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Chapter III
Historical Imagination
Amitav Ghosh is a postmodern writer who attempts to express different
discourses on the history of some nations in his fiction. After the arrival of
post-structuralism and later Postcolonialism on the academic scene, history has
been refused and its truth have been questioned. The postcolonial writers often
use allegory to proceed beyond a
deterministic view of history by revising, appropriating or reinterpreting
or it as a concept, and in doing so articulating new codes of recognition
within which those indent acts of resistance, those unrealized intentions
and those re-orderings of consciousness that ‘history’ has rendered silent
or invisible can be recognized as shaping forces in a culture’s tradition.
(Journal of Commonwealth Literature 159)
Reconstructing history is a narrative style of the postcolonial writers in
their attempt to make the meta-narratives of history easier to understand.
Amitav Ghosh effectively makes use of it to promote the narrative as an
alternative mode of knowledge to the scientific, on which has been founded the
western imperial enterprise. The basic idea that reflects his writings is that
history like culture and knowledge is not an absolute independent thought, but
a construct. So it is possible to remake it with intuition. Ghosh shows his
conviction about the fluidity of history in a letter written to withdraw The Glass
Palace (2000) from the competition for the Commonwealth Writer’s prize.
About the writer’s freedom of choice in reconstructing history, he writes:
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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. Yet the ways in which we remember the past
are not determined solely by the brute feel of time: they are also open
to choice, reflection and judgement (Journal of Commonwealth
Literature 21)
So, history is telling a story about the past which implies that there is no
single unalterable history, but histories erected in accordance with the prevalent
power structure of that time. The academic discourse had shown a tendency to
look open Europe as the sovereign theoretical subject constructed by tales told
to the colonized by the imperialism. Consequently, all other histories were
documented as the variation of the European master narrative. In the Indian
context, the colonial discourse had remoulded historiography through the
discourse and practice of modernity, and the cultural diversity of India. Along
with these, the European concepts of social formation like the Feudalist, the
Capitalist, and the Modern found their way into the Indian ethos. Dipesh
Chakrabarty in his essay Postcoloniality and The Artifice of History” portrays a
beautiful pen picture of this social transformation in colonial India. He writes.
Indian history, even in the most dedicated socialist or Nationalist hands
remain a mimicry of certain “modern Subject of “European” history and
is beyond to represent A sad figure of lack and failure. The transition
narrative will always remain “grievously incomplete”. (Postcoloniality
and The Artifice of History 239)
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The lack of the transition narrative reveals the incapacity of the Indian
historiography to make an idiom conforming to the peculiar cultural condition
of India. So the only possible mode of self- representation that the Indian can
adopt is what Homi K.Bhabha calls “mimetic” placing itself to a position of
subalternity. A study of the issue of Indian history abounds in occurrences
where they made their subject hood as truth by way of anti-historical and antimodern collective memory. The Glass Palace gives excellent examples of this
self- willed subaltern feeling of the Indians as represented in the narration,
“Many of them were uneasy about this: their relationship with their British
officers was the source of their pride and prestige. To serve under Indians was
a dilution of this privilege” (The Glass Palace 281). Again, the emptiness of
inescapability from the colonial baggage stares out through the argument of
Arjun with Dinu:
Did we ever have a hope ….. We rebelled against an Empire that has
shaped everything in our lives; colored everything in the world as we
know it. It is a huge indelible stain which has tainted all of us. We
cannot destroy it without destroying ourselves. And that, I suppose, is
where I am ….(The Glass Palace 518)
Colonial India had witnessed a number of struggles in which the
anti-historical constructions of the past provided very powerful forms of
collective memory which in a disciplined and regulated form is nothing other
than history. It is in the efforts to represent the originality and the distinction of
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Indianness that the anti-historical devices of memory and the anti-historical
histories of the subaltern classes are appropriated.
A portrayal of complexity in history with the nation in the Indian
context an insertion of the mixed feelings, contradictions, and sorrows into the
history of modernity. However, the suppressed thoughts and violence that
were used in the victory of the modern is played down in histories that
celebrate the arrival of the modern state. Commenting on this fact, Dipesh
Chakrabarty writes:
Histories that aim to displace a hyper real Europe from the center
towards which all historical imagination currently gravitates will have to
seek out relentlessly this connection between violence and idealism that
lies at the heart of the process by which the narratives of citizenship
away modernity come to find a natural home in “history”.
(Postcoloniality and The Artifice of History 243)
History can be seen to function in accordance with a fixed agenda that
seeks to domesticate a variety of things by way of persuading, both personal
and impersonal. It is important in the establishment of meaning, in the creation
of truth, and in deciding the master and the slave. This explains Europe’s
acquisition of the epithet “modern” which established the existing potion of
imminent colonial expansion as witnessed by the world history. The reciprocal
relationship between history and culture as Ngugi Wa Thiong’o points out:
“Culture is a product of the history of a people which it in turn reflects”
(Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature 15) has
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become instrumental in the establishment and continuance of colonialism.
The colonizers took the fullest advantage of this history culture nexus in
restricting the colonized as the inferior and the submissive by the deliberate
devaluation of ethnic cultures and the denial of their history. This has occurred
as a result of the cultural displacement of the colonized, proving itself as the
most persistent colonial aftermath. The intrusion of colonial culture and
ideology or the cultural fall has invited “a defense of indigenous culture
developed almost simultaneously with the colonial conquest” (Nationalism and
Colonialism in Modern India 89).
The influence of colonialism was such that the subject races were
estranged from their traditional way of life based on love and fellow feeling.
Instead, they began to hatred nature and greed for power, imitating the model
held before them by the colonizer.
Indian English fiction has a long history but it reached the development
when it first received global attention with the publication of Salman Rushdie’s
The Midnight’s Children and its recognition world-wide through the Booker
Award. It created for the first time, an awareness among the creative writers of
the tales that India has “to tell”. As Rushdie expresses in The Midnight’s
Children, “There are so many stories to tell….an excess of intertwined lives,
events, miracles, places, rumours, so dense a commingling of the improbable
and the mundane” (The Midnight’s Children 5). Even Amitav Ghosh in one of
his recent interviews in The Times of India says, “ India abounds in stories and
the more they are told the better”.(8) Today, the Indian English novelists
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follow this advice and so there are innumerable novels telling stories of the
past, present and the future, of men and women, of the affluent and the poor, of
the down-trodden and the upper-cast, of corruption and samskara.
Another significant aspect to which Rushdie brings our attention is the
interaction of the historical and the individual forces. In the 1930’s, the Indian
English novelist was more concerned with the national, political and social
problems but the novelist of the 1960’s shifted the focus to the individual’s
quest for personal meaning and his existential problems and social
relationships. In the 1980’s there was a further discernible change. With
Rushdie’s The Midnight Children, the novelists were inspired to take up the
relationship between national issues and the individual. Women writers like
Anita Desai and Shashi Deshpande are the exception to the general trend where
the novelist began to concern themselves with issues that are important in
national life and their impact on private lives. They looked back at the issues
of the freedom struggle, independence, partition, emergency, India-China War,
the birth of Bangladesh, the massacre of Sikhs in 1984 …. A new group of
writers found no distinction between the traditional oral culture history and a
scientific objective history. In fact M.F.Salat states: Postmodern
historiographical fiction perhaps most deliberately Contextualizes the
postmodern interrogation of fact and fiction Divisionism by subverting and
contradicting the modernist view Of history as scientific and objective
discipline.” (Pinning Down Proteus 32).
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The postmodernists equate the riots and rebellions with wars and battles
since their focus is on bringing to the centre, the marginalized events and
persons. The focus is on the individual and private rather that the royal and the
public, in a sense to show how public and political affairs have influenced and
shaped the private life of the nation. Rushdie’s novel sets the tone of fiction
writing and is a turning-point for the Indian novel in English. It is the 1980’s,
that saw the publication of novels like Nayantara Sahgal’s Rich Like Us,
Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey, Shashi Tahroor’s Great Indian Novel,
which could undermine and the written history of the period including the
historical capsule that Indira Gandhi buried for posterity. Rushdie says that the
real history of the people of India should be ‘pickle-preserved’ as he has done
in his novels. This subversion of history is repeatedly done by Amitav Ghosh
too very skillfully in his Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique
Land, The Calcutta Chromosome and The Glass Palace. The Naxalite
movement, The Bangladeshi exodus, the riots in Dhaka and Calcutta, The 1984
riots in Delhi, the historical facts about malarial research, the condition of the
slaves in Egypt, the immigrant ghettos etc. fill his novels. As Coomi Veraina
quotes Kroetsch Bessai, “the reader has slowly to unlearn concepts of
characters, of motivation, of plot and ending” (The Post Modern Test 40).
These characteristics are responsible for placing the novel today as a
universally recognized historic form of literary art. “Its resources and
capacities appear to be commensurate with the realities and consciousness of
the modern epoch,” (72) says Roth.
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Ghosh’s use of time presents an interesting innovation from the
traditional Dickens’ novel. To him, past, present, and future coalesce into one.
He does not make events in a historical or chronological order. Instead, the
reader is able to move with the characters “to envision the way in which his
past colours his present, in which the past is ever present within his
consciousness” (14 ). His novels are nit limited by clock-time as they do not
deal merely with externals. In fact, the researcher often gets the impression
that events lie outside the normal dimensions of time as in The Calcutta
Chromosome. “Yesterdays are never lost, just as tomorrow’s are always
embedded” (112).
Amitav Ghosh’s first novel, The Circle of Reason places him
immediately as a master craftsman in the art of fiction. Hailed as a breakaway
from the traditional forms of fiction writing in English, The Circle of Reason
has been translated into many European languages and has even won the
prestigious literary award Prix Medial Estranger for its French version. Even
in his first novel, Ghosh introduces strange and bizarre happenings which are
repeated and become an intrinsic part of novels like The Calcutta Chromosome.
Themes and metaphors are used in plenty with the journey motif being the
most recurring one. This is not very surprising when one remembers that the
author himself has traveled from Bengal to Delhi and later to Egypt and
England. He is able to tell a story well. The Circle of Reason is about an eightyear old orphan who lives in Lalpukur in West Bengal but from where he is on
the run. Using the motif of the journey, Ghosh has drama, suspense and
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mystery too. Shyam Asnani describes the novel: “It is also an interesting tale of
myriad colourful people, of man’s relation with the machine, his curse and
salvation with science and reason” (The Circle of Reason 141).
The illusory idea that a land of splendour and prosperity awaits
researcher in an alien land increased the number of post-partition and post-war
migrants. In The Circle of Reason Ghosh portrays how middle class and lower
class people are drawn to the oil rich countries of Al-Ghazira in search of
prosperity. But when the immigrants meet reality, the truth dawns upon them
that what they have made is a lost bargain. In their craze for the material
pleasures of life, they have lost so many precious things. They have missed the
freedom that they experienced in their mother land. Ghosh realistically
portrays the unsafe life of the diaspora in the second section of The Circle of
Reason; the picture of the moving migrants, how they crowd together in the
ship bound for the gulf countries, how everyone gets involved in the problems
faced by other fellow passengers on board and their attempt to tackle them and
how they unite in pleasure and pain are graphically caught up here. A
respectable person who had been leading a wealthy life can turn into a very
poor person within a fraction of a second, with nobody to care for and no law
to protect Zindi, the middle aged lady who had been a step mother for the
homeless immigrants became orphaned when everybody left her in their
foolish rush for personal benefits. Santhosh Gupta describes Ghosh as a writer
of the shifting ongoing migrations and transnational cultural flows in different
countries over different continents, a writer who questions the validities of
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boundaries and borders imposed by some powerful or communities over others
(Indian Writing in English: The Last Decade 242).
In his first novel The Circle of Reason Ghosh uses Nachiketa myth
from the Kathakopanishad. Vajasravasa, a poor and pious Brahmin had a son
named Nachiketas. The father performed a sacrifice and being poor, gave as
presents, to the priests, only the few old and feeble cows he had. The boy felt
that such unworthy presents wouldn’t possibly secure his father’s happiness in
the life to come, and inorder that there should be at least one substantial gift in
connection with the sacrifice he offered himself to be given away as dakshina
to the priest. This inference on the part of the boy offended the father. Yet he
kept silent at first but seeing Nachiketas persist in his request, burst out in
anger, “Unto Yama I give thee” (The Circle of Reason 137). A Brahmin’s
words once given could not be retracted. Nachiketas entered the abode of
Yama and stood waiting for Yama to come. Yama returned after three days
and was horrified to see a Brahmin waiting, granted him three boons, which
formed the subject matter of the Upanishad. The most important of these boons
relate to the survival of man after death and the Kathakopanishad accordingly
deals with one of the fundamental issues of philosophical controversy. While
Lord Yama imparted the rare knowledge relating to the mysteries of life and
life after death, Nachiketa remained an eager listener and received
enlightenment on the true nature of Brahman. A.S Rao states that Nachiketha
Bose in The Circle of Reason is the mythical pre-figuration of the mythical
Nachiketha (Myth and History in Contemporary Indian Novel in English 38).
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Nachiketa’s entry into the world of Yama to obey the words of his father is said
repeatedly in The Circle of Reason when Alu lives for four days face to face
with death under the collapsed building the ‘Star,’ “…he lay flat on the floor
with a huge block of concrete just inches from his chest. And that, too, for four
days without food - immersed in thought” (The Circle of Reason 225). Here
Ghosh gives a subverted interpretation of the Indian myth, and reminds the
readers of the rich cultural heritage of India.
Amitav Ghosh always researches and brings together the social, cultural,
and political events, of the past the far-past, the present, and the future. He
sometimes stuffs his novels with so much research as in In An Antique Land
that it becomes too obvious for fiction-writing. At other times his research is
well woven into the fabric of the fiction as in The Shadow Lines that it becomes
intrinsic to the novel. That is how he appears to be more of a scholar’s writer
than of a common man’s. The Shadow Lines gives the reader a sense of
fulfillment and pleasure as no other novel does. After Midnight’s Children was
published The Shadow lines can be considered as one of the best works in
Indian English Fiction.
Amitav Ghosh explores extreme responses of infinite variety. Indira
Bhatt describes the circles, which are interconnected, and the circle of Alu,
which always remains outside. In tracing the journeys of the main character,
she concludes that Ghosh reveals too much of passion and too little of
perception. To Ulka Joshi, The Circle of Reason has a circular pattern on the
lines of Indian philosophy. She describes the metaphors that Ghosh employs to
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emphasize the circles and concludes that throughout the novel, the novelist
seems to handle the use of circles. Darshana Triuvedi argues that The Circle of
Reason is not a novel of plot or character but of thought. She describes in
detail the characters that make the portrait gallery of The Circle of Reason.
Urbasi Barat examines the concept of time as used in The Shadow Lines.
She argues that the historian and the novelist are both storytellers. The
narrative time and the story time being different, the modern novelist avoids
the traditional linear order of narration is her contention. To Amina Amin,
journeying is the central motif of The Shadow lines. There is a lot of
movement in the novel, as people are always going to or coming from
somewhere. The points of fixity becomes shadow lines, is her conclusion.
Rahul who Sapre argues that the concept of nationalism as being defined by
‘Us and Them’ and realizes that history is a process of selection, invention, and
even rejection. Ratna Sheila Mani says that the facility for story telling has
been the hallmark of Amitav Ghosh’s fiction. In The Shadow Lines, the use of
first-person is used to maximum advantage by his innovative use of this
narrative technique is her opinion. Discarding the chronological form of
narrative, Ghosh is able to tell his story even better. Pallavi Gupta believes that
Ghosh’s engagement with historiography makes him question the process of
historical construction itself. In The Shadow Lines, the author forwards the
view that the narrator’s history may be more credible than the historian’s
history. Novy Kapadia is of the view that the historical events have provided
the raw material for the novel. The concept of freedom and the different
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concepts of freedom are also analysed by Ghosh, says Kapadia. Gita
Chaudhari considers The Shadow Lines to be a multi-layered novel, which can
be examined at different levels. Coming in terms with reality is a predominant
theme in modern fiction and Ghosh traces how the narrator – an Everymancomes in terms with the divergent forces around him. Chote Lal Khatri posits
the view that critical pluralism is essential for the study of modern fiction. To
him The Shadow Lines has multiple layers of themes and a complex narrative
structure. Structured on a pattern of contrast between imagination and reality,
the novel allows the narrator to view childhood experiences from an adult’s
point of view.
Reena Kothari describes Ghosh’s ability to tell a tale by using memory
as an important facet. As an anthropologist, Ghosh is interested in ancient
culture and he manages to translate this very aesthetically into ficition in In An
Antique Land, she concludes. Dr.Shyam S.Agarwala writes about the blurring
of genres, which is so common in 20th century writing, Comparing In An
Antique Land to other 20th century novels, he draws the conclusion that Ghosh
has taken “not only nouns but the conjunction also.” History is an important
and inalienable aspect of much of Ghosh’s fiction. Nirzari Pandit argues that
The Shadow Lines and In An Antique Land are allegorical and that in both the
novels, there is a clear demarcation between history and historiography. Both
novels raise certain ambivalent issues and attempt to subvert them. To Nutan
Damor, alienation is not merely a modern concept of feeling. Ghosh believes
that migration compounds the feeling of alienation as is evident from the
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similar experiences of Ben Yiju and the anthropologist researcher, Amitav,
even though they are separated by many centuries. Darshana Trivedi analyses
Ghosh’s ability to combine the personal and the historical in an aesthetic
manner. According to her, The Shadow Lines reaches its culmination in In An
Antinque Land. Bharati Parikh examines how Ghosh integrates the historical
achievement of the Indian traders from a “decolonized” point of view. She
points out that India attracted merchants from various far off places even
though the means of communication were few. In An Antique Land portrays
the extortion and greed of colonialism, which ended the intimate relationship
between individuals as different as Ben Yiju and Booma.
The Shadow Lines is set in the Calcutta of the 1960’s and moves with an
easy felicity between Calcutta and Dhaka and London. A young unnamed
narrator, his hero, Tridib and the narrator’s grandmother provide the basic
framework on which the novel moves forward. The time span of the novel
extends from 1939 to 1974 with 1964 being a very important year for the
characters. Memory links the past to the present and many of the characters
live more in the past than in the present. The novel seems to mock even the
concept of exclusive national identity and pride because riots break out
simultaneously both at Dhaka and Calcutta and as a result of the same incident,
snapping of cultural bonds becomes a recurring image in this novel. Lines
and boundaries are drawn across continents and countries but what purpose is
served by them is an unsolved puzzle. Even ideals cherished by the freedom
struggle suddenly seem meaningless because the disrupted sub- continent today
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refuses to accept the importance of religious tolerance and brotherhood. In
fact, the novel clearly suggests the mindlessness of the violence unleashed in
both the countries as fallout of the theft of the prophet’s hair. This is confirmed
by the killing of Tridib when he is on an innocent visit to Dhaka along with
Tha’mma and May. Girish Karnad writes about this visit: “Past and future
meet across religious, political, and cultural barriers in a confusion of emotions,
ideals, intentions, and acts, leading to a shattering climax” (World Within
Worlds 5) Political independence is analysed and scrutinized in new
perspectives. Through the minds of the characters, their painful and nostalgic
recallings and recollections, one gets a picture of the period.
The novel The Shadow Lines is allegorical in that it rectifies the status of
history as an objective record of the past by asserting it as the relation of the
individual to his or her past. In this novel one has a clear demarcation between
‘history the phenomenon i.e. actual happenings in the lives of people and
‘historiography’ i.e. the business of writing history in certain ways.
In The Shadow Lines the events documented as History merge with the
private lives of the individuals in such a way that they lose their importance as
external and superior to the excitement happenings in their lives. In An Antique
Land starts with a “prologue” introducing the merchant Ben Yiju and his slave
Bomma of medieval times on whom the narrator Amitav Ghosh is doing
research. In the end the narrator combines the story of Ben Yiju with his own
experiences in Egypt during the period of his research. The ‘epilogue’ of the
novel designates the individual and his/her own past over the ‘research
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oriented story” of recorded history, thus reducing history, to one among many
narratives. The contrast between the ‘prologue’ and ‘epilogue’ is an ironic
comment on the organised forms of history which are considered useful as
against the individual histories. The shadow lines and In An Antique land
explore first person narratives, narrated by ‘people without histories’ and
therefore the alternative history offered is described by what is peripheral and
not what is central.
‘Freedom’ forms an integral part of The Shadow Lines, where the
researcher find a range of individuals, each with a notion of freedom which
conflicts with the others. All these notions of freedom, freedom from
traditional culture (to which Ila aspires) or national freedom (which the
narrator’s grandmother considers to be the ultimate form of freedom) are
created by History. History creates a different reality from the reality
experienced by the individuals in their daily lives. The grandmother, who is
preoccupied with the idea of national freedom and boundaries, expects a visible
border between India and Bangladesh and when she does not find one, she is
surprised and disappointed. She says:
But if there aren’t any trenches or anything, how are people to Know? I
mean, where’s the difference then? And if there’s no Difference both
sides will be the same; it will be just like it used to Be before, when we
used to catch a train in Dhaka and get off in Calcutta the next day…(The
Shadow Lines 146)
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The grandmother is disappointed because the reality she witnesses
around her does not fit into the framework of the history she has known all
along. History, according to her, has more truth than her own life experiences.
Similarly, Ila aspires to have freedom form the bondage of Indian culture and
lifestyle, for which she decides to live in England, all her life.
The reality evidenced by Ila’s grandmother is shaped by history and is
therefore a construct itself. But the same reality is also a constructing force
because it shapes the identities and lives of individuals. Both Ila and
grandmother live in notions of nationality and freedom which are the
ideological constructs created by the canonical history which is politically
motivated, thus submerging the individual perceptions of reality as less
important or invalid. The irony is that the grandmother who believes so
emphatically in ‘nationalism’ is actually a refuge from Bangladesh and Ila who
leaves India in order to live freely gets entangled in marriage with a
promiscuous man.
The notions of nationality and freedom come from the history which is
treated as an objective truth supposed to be documented in a chronological
order of events. This is what Ashis Nandy calls western history. Ghosh, like
Nandy, prioritizes the mythical form of history whereby all the versions of a
given historical events are considered equally valid. He places the individual at
the centre of society and thus defies the forms of collective identity created by
institutional history. Besides, the past is seen in continuum with the present and
not as a monolith. Every age and every person interprets it differently. And
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Ghosh seems to be arguing that the continuum can be maintained only when it
is expressed through fiction and not through historical documents.
The national history does not consider the existence of individual pasts
in its records. The narrator of The Shadow Lines who has been a victim of the
riots of 1964 in Calcutta and Dhaka is shocked to learn that his friends don’t
know everything about the events. Seventeen years after the riots, his friends
still talk about the China War of 1962 and the Pakistan War of 1965, but have
no knowledge about the riots once took place. The narrator who witnessed the
terrible incidents and lived with their memory cannot convince his friend
whose explanation is not very different from explanations given by historians:
“All riots are terrible, Mallika said. But it must have been a local thing.
Terrible or no, it’s hardly comparable to a war” (The Shadow Lines 221) The
fact that the past which he has internalized within himself is without any
“historical” importance, frightens the narrator. He says: “I was determined to
persuade them of its importance” (The shadow lines 221). His friend suggests,
“Maybe there’ll be a reference to it in a book or something” (222) and if there
isn’t any reference “we II have to assume that you imagined the whole thing”
(222). The narrator finds huge volumes on wars, the national freedom
movement, political analysis, etc., but nothing at all on his vividly remembered
riots. Shaken by insecurity he “nodded silently, unnerved by the possibility
that I had lived for all those years with a memory of an imagined event” (222).
After a lot of searching he finds the riots mentioned in newspapers, it is
only in an offhand way, whereas the news of cricket matches or splits in the
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political parties make headlines and also happen again with careful regularity.
The riots were initially referred to as “stray incidents” (224) in a small script, a
week after the same newspaper thought it right to declare that normally had
been restored and after that the riots were never mentioned by anyone or
recorded in History Books:
By the end of January 1964, the riots had fiaded away from the
pages of newspapers, disappeared from the collective imagination
of ‘responsible opinion’, vanished, without leaving a trace in the
histories and book shelves (The Shadow Lines 230)
In an Antique Land (1993) reveals Ghosh’s research abilities and
interest in Anthropology, in which subject, he has a research degree. As a
postcolonial writer cultural heritage and identity have become the important
facts of Ghosh’s personality. The keen ability for deep research which is seen
in this novel is a quality generally not associated with Indian writers writing in
English. History is easily interwoven into the narrative framework and Ghosh
attempt a comparative study of Asian and African, Indian and Egyptian, Jewish
and Islamic cultures. Using the autobiographical traveler’s tale to study the
past, Ghosh’s canvass here is vaster than that of his other novels and his brushstrokes wider. Character delineation has been handled expertly by Ghosh in
most of his novels and the three dimensional characters—Abu Ali, Musa
Mustafa Jabir, Sabry– bring life and color to his fiction. Sharmila Guha sums
up Ghosh’s achievement in this novel: “The barriers of nation, country and
time dissolve in the consciousness of the author and he reaches a tragic
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realization of how unscrupulous political forces continue to suffocate
human aspirations (In An Antique Land 186).
The narrative of In An Antique Land has two plots unlike The Shadow
Lines which is framed in a single plot. This novel also repudiates canonical
forms of history. The story of the Egyptian merchant Ben Yiju and his slave
Bomma is intertwined with the narrator, Amitav’s own story of his stay in the
two villages of Egypt while doing research on the merchant. Ghosh himself is
given permission by Oxford to use the Geniza library:
..The study of Egyptian antiquities passed from being as esoteric and
quasi-mystical pursuit into a freshly-charted field of scholarly
enterprise, and in the service of the new science several travelers
undertook journeys of discovery into Egypt (In An Antique Land 131)
This is a comment on the fact that historical research was activated by
the Oriental School after the discovery of the colonial ‘other’ Though the
Geniza library contains every written document of the past, the historical
documentation of Ben Yiju and his slave is inadequate. Amitav finds it
imperative to make connections between the letters exchanged by the merchant
with this slave, and the customs followed by the people in the villages of Egypt
as well as in Mangalore in India, to arrive at authentic facts about the lives of
the two men. These attempts at the research reveal certain truths hitherto
known to him,
“You have to put a stop to it’, she called out after me as I hurried
away down the lane. ‘You should try to civilize your people.
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You should tell them to stop praying to cows and burning their
dead” (In An Antique Land 126)
Postcolonial history is reflected by various characters throughout the
Novel. It clearly refers to the fact that canonical history is imperialist in nature.
It has created stereotypes about the Orient and these are stacked in books as
objective records of truth. The Expression of history is not a general and
overall informations about the world but it is selective picture of the past
events. Amitav’s attempt at the scholarly research on the lives of Ben Yiju and
Bomma is also an attempt at questioning Orientalist History. Amitav does not
make any statements about the merchant or his slave; he makes references to
historical incidents to justify his research. In the end, the story this novel comes
across as important, not as an objective, but as an event which not clear has
connections with various events of present times, though it happened centuries
ago. Ghosh, therefore, seems to parody History’s claims to objective factuality
in order to highlight the personal and the individual. While referring to Ben
Yiju reasons for marrying a girl outside his faith, he says: “If I hesitate to call it
love it is only because the documents offer no certain proof” (In An Antique
Land 230). A parody of the idea of recorded history as truth is evident in the
use of words like ‘proof’ and ‘documents.’
Amitav stays in Nashawy for his research; but over a period of just a
few years, he sees the village getting affected the storm of ‘development’. Like
modern India, modern Egypt too loses its local identity and enters the age of
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machine- guns and technology offered by the West. The history of the ordinary
people and their ordinary rural lives will never be a part of recorded history:
If was thus that I had my first suspicion of what it might mean to
belong to a ‘historical civilization’, and it left me bewildered
because, for my own part, it was precisely the absoluteness of
time and the discreteness of epochs that I always had trouble in
imaging (In An Antique Land 201)
The irony is that the Indian and Egyptian civilizations are the ones
which boast off the greatest antiquity and historicity. The colonizers’ histories
have rendered all ancient ‘historical civilizations’, a historical in their
documents and evidences.
Amitav finds a number of common traits between Ben Yiju and his
slave who crossed the Indian Ocean in the middle Ages, and the people he has
met in Egypt and in India. But he feels sad to realize that these people are not
prepared to understand the similarities among themselves. They are all carried
away by the notion of ‘development’ and ‘progress’ created by the West.
The story of Ben Yiju reveals to him how Mangalore “came to lose
virtually every trace of its extraordinary past” (In An Antique Land 245) with
the advent of the colonial power. Amitav refers to a range of popular traditions
and folk beliefs “which upturn and invert the categories of Sanskrit Hinduism”
(263). The hybridity which he finds in local faiths in India is also prevalent
among the villagers of Egypt. Imam Ibrahim is knowledgeable about the
traditional kinds of medicine and there are festivals such as mow lids in honour
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of the saints who are not a part of the mainstream Islam. But colonization has
led to the destruction of all these local histories and cultures and given rise to
mainstream canonical history and religion. The colonial power colludes with
the dominating power of the colonized country. Therefore the mainstream
“history” is a product of the collusion between various dominating forces
the colonial and the colonized.
‘[Zaghloul ] has read many of the classical texts and he is very
knowledgeable about plants and herbs and things like that’ …’
Those leaves and powders don’t work anymore,’ he [Zaghloul]
said. ‘Nowadays everyone goes to the clinic and gets an
injection, and that’s the end of it’ (In An Antique Land 142)
Indians and Egyptians have both shared similar religious practices,
attitudes, and lifestyles which do not fit into the framework of modern Western
notions of ‘progress’ and ‘developemnt’. The narrator laments on the fact that
in present times they hate each other not on the basis of personal experiences
but stereotypes created by History which is written in Western Orientalist
academies. He finds it miraculous that parts of Bomma’s story have survived
in spite of the historical interventions: “It seemed uncanny that I had never
known. All those years that in defiance of the enforcers of History, a
remnant of Bomma’s world had survived, not far where I had been living”
(In An Antique Land 432).
The parody of historical facts is evident throughout the novel. The
narrator relates to “document” and ‘proof” whenever he talks about Ben Yiju or
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Bomma and yet calls it a story : “Bomma’s story ends in Philadelphia” (348).
He refers to his stay and experiences too as story: “I sometimes wished I had
told Nabeel a story” (204). This story is about the communal riots of 1964 in
Dhaka which Ghosh had witnessed as a child. Another incident of communal
and provincial violence in Egypt and Algeria triggered off by a football match,
is a fact in Isma’il’s life also referred to as story: “Later Ismail told me a story”
(352). He says, “the stories of those riots are always the same: tales that grow
out of an explosive barrier of symbols” (210). ‘History’ and ‘story’ are
etymologically related. Journalists also call their news reports ‘stories’.
Therefore ‘story’ is not necessarily the equivalent of ‘fiction’ or ‘lies’. Ghosh,
by using the word ‘story’ for the act of writing an autobiographical novel blurs
both ‘history’ and fiction into ‘story’ (narrative). This clearly shows that his
aim in recreating the given history is not to make a new set of truth claims. The
narrative of Ghosh is presented as a version of truth, because history in the
form of fiction is itself subversive in nature, since it gives a new vision to the
existing past and historicizes it.
In An Antique Land raises certain ambivalent issues and attempts
to subvert them. The writer’s consciousness with history in In An Antique
Land is similar to his concern in The Shadow Lines. The two novels refer to
displacement of human beings, their psyches, as well as their identities in riots
and communal violence. The narrator in The Shadow Lines has heard of the
death of his uncle Tridib and the narrator, Amitav Ghosh in In An Antique Land
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witnesses how ordinary human beings are uprooted or killed in the name of
‘freedom’ and ‘progress’.
It is History that defines, creates, and eliminates boundaries. The novels
show how geographical boundaries at times lead to cultural differences which
in turn create hatred among people. The celebrations of Egyptian football
victory against Algeria culminates in violence and ultimately a lasting fear and
hatred among the people of the two states (In An Antique Land 353). If History
has created and named nations, it has also conditioned them into viewing each
other differently and with feelings of antagonism. This feeling of fear and
hatred of the ‘Other’ is very similar to what Said might call the Occident’s fear
of the Orient and therefore a desire to appropriate it. History, which is
monolithic does not recognize the local or individual. It defines nations,
cultures, and people only in terms of totalities creating homogeneous modes of
‘nationalism’ or ‘freedom’ as in The Shadow Lines or ‘Hinduism’ or ‘India’ as
In An Antique Land. History through allegorical fiction thus ceases to be a
fixed monument and comes across as the creation of a discursive practice,
which therefore lends itself to the possibility of transformation. In both the
novels, the writer refuses to accept history because the common people such as
Nabeel with their individual pasts “vanish into the anonymity of History” (In
An Antique Land 353). He reveals incredulity towards the universals created
by History and subscribes to a postmodernist notion of History as a narrative
and therefore the validity of all individual histories against canonical history
which is treated as a metanarrative.
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Both novels are first person narratives, in which the narrator is used as a
lens through which one sees various paradigms of ideology and their
constructs. Each narrator is therefore a historian and a character at the same
time, therefore subject as well as object simultaneously. The ultimate irony is
that the narrators speak ‘objectively’ about their situations; they have no power
to either control or alter them. Their history remains a version which the writer
appropriates through the use of allegory. Ghosh thus recreates the past by
creating subjective / individual history in his fiction. Postcolonial writers
would say, fictionalizing of history is total subversion since as they contend,
truth is not to be found in recorded statements but statements in the making,
because anything which is codified becomes institutionalized. To understand
what the past was about, it is necessary to impose a narrative upon it. There is
an element of fiction in all historical accounts and the neglect of this fact by all
historians abuses it by explaining away notions of history- writing as
‘scientific’.
History, therefore, conditions people into believing only in the reality of
its own making. Every form of reality which is personal and not part of the
written history is written off as fictive or imaginative. The novel also portrays
how notions of nationhood are created. Though an individual like the narrator
may not be able to free himself from the terrifying memory of Tridib’s death in
the riots, he is expected to believe that he is living in a ‘free’ country among
‘free’ people. The narrator’s grandmother is a victim of a notion of nationalism
which is fictional rather than factual. While on the one hand she aspires
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political freedom, on the other, she subscribes to stereotypical form of heroworship in the name of nationalism and patriotism, when the reality around her
in the same and the reality created by history books.
The Calcutta Chromosome , sub-titled A Novel of Fevers, Delirium and
Discovery is probably Ghosh’s most disappointing novel. Set in Calcutta, it
begins as a science fiction but too many issues form as a whole to make it a
confusing kinds of object. The novel finds the adventures of the enigmatic. L.
Murugan. Time is again used as an important element but the constant time
shifts leave the reader repeatedly confused. In short, myth and superstition,
science and grandma’s tales combine to make the novel an unrealistic work.
Indira Nityanandam points out that the continuous time space shifts add
an extra dimension to The Calcutta Chromosome. The great change in the
attitude towards space and time in the 20th century has influenced the novels of
the century. Ghosh’s structure is analysed by Pramod K.Nayar in “An
Ontology of the Elsewhere.” In The Calcutta Chromosome, singularities and
peaks telescope and diverge to end in a continuous multiplicity, argues Nayar.
Analysing The Calcutta Chromosome as a Postcolonial novel, M.Adhikari
argues that it presents a process of various thematic and technical
experimentations and innovations. A.G.Khan is of the view that quest is the
constant theme in Ghosh’s novels. Through this, he attempts to prove the
superiority of the East over the West. Without ‘a willing suspension of
disbelief’ Ghosh’s novels cannot be appreciated. Indira Bhatt examines
Ghosh’s theory of science and counter science as presented in The Clacutta
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Chromsome. According to her, Ghosh makes an attempt to “exoticise” India
but the novel fails to provide any satisfactory answer to all the questions that it
raises. J.D. Soni compares The Clacutta Chromosome to Coleridge’s “Kubla
Khan”. Uniting past, present, and future, the novel is science fiction- suspense
thriller- fact finder all rolled into one. K.K. Pareksh makes a detailed study of
the theme of quest in The Calcutta Chromosome. Ghosh, he argues, uses the
Indian tradition of narrative in order to achieve his purpose. Combining the
occult and the scientific, Pareksh describes the power of counter-science.
Ramesh Kumar Gupta refers to the mistaken belief of the people about the
fever or the mystical aspect of the novel. Presenting the historical facts of
Ronals Ross’s experiments about malarial fever, he finds the concept of
counter- science as developed by Ghosh. In a hard hitting article, Amar Nath
Prasad repeatedly says Ghosh’s predictions and fears of a nuclear fall-out as
imagined in “Countdown”, He quotes extensively from Arundhati Roy’s “The
End of Imagination” to substantiate his arguments.
The character Mangala in Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome is
emblematic of such an assigns striving to restore the nearly extinct indigenous
practices that were sidelined by the on rush of science. Indian tradition had
shown a unique capability of adaptation and flexibility for accepting changes
whereby it could stand the threat of cultural invasions. The new ideas were
made acceptable by traditionalists giving them local habitation. Thus the
delicate dividing line between traditionalism and modernism gets blurred up as
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shown in Mangala performing traditional riots to cure syphilitic paresis where
the principle is that of modern vaccination.
Amitav Ghosh being heir to that ancient Indian civilization, which
refused to be destroyed by centuries of colonization, is never manipulated to
‘discover’ the past. His characters, mostly rooted deep in the Indian tradition,
never encounter the West directly and so do not flaunt their Indianness in a
proclamation tone. The technique he employs also is the conventional Indian
style of interpreting the present in terms of the mythical past and containing the
historical within the metaphysical by dismantling the temporal with events
perceived in a cyclical rather than linear time frame. The events are narrated
through the consciousness of the narrators either as a participant in the events
or as reconstruction of a narrated past.
The Calcutta Chromosome has three strands of story-line. The first
relates the Egyptian computer clerk Antar, tracing the adventures of an
American Scientist of Indian origin, L.Murugan, who had mysteriously
disappeared in Calcutta. The second strand is historical, wound round Ronald
Ross, the Nobel laureate who had discovered the manner in which Malaria is
conveyed by mosquitoes. The third strand subverts colonial history by
chronicling Ross’s investigations as only a subordinate research, maneuvered
by a more potent power using Mangala, the sweeper woman and Lucthman, the
dhooley bearer as its agents. Murugan’s reconstruction of the 1890s reveals that
Ronald Ross’s epoch making scientific research was the outcome of extraneous
help and directives from the devotees of a mysterious cult of silence. They
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believed in counter science, transcendental aspects, and always concealed their
identity. The basic idea of this group was:
Knowledge is self-contradictory; may be they believed that to
know something is to change its therefore in knowing something,
you’ve already changed what you think you knew so you don’t
really know it al all: You only know its history. (The Calcutta
Chromosome 88)
Thus their religious system proved directly opposite to the pedantic and
materialistic science which the colonizers used effectively in the semblance of
conscientizing mission to subdue indigenous potential during colonization.
Putting together fragments of information hidden within the master narratives
of history, Murugan infers that this mysterious people had their own ways of
researching, even though constrained by want of proper gadgets. So in the
particular case of the malarial parasite, they close Ronald Ross to continue the
experiments through ways of their choice. The secret group wanted to achieve
the ultimate transcendence of nature which in the modern scientific
terminology is a technology for chromosomal transmission of all information
from body to body. Explaining about the mysterious beliefs and rites of the
secret cult to the awe stricken Antar, Murugan says:
When your body fails you, you leave it, you migrate-you or
at least a matching symptomology of your self. You begin
all overagain, another body, another beginning. Just think:
no mistakes,a fresh start. What would you give for that Ant: a
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technology thatlets you improve on yourself in your next
incarnation. (The Calcutta Chromosome 91)
Some systematic differences in Ronald Ross’s account of the malarial
parasite encourage Murugan to ransack the dusty stacks of Ross’s malarial
research. The findings were so attracting that Murugan prepared an article
captioned “An Alternative Interpretation of late 19th century Malaria Research:
Is There a Secret hisoty?” It could invite only opposite response from the
conservative scientific community “which embodied the entrenched antipathy
of the forces of establishment towards the ‘other mind’ or the ‘other voice’
(Nationalism and Colonialism in Modern India 266). Murugan was convinced
that become person or person had “systematically interfered with Ronald
Ross’s experiments to push malaria research in certain directions while leading
it away from others” (The Calcutta Chromosome 31). His efforts to unravel the
malaria mystery allegorizes the postcolonial temperament of looking through
imperial history that was created to suite the interests of the colonizer. It also
symbolizes the postmodern cynicism about the binary opposites or truth and
falsehood and an attitude of questioning the obvious historical fixities. Thus
the novel becomes Ghosh’s eloquent response to the issue of a historicity that
colonial discourse had burdened on India. Colonial discourse justified the
presence of the colonial power in India claiming itself as the only cohesive
force which was instrumental to the creation of the hitherto absent history for
India, enabling it to exist as a single entity. This colonial invention of a
historicity is tackled on two levels at which it operates. First, the discourses of
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a historicity suggest India as a colonial construct since it did not exist in
conformity with the European definition of a nation-state. India has ever been
a divisible, chaotic multitude of parts, and averse to the cohesive elements of
politics or castes thereby denying any narration to its history. The Clacutta
Chrosome presents an India that is complex but coherent on a non- colonial
level, about which Tabish Khair writes:
While not being essentialist and while operating with full
awareness of the Babu-Coolie discursive and socio-economic
line of division, Ghosh’s ‘Chromosome’ Suggests- a coherence
of parts which is neither a nationalist unity not based on
hegemonic and parochially universal discourses emanating
from Europe or from Babu realms of activity. (Fictions:
Alienation in Contemporary Indian English Novels 310)
The novel portrays, people from various levels of society, regions,
and religions united over a common cause, taking part in the sacrifice ritual.
The colonial myth of Indian history operates on another level in dominating its
history before the colonial invasion to the extent of emptiness. Apart from
being a consequence of colonial historiography, this erasure of precolonial
cohesiveness was crucial in effecting colonization, extending its effects into the
complex and resistant fields of culture. Amitav Ghosh seems to bridge the
gaps of the obscured and dichotomized parts of the Orient, breaking the
colonial construct of alienness between nations of the East. The so called
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subalterns are shown as involved in a project that is effected by colonial
realities, but has its own independent aim, process and justification.
The myth of colonial centrality and marginal fragility had encouraged a
postcolonial hybridity in the Indian context, a peculiar Euro-Indian nexus of
cultural linkages. However, this cultural hybridity is unacceptable for Ajaz
Ahmed in that “non-Europeans hardly ever encounter each other and never
without a prior European modulation of the very field of that encounter” (Post
modernism and contemporary novel : A Reader 290). The logic of this
argument is shown in Ghosh’s In an Antique Land where the precolonial and
the Postcolonial Indo- Egyptian cultural exchange and communication is
closely traced in an attempt to do away with the colonial baggage. The
argument between the Egyptian Mullah and Indian Anthropological researcher
establishing cultural superiority of their respective homelands appeals as a
brilliant metaphor to Tabish Khair and he writes: “An argument that, enacted
in the postcolonial context, igoners centuries of Indian, Egyptain and IndoArabcommerce and trades in the goods of a colonial and neo-imperial
Eurocentric hegemony.” Post Modernism and contemporary Novel : A
Reader (290).
The Indo-Egyptian connection is once again illustrated in The Calcutta
Chromosome through the Egyptian computer professional Antar, his Indian
friend Murugan, and in their repeatedly stressed sense of community. Antar
confesses an inexplicable and irresistible ‘sense of kindship’ with Murugan. A
similar liking of Murugan by Urmila is expressed in unsexual terms. This kind
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of subaltern and subversive line of connection are posited by the novelist for
deconstructing and transcending the colonial realities. The novel also
foregrounds the ways in which the colonized and the subaltern subvert the
power, remains the prerogative of the colonizer in the political and economic
sense. There is also a realization that a historicity and incomprehensibility
attributed to the colonized were the result of the discursive appropriation of
colonialism that had made the subaltern impassive in the colonial discourse and
occluded the subaltern actions in other discourses. The colonial subaltern is
ascribed power by way of restoring history and comprehensibility.
In the form of historical discourse, the novel evaluates the grand
narratives and the concept of science as the liberator of humanity. It effectively
employs the forces of anti-rationality and contingency to subvert history and to
undermine the metanarratives proving the claims of the colonizer as elite and
civilized under the spell of science. Rationality which regions the
contemporary spiritless world is deconstructed exploiting the possibilities of
intuition. Mangala and Lutchman epitomize the validity of intuitive knowledge
who, by their performances disprove the infallibility of science and suggest the
possibility of a realm beyond the reach of science. The novel is a unique blend
of fact and fiction contributing to the reinvention of the history of malaria
research to re-member the indigenous cults elbowed to the margins and
subdued by colonial historiography.
The influence of colonialism was such that the subject races were
alienated from their traditional way of life founded on love and fellow
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feeling, Instead, they began to nurture hatred and greed for power, emulating
the model held before them by the colonizer. Historicity is Amitav Ghosh’s
favorite expression profusely employed to expose this hideous shadow-side of
colonialism in his novels. The Glass Palace presents eloquent instances like
this effluent articulation of Uma Dey, the alter ego to Rajkumar, the protagonist
that show the eerie side of European colonialism:
Think of the evils you have listed: racialism, rule through
aggression and conquest. Is the Empire not guilty of all of this?
How many tens of millions of people have perished in the
process of this Empire’s conquest of the world- in its ppropriation
of entire continents? I don’t think there could ever be an
accounting of the numbers. Worse still, the Empire has become
the ideal if national success- a model for all nations to aspire to.
Think of the Belgians, racing off to seize the Cango- they killed
ten or eleven million people there. And what was it they wanted
other than to create a version of this Empire? (The Glass Palace
294)
The colonial meters reproduced in The Glass Place characteristically
reveal their diligence in keeping the natives submissive, away from any
possible infestation of decolonization. This intellectual supremacy that the
colonizer of west exercised over the natives peep out ill Saya John’s words:
What makes you fight; I would ask them, “when you should be
planting your fields at home?” “Mone” they’dsay, and yet all
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they earned was a few annas a day, not much more than a
dockyard coolie. For a few coins they would allow their
masters lo use them as they wished, to destroy every trace of
resistance to the power of the English. (The Glass Palace 29)
The colonial experience had been unpleasant, laden with a sense of
pain and suffering for those who were destined to live through those troubled
times. Hence Ghosh suggests, that history, which for the colonized, had always
been dictated by the Meta narratives, is to be remembered as having a bearing
upon the present. Hence the novel The Glass Palace employs memories and
history to re-member the past as pervading into the present multi- ethnic,
culturally diverse, pluralism society of the postcolonial situation. Ghosh has
made it clear that the issue of how the past is to be remembered lies at the heart
of The Glass Palace. The novel repeatedly employs the metaphor of the Glass
Palace of Mandalay fort to suggest the emergence of an awakened selfconsciousness among the different sections of the colonized that gradually
attained wider dimensions of a national independence movement. This
metamorphosis among the colonized people is induced by this “Struggle to
gain a sense of subjectivity, to come to terms with the complex interconnections between economic, political and cultural developments in the
colonial world” (Indian Writing in English: The Last Decade 246).
The postcolonial concept of homelessness and non-belonging or
alienation typifies the historical condition created by the ravages of
colonialism. The Glass Palace has such a pack of protagonists, displaced and
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buffeted about by the gales of history from Burma to India, Malaya, Singapore,
and back again, each time repeated the very same pattern of action. Ghosh here
exploits the possibilities of fiction in providing identity for those actors
marginality and dropped out in the historical chronicle. The emotive
magnification of unrecorded lives which the historical records cannot afford, a
sort of interior history is created. This internalized record of emotions and
explicit factual accounts run parallel, mutually complementing to reach a point
of intersection where the story meets history, adding to its comprehensibility.
Thus the narrative replenishes those empty frames of history from which the
colonial subject is missing. Tackling history within the boundaries of
contemporary fiction, The Glass Palace is a meticulous presentation of one of
the lesser known theaters of the Second World war, drawn around the
repercussions of the fourteen days’ war between the imperial troop and the
Burmese army in 1885.
Fiction proves itself the best in giving identity to those who refuse
contained within any frame. The multiplicity of the human self is
metaphorically unfolded by juxtaposing individuals in similar but historically
distanced life situations. Thus historicity is employed here for an uncommon
purpose of revealing the plurality of the human self.
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