex fabric of contemporary Indian civilization
She goes onto explain that,
At the present point of Indian history, a writer’s analysis of
his self necessarily involves the evaluation of his own
attitude towards… two aspects of his being- namely,
the indigenous Indian traditions and the imported European
conceptions”,
and the tension resulting there form
...
It is a different
matter whether it is given a central or peripheral place and whether it appears
overtly or just indirectly and implicitly in their work
...
At the outset, the oral transmission of Indian
literacy an indelible mark in the mind and heart of the Lovers of art
...

Describing history as an unending dialogue between the present and the past, the
historian E
...
Carr observes that its dual function is to enable man to understand
the society of the past and to increase his mastery over the society of the present
...

History can be fashioned by the way individuals look at their culture
...

Like Soyinka, Ghosh knows that history is a continuous process, the same things
happening again and again
...


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The sudden realization of the reality of history in which the
individual has an important part to play is reflected in the
Indian novel of the 1980s

Ghosh’s first novel {The Circle of Reason} {1986} is a densely textured workaddressing multiple concerns, from reconstructions of history to cosmopolitan
multiculturalism, from science to pseudo-science, from imagination to reality
...
But Burger’s
argument that it juxtaposes stable, traditional cultures with a diasporic , postcolonial culture is a reading made within the paradigm of classical ethnography
...

The novel concerns the picaresque adventures of Alu, a weaves from a small
village near Calcutta, who leaves home to travel across the Indian ocean to the oil
town of al-Ghazira on the Persian Gulf
...

When Balram decides to make the young Alu, a weaver, the tells him a story of
the technology of weaving that evokes cultural instability and borrowings across
borders
...
The loom
recognizes no continents and no countries
...


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Renato Rosaldo Obseves,
All of us inhabit an independent late 20th century world
marked by borrowing and lending across porous national
and cultural boundaries
...

In this novel, Ghost deconstructs and simple opposition between tradition and
modernity, or discrete, oriental and occidental cultures
...

The second novel of Ghosh The Shadow Line published in 1987 presents historical
dates going back to 1939
...

In his essay on the anti sikh riots of Delhi ( The Ghosts of Mrs
...


A book that led me backward in time to earlier memories of
riots,ones witnessed in childhood
...


The novel is set in calcutta of the 1960’s and moves with an easy falicity through
Calcutta and Dhaka and London
...

The novel is a sweeping history of two familes, one Indian and other English, that
are deeply shaped by events following the departure of the British from India in
1947
...
As Renoto Rosaldo argues,

In contrast with the classical view, which posits culture as a
self-contained whole made up of coherent patterns, culture
can arguably be conceived as a more porous array of
intersections where distinct processes across from within
and beyond its borders
...

The narrative is intricate and Ghosh is laudable for handling the complex flow of
time, from starkly different historical perspectives, masterfully
...
Ghosh told one interviewer,

Within the parameters of history, I have tried to capture a
story, a narrative, without attempting to write a historical
novel
...


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The novel blends fiction, fact and history so skillfully that the combination
appears seamless
...
Their account
of their journeys and trade dealings are discovered in the twentieth century
...
The two narratives initially seem arbitrarily
connected, but they gradually illumine and complement each other
...
Everyone’s on the move, and has
been for centuries: dwelling in travel
...
It is an example of blurring of genres,
unique for any Indo-English writer
...

Ghosh brings in his memory of his childhood experience of riots in Dhaka and the
present predicament of Iraqi war of 1990, in Africa
...
As history was written by the colonizers,
it hardly looks note of the achievements of the subject, colonized people
...
It is a novel of fevers, delirium and Discovery represented Ghosh’s first
foray into science fiction; this densely layered novel offers an alternate history of
the discovery of the parasite that causes malaria
...
Murugan and the early
twentieth century characters in Calcutta
...

It is remarkable to note that Ghosh engages the readers with the issues and
debated on history/historicism and historiography as well as India’s tradition of
narrative
...
Nirmal unfolds the
history of settlement at Lusibari and other places nearby developed by Hamilton
to Kanai, the young boy
...


Ghosh’s latest novel ‘The Glass Palace’, is a monumental work written with
unerring skill
...
It grasps the rise and fall of empire across the
twentieth, even as it maps the geographies of the heart
...
Novels set in the back-ground of the
great opium trade and becomes a world of stories of individuals who have/could

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have/ would have lived through such times and would have suffered, prospered
or doomed during those events
...

Amitav Ghosh’s non-fictional writings now constitute a formidable collection on
their own, comprised of ‘Dancing in Cambodia, At large in Burma’ (1998),
Countdown (1999) and the recent The Imam and the Indian: Prose Pieces (2002)
...

The much celebrated essay on The Slave of MS H6 recovers an anonymous
individual from medieval time
...

Describing history as an unending dialogue between the past and the present, the
historian E
...
Carr observes that his dual function is to enable man to understand
the society of the past and to increase his mastery over the society of the present
...

In conclusion, I see Ghosh as a storier-historian incessantly bringing
historiography to crisis, through consistent and uneasy explorations of microhistories, and seeking their validation beyond disciplinary boundaries, and within
post- foundational theoretical paradigms
...




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