The Calcutta Chromosome: An Acknowledgement of Indigenous Caliber and Extrapolation upon the History of Malaria Parasite Discovery

Amitav Ghosh novel The Calcutta Chromosome: a Novel of Fevers, Delirium and Discovery is considered, - an outstanding literary work in which the writer reveals a discourse of science versus counter-science from the earlier world of social, cultural and ethnical history of Indian subcontinent. India is home to the oldest continuous civilization, nevertheless, the long invasive rule of the Mughals and the Britishers has framed minds to undervalue the indigenous knowledge, practices, customs and discourses. Amitav Ghosh novel denies the Western supremacy in every field and puts a question mark in the invention of Anopheles maculipennis as the cause of malaria. Dr. Ronald Ross received the prestigious Nobel Prize in 1902 for his discovery of malaria parasite but Ami- tav Ghosh supports the contribution of Indian assistants Mangala and Laakhan who were not acknowledged by the British researchers. The novel reflects a postcolonial approach to interpret Western scientific mechanism, posits the question to unethical exploitation of native workers by the English and gives voice to the traditional knowledge of the subalterns. An integral part of Ghoshs approach in this novel is to illuminate the richness of ideas and complexity of Indigenous life, and to create a place where aboriginals are acknowledged for their remarkable contributions.

A Study of Cultural conflict and trauma of the protagonist in Amitav Ghose’s The Glass Palace

Amitav Ghosh is one of the most popular novelists of the period, with an amazing intelligence of place, history and politics. Ghosh has joined the ranks of notable novelists such as Monohar Malgonkar, Shashi Tharoor, Khushwant Singh, Salman Rushdie, Chaman Nahal, and others. In Ghosh’s novels, one may detect a feeling of historical realism. Ghosh’s writings are characterised by a strong desire for strong identifications and race relations. Amitav Ghosh recognises that society must be reformed from problems such as caste system, gender discrimination, ill-treatment of women, child marriages, poverty, exploitation, and demonic tradition, among others. Ghosh’s humanistic approach provides voice to the forgotten and lowly women characters in his works. He wants to free the entire world from the squabbles of caste, race, gender, religion, untouchability, and geographical dislocation that obstruct human development. It is also demonstrated how the sacrifices of marginalised and female characters have gone unnoticed in the pages of history. This paper examines the Cultural conflict and trauma of the protagonist in AmitavGhose’s The Glass Palace.

Abstract Knowledge, Embodied Experience: Towards a Literary Fieldwork in the Humanities

The paper attempts to read the representation and (re)creation of Sundarbans into the narrative structure of the three works of Amitav Ghosh- The Hungry Tide (2004), Gun Island (2019), and Jungle Nama: A Story of the Sundarban (2021) through the idea of ‘literary fieldwork’ that the paper develops by putting these literary narratives in conversation with the fieldwork narratives. Drawing from Puri and Castillo’s (2016) concept of “humanities fieldwork” and Ghosh’s (2016) idea of sensuous recognition and identifying the literary texts as primary data for fieldwork, the paper brings home a new reading practice which here qualifies not only the role of Ghosh, the literary ethnographer but also the natives of Sundarbans who narrate their own testimonies of the place and their politics of survival. Their embodied experiences of Sundarbans are embedded with the author’s literary experiments in the texts to advance the place of fieldwork in literary studies and redefine the ideas of fieldwork in the humanities in general. In other words, the paper dwells upon the author’s creative response in portraying the difference between the abstract knowledge of the Sundarbans and the embodied experience of the place that offers literary fieldwork within which it accommodates the points of view of the author, the natives, and the readers and thus, changes the conventional practices of perceiving fieldwork in humanities.

Trend of Migration Studies in Sociocultural Anthropology: A Critical Analysis

Migration studies have always found their unique place in anthropology since the birth of anthropology in India under colonial rule. From the formative phase, anthropology of migration has grown multifold. In the present time when the Indian diaspora is the largest in the whole world, the process of migration has affected the lives of all individuals and has become an important area of research. The present article examines the growth of this field in sociocultural anthropology in India and is based on secondary data. Work of renowned Indian anthropologists like M. N. Srinivas, Moni Nag, L. P. Vidyarthi, Amitav Ghosh and others like R. K. Jain, Ashish Bose, etc. on migration has been discussed in the present article. Migration studies in India have found and sustained a key place in the anthropology curriculum report since the first time of its release by the University Grants Commission, New Delhi. Migration studies have grown from studying mobility among the tribals to the movement of people from rural to urban areas and then to international migration. New areas like displacement and refugee movements, literature and art, diaspora studies, urbanism, labour migration and many more are emerging as important topics in the landscape of migration studies.

Amitav Ghosh’ Shadow Lines: Mapping Cross Border Identity

The Shadow Lines (1988) is a historical novel by Amitav Ghosh that focuses on the national and geographical boundaries that alienate individuals. The book also depicts the violence that erupted in 1964. The title “The Shadow Lines” has multiple layers of meanings; it does not only relate to international boundaries. Ghosh’s choice of the title implies that the boundaries that divide people are just ‘shadows’. Those borders are nothing but artificial and fictitious lines drawn by people from power centre. Ghosh emphasises arbitrary nature of such geographic demarcations. This paper tends to identify the identity of people who did cross geographical borders forcefully or voluntarily and how memory and nostalgia loom large upon them.

"Not at Home in Empire"

Amitav Ghosh opposes the “agonistic” or “reconciliatory” strand in postcolonial studies espoused amongst others by Bhabha. By fusing postcolonialism with postmodernism, this school of postcolonial thought rejects resistance and reconfigures the historical project of invasion, expropriation and exploitation as a symbiotic encounter. As a staunch anti-colonialist, what Ghosh presents in his writing is the ubiquity of the Eurocentrism of the colonized. The Glass Palace represents how colonial discourses (primarily the military discourse) have molded native identity and resulted in severe vulnerability and existential crisis. Self-alienation is apparent in the characters of the Collector, a Britain-trained colonial administrator and the soldier, Arjun, who has been transformed into a war-machine in the hands of British military discourse. The narrative attempts to revisit and reframe the colonial past by questioning the ideological, epistemological and ontological assumptions of the imperial powers, the masks of conquest. The community of the disillusioned soldiers of the British Indian army presented in The Glass Palace is one that challenges, provokes, threatens, but also enlivens, is a community of disagreement, dissonance, and resistance. Popular or insurgent nationalism thus reclaims or imagines forms of community and challenges colonial rule giving shape to a collective political identity. This article also intends to trace the failures of Burmese nationalism after a series of insurrections on ethnic grounds belied the aspirations of the postcolonial nation state.

Oil, Water, World, Wax, Mind: Jean Rolin’s Ormuz

This essay considers the unworldly setting of Jean Rolin’s novel Ormuz (2013), composed around the attempt by a shadowy character named Wax to swim across the Strait of Hormuz. This twenty-one-nautical-mile-wide stretch of sea separating Iran from the Arabian Peninsula, through which is shipped 35 percent of the world’s petroleum, is a waterway of the utmost geopolitical importance, its harbors built not for dreamy swimmers but for giant oil tankers and the elaborate maritime-military infrastructure assuring their passage. Such a setting would seem to stand as a bleak other to the novel as genre. Yet if one thinks of the history of the novel as inseparable from that of carbon capitalism (as Amitav Ghosh has argued), such a claim is reversed—this site where powerful strategic interests drive the flow of oil, capital, and power is the place of the continual making and unmaking, by night and day, of the world order, and thereby of the modern novel. The essay reflects on what Wax’s weird wager—as an emblem for a remarkable narrative wager—may owe to such intertexts as Google, Descartes’s Meditations, and Jules Verne’s Tour du monde, and argues for reading Ormuz as an ecological novel for our times.

A study on change in behavioral pattern with reference to the select novels of Amitav Ghosh

This article is an attempt to illustrate the different ways through which culture gets transformed as a result of contact with other cultures. The desire to gain sociability forms ground for cultural changes such as accultration, assimilation, diffusion and other types of cultural changes. Amitav Ghosh is a prolific writer who occupies an invincible space among the national and also the international writers. Six of his novels are analysed to study the changes in the behavioral patterns of the characters in the novel. Cognition is a mighty factor that conditions the thoughts of every human. The desire to garner solidarity and establish sociability is the chief reason for cultural compromises. Therefore, Georg Simmel’s theory on sociabilities is taken into account to support this study.

“Prompter’s Whisper”: History, Travel and Narrative in Post-Colonial Indian English Travel Writing

The theory revolution and the counter-traditional wave in humanities in the 1980s have garnered attention towards new localism by positing alternatives to the great tradition. In this, Travel writing has proved adaptable and responsive to post-colonial and Globalization studies, thereby shaking off its ‘middlebrow’ status. Keeping in mind the relevance of travel writing in Global politics, the paper aims to engage with In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveller’s Tale (1992) by Amitav Ghosh to delineate the question of History, Travel and Narrative in Indian English Travel Writing. The paper contends that Ghosh uses the Hybrid non-fiction space of the travelogue to write a counter-narrative to the Eurocentric discourse of Travel writing. It seeks to foreground that the reverse Grand tour of Amitav Ghosh problematizes the western hegemonic hold on the field of Ethnography and History. The paper is divided into two parts- the first part will establish In an Antique Land as Resistive subaltern history, followed by the second part, which focuses on Ghosh’s privileging of third world ethnography to write an alternative narrative.