History and Post-colonialism in Amitav Ghosh’s Select Novel

Abstract

Amitav Ghosh has handled history and how he made it as an integral part of wearing a story.  His novels are replete with historical documents, facts and ideologies and question the concept of history in the colonial and post colonial contexts.  Ghosh asserts that history is an inevitable and remarkable one. Post colonialism is a meaning of one's position compared with the colonial past. It is not merely a question of time, of the aftermath of colonialism, but one of attitude which goes beyond the attempt to confront colonialism to become an attempt to transcend it. The debate of history has to be located in a post modernist as well as post colonial context. The setting of most of the historical novels is in the context of some historical framework unless the novelist willfully places his action in an imaginary locale hoping to highlight a special metaphysical point of view.  The historical novel naturally presents no surface wave of escapism but a deep, unconscious movement towards national homogeneity.  It is in the historical novel only that the actually daily events / problems of life can be encountered, examined, exposed, challenged and rectified.  Ghosh recounts his travels at an ethnographic researcher in rural Egypt, juxtaposing the cosmopolitan perspective with the effects of provincial isolation.  Ghosh further juxtaposes the narrative of the personal experiences with both an account of his research into the lives of a medieval merchant and one of his slaves and the imaginative reconstruction of the narrative(s) of their lives.  This paper focus on Land is based on the author's personal experience when he spent several months in Egypt in the 80's doing research in social anthropology. Ghosh captures history with all its complexities. There are multiple ways in which he engages history and aspects of historicism as an intrinsic aspect of his works. This is an attempt to write subaltern history through fiction and making the theory into practice in a unique manner.