AMITAV GHOSH : THE QUINTESSENTIAL POSTCOLONIAL WRITER

 Amitav Ghosh is a postcolonial writer in all the sense of the word, he attempts to subvert the existing history by bringing out the alternate and hitherto less known historical events and facts in his novels. History is easily interwoven into the narrative framework Ghosh’s fiction and he attempts a comparative study of Asian and African, Indian and Egyptian, Jewish and Islamic cultures over the course of his novels. Ghosh’s novels are postcolonial thematically as well as in terms of technique.

He breaks the traditional time and place unities. There are no barriers of time and space in his fiction, the multiplicity adds to the appeal and understanding of the non-popular history. He does in depth researches about even the minute of details to recreate that moment of history in all its vividness. Ghosh uses time to maximum effect because past, present and future coalesce into one, which is one of the major conditions of the ambivalent modern nation. The choice of narrator and point of view is an important element of fiction. Ghosh shares concern with and provides the space for or re-instates the unrecorded, subaltern, silenced, othered, voiceless or those who are overlooked by history and who are swallowed by the powerful. Migration, dislocation or de-territorialization of culture and diaspora are also the major issues of post colonialism. Ghosh’s fiction directly addresses these issues.

Intense research is assured in every novel by Amitav Ghosh. Works by Amitav Ghosh are:
Works of fiction: The Circle of Reason (his 1986 debut novel), The Shadow Lines (1988), The Calcutta Chromosome (1995), The Glass Palace (2000), The Hungry Tide (2004), and Sea of Poppies 
Works of Non- Fiction: In an Antique Land (1992), Dancing in Cambodia and at Large in Burma (1998), Countdown (1999), and The Imam and the Indian (2002) The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016)