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Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide operates in the archipelago of the Sunderbans and explores characters who reside in different quadrants of the socio-political map, navigating the difficult nexus between the survival of humans and conservation of the non-human. The key to this navigation is an important, and often ignored, historical event in his fiction—the Marichjhapi massacre of 1979. The massacre was enabled by West Bengal government's primacy on ecology and disregard for the fundamental rights of the people. This massacre and its impact on subsequent generations of that locality have been brushed aside in Indian mainstream history. Events of Marichjhapi have been deemed problematic for both nationalist sentiment and environmental conservation—two things that were of growing popularity during that time. In his narrative of deltas and dolphins, Ghosh manages to carve out the space for such a difficult event regarding people through a literary device that is often personal—a diary. Ghosh's narrativization of the events in Marichjhapi through Nirmal's diary, along with his characterization of local representatives such as Fokir, gives new understandings of the sufferings faced by the marginalized communities and the narrative challenges of relaying their voices—while showing the interconnectivity of people and their environment at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engaging with Amitav Ghosh's recent essays that link imperial modernity's mechanistic view of the world to the novel's failure to imagine climate change, this article examines how Ghosh's fiction attempts to dislocate narratives of modernity to reveal a world constructed by capital and naturalized through reason. Drawing on the work of postcolonial theorists on the introduction of Western science to India, this article returns to Ghosh's first novel, The Circle of Reason , to focus on the intimate scale of the transformations that imperial modernity enacted on the human body and psyche. Though underrepresented in scholarship on Ghosh, this novel is a critical site for understanding Ghosh's view of how the ideology of modernity gets entrenched as scientific reason, reshaping humankind's relationship with the human body and the surrounding world. The novel's representation of the body, moreover, proposes an intimate and uncanny space that discloses alternative ways of imagining the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article situates Amitav Ghosh—as both critic and novelist—in relation to the contemporary genre turn, as a means of questioning the logical distinctions undergirding ideas of literariness. Readers of Ghosh tend to cast the overtly science‐fictional The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium and Discovery as a generic anomaly in his otherwise historical realist oeuvre. Against such automatic delineations, this article argues that Ghosh's 1995 work is not such an outlier when we break down the multiple genres at play within novels across his career, and how their interactions produce effects that have been mistakenly attributed to one or other isolated genre. In The Calcutta Chromosome and the Ibis trilogy (case studies that seem generically distant), critical representations of globalization are developed through recourse to speculative genre frames for archival contents, with the effect of estranging historical continuity, collectivity, and narrative conventions. Attending to ambivalent deployments of genre allows for more precise identification of how contemporary novels formally construct and confuse their own world‐building effects, and how critics categorize texts and attribute political‐critical impact to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amitav Ghosh is one of the most significant literary voices to emerge from India in recent decades. The Shadow Lines was published in 1988, four years after the sectarian violence that shook New Delhi in the aftermath of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination. The Shadow Lines can be read as a memory novel where the characters are maneuvered and manipulated by the memory of Tridib’s tragic death. Each of these characters is affected differently and their experiences weave into a single plot. The narrator in The Shadow Lines calls up a stream of recollections in the form of flashbacks, a testimony that the nature of these memories is unpleasant and haunting. The past invades the present, enriches and transforms it, and even reshapes the progression of the events eventually strengthening the structure of the plot. As memory provides the narrative trigger in this novel, Amitav Ghosh allows his narrator’s memory to play freely and form loops of stories inside the story rendering chronology and space redundant. Violence has many faces in the novel, but Tridib’s tragedy subtly resonates till the end of the book and comprehends the total senselessness of the post-Partition riot that claimed Tridib’s life. Being a memory novel, it captures the shock of emotional rupture and estrangement, giving voice to the silence resulting from the personal and national trauma in the subconscious of the characters. This critical investigation would focus on Ghosh’s use of memory as a fictional device to pull the memory fragments into plotting the story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the end of the Napoleonic wars through the First World War, London was made into a historic city that showcased it as the heart of a growing empire. Waves of urban reform produced public spaces, such as Waterloo Place, that were populated with statues of military and imperial heroes involved in Britain's territorial conquests. The result was that London came to be imagined as old, designed in a neoclassical style that could be seen across the empire in cities such as Calcutta, which had been the capital of British India through the nineteenth century. Some statues installed in Calcutta were made in London and displayed at the Royal Academy or elsewhere before they were sent abroad. In spite of the seeming permanence of statues, this essay shows that throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, statues were moved on multiple occasions to respond to changing political and aesthetic demands. • London and Calcutta (now Kolkata) share a neoclassical and imperial urban aesthetic. • Moving statues around London, from London to India, were part of urban design. • Public art in Waterloo Place showed London's visitors the history of empire. • The Maidan showcased statues of viceroys, governors-general, and military officials. • Urban planning, public art, and public history merged to make empire visible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the challenges posed by the Anthropocene and climate change to human perceptions of reality and the need to revise traditional notions of the real. The article examines Amitav Ghosh's novel Gun Island as an attempt by Ghosh to break free from the anthropocentric limitations in the realist tradition that he identifies in his critical work in The Great Derangement in order to give shape to a new climate change realism capable of representing larger than human realities. The article studies the literary strategies Ghosh uses in Gun Island to cause a post- anthropocentric reality to emerge from beneath its concealment by anthropocentric worldviews: from uncanny animations of settings by non-human agencies to a metafictional blurring of fiction, imagination, perception and more- than- human realities, which, the article argues, inspires new ways of reading the real and quite concretely performs some of literature's affordances in the cultural struggle against climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the concept of environmental refugees and their portrayal in Amitav Ghosh's novel Gun Island. It discusses how human-induced environmental degradation leads to migration and displacement, both internally and externally. The study emphasizes the global nature of environmental displacement and the challenges in defining and legally recognizing environmental refugees. It also highlights the need for comprehensive policies and protection for these individuals. The article further explores Ghosh's novel as a research methodology to illustrate the impact of environmental degradation on migration. It discusses the effects of natural disasters and climate change on human and animal displacement, using examples such as the Sundarbans in India, wildfires in California, and extreme weather events in Italy. The text emphasizes the interconnectedness between humans and nature and the importance of addressing the underlying causes of climate change. The novel "Gun Island" by Amitav Ghosh explores the theme of environmental refugees and the consequences of climate change on human and animal displacement. It highlights society's indifference towards these issues and draws parallels between the experiences of environmental refugees and legends of Manasa Devi. The novel concludes with a message of hope, suggesting that recognition and protection for ecological victims are possible if authorities take responsibility and act. The collection of sources includes articles and reports that discuss the relationship between climate change and forced migration. These sources provide valuable insights into the complex issues surrounding climate-induced migration and can be useful for researchers interested in understanding the intersection of environmental change and human displacement. [Extracted from the article]

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The paper situates the massacre of Dalit refugees of Marichjhapi Island (1978-79) in West Bengal, India through a multidisciplinary reading of Amitav Ghosh's novel The Hungry Tide (2004) along with local history, vernacular literature, reports and experiential narratives. The refugees from East Pakistan/Bangladesh who settled on the island of Marichjhapi at Sundarbans (currently one of the most ecologically endangered places on Earth) were forcefully evicted by the government citing ecological issues. Utilizing a framework that incorporates both ecocriticism and postcolonial theory, this paper reads the vulnerable humans and non-humans, especially the island's unique ecosystem and fauna as victims of anthropocentrism and biopolitics, propelled by ecological and political factors acting together. Taking up from Ghosh's own interventions on ecological thought and the Sundarbans, the paper further delves into the concept of "the disaster unconscious" in postcolonial literature as suggested by Pallavi Rastogi through a close reading of The Hungry Tide. It describes the co-constitution of precarious lives (both human and non-human) and fragile environments during disaster as what Blanchot would call "outside of temporality" marking the 'necroeconomy' of the nation-state, as conceptualized by Achille Mbembe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

L’approfondita esplorazione di Amitav Ghosh sul commercio dell’oppio presentata nella sua illuminante conferenza Smoke & Ashes del 27 ottobre, presso il Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Straniere dell’Università di Torino, scaturisce dal suo capolavoro di saggistica pubblicato nel 2023 con il medesimo titolo. In occasione della conferenza, l’autore si è distinto non tanto per la semplice dissezione del contenuto del suo trattato, quanto per l'arricchimento della narrazione storica attraverso l'inserimento di riflessioni personali e dettagli inaspettati, frutto della sua prolungata ricerca inerente alla Trilogia dell'Ibis; questi romanzi hanno fornito a Ghosh l'impulso per condurre un'analisi post-scrittura, sintetizzata poi nella pubblicazione del volume intitolato Smoke & Ashes e nella conferenza in esame. Smoke & Ashes emerge pertanto non solo come un'analisi storica minuziosa, ma altresì come un epilogo narrativo in grado di colmare il vuoto percepito alla fine della Trilogia; oltre a colmare una lacuna storiografica, delineando la configurazione dell'impero coloniale britannico, basato metaforicamente su tè e papaveri, la narrazione getta luce sull'amoralità dei colonialisti britannici e olandesi, mettendo in evidenza le considerevoli fortune accumulate attraverso il contrabbando e il commercio incontrollato di oppiacei.

La questione ambientale è sempre stata un tema caro ad Amitav Ghosh, scrittore ed antropologo che si distingue per l’abilità di mantenere i piedi per terra, la nostra, e gli occhi ben aperti verso un pianeta nella sua nuova epoca, l’Antropocene. Nella conferenza tenutasi il 25 ottobre all’auditorium dell’Ateneo torinese, Ghosh ha parlato di cambiamenti climatici e della forza della natura, di fronte ad un pubblico di docenti, studenti universitari e liceali. Ed è soprattutto con le nuove generazioni che l'autore riesce a comunicare in maniera fresca, empatica e chiara, rafforzando il concetto che sì, anche gli umanisti possono risvegliare le coscienze. Anche gli umanisti possono essere delle pop star (che in fondo ci meritiamo). Amitav Ghosh parla a tutti, e parla di un mondo sempre più affezionato alla filosofia capitalista: in esso il legame fra cultura e consumismo è stretto, e di conseguenza le persone vengono invogliate a consumare e sprecare, attratte da una pubblicità accattivante e da false promesse. Sfruttando l’influenza della cultura sull’opinione pubblica, l’autore ha deciso di usare la letteratura per fissare tanto la sua preoccupazione davanti al cambiamento climatico - che merita forse più l’appellativo di ‘crisi’ climatica – quanto la speranza che ci sia ancora tempo per intervenire e imparare. È con questo intento che è nato il suo saggio La grande cecità: Il cambiamento climatico e l’impensabile (The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, 2016), pubblicato in Italia nel 2017 dall’editore Neri Pozza, nella traduzione di Anna Nadotti e Norman Gobetti.

Il terzo giorno di ciclo di conferenze, dal titolo The Ibis Trilogy, si apre con una prima sessione in cui Amitav Ghosh approfondisce da un punto di vista storico, geografico e artistico le relazioni commerciali tra l’Occidente e la Cina in un periodo compreso tra il XVIII secolo e XIX secolo. Amitav Ghosh ricostruisce attraverso una vera e propria lezione di storia, con l’aiuto di dipinti e fotografie, quelli che sono i grandi eventi che fanno da sfondo ai tre romanzi della trilogia Ibis: Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011), Flood of Fire (2015).

Lunedì 23 ottobre, il primo incontro del ciclo di lezioni tenuto da Amitav Ghosh si apre in una sala lauree gremita e avvolta da un grande senso di anticipazione. Numerosissime studentesse e altretatnti studenti, con le/i docenti, hanno risposto con entusiasmo all’opportunità di ascoltare il rinomato autore bengalese parlare all’Università di Torino. Come tema del suo primo intervento, Amitav Ghosh ha scelto di esporre idee ed elementi chiave dietro alla sua ultima produzione saggistica pubblicata nel 2021 e poi tradotta in Italia con il titolo La maledizione della noce moscata da Neri Pozza. Rispecchiando perfettamente la sua produzione letteraria ed ampiezza tematica, il saggio di Ghosh è composito negli intrecci che propone ed indaga: colonialismo, capitalismo, crisi climatica e sfruttamento sono sapientemente osservati nel loro irriducibile legame, che l’autore dipana appoggiandosi ad una minuziosa ricerca storica. É in fondo questa l’origine etimologica della parola ‘testo’ – textus, tessuto – a cui Ghosh ci reintroduce con il suo saggio e la sua lezione.

This research paper investigates the profound role played by Indian culture in shaping the thematic and narrative contours of the postcolonial literary oeuvre of acclaimed author Amitav Ghosh. Through an in-depth analysis of select novels, including the Ibis Trilogy, The Hungry Tide, and others, the study elucidates the critical importance of Indian cultural elements in understanding the complexities of Ghosh's literary world. The paper unfolds against the backdrop of historical legacies, examining Ghosh's portrayal of colonial encounters and their farreaching effects. The Opium Wars and the indentured labour system, explored in the Ibis Trilogy serve as a lens through which Ghosh skilfully articulates the cultural reverberations of colonial exploits, capturing the resilience and adaptation of Indian communities in the face of historical upheavals. A central focus of the research is the intricate interplay between characters and the rich cultural tapestry of postcolonial India. Ghosh's novels serve as a mosaic of languages, customs, and traditions, embodying the nation's diversity. The paper probes the significance of linguistic diversity in reflecting the multifaceted nature of Indian identity, with characters seamlessly transitioning between languages, mirroring the polyglot reality of the nation. Furthermore, the study examines the thematic exploration of cultural hybridity in Ghosh's works. Characters navigate the confluence of tradition and modernity, encapsulating the evolving cultural landscape in postcolonial India. Environmental and ecological aspects are also scrutinized, emphasizing how Ghosh integrates nature as an integral element of culture, revealing the symbiotic relationship between the environment and cultural practices. This research contributes to the discourse on postcolonial literature, emphasizing the centrality of Indian culture in Ghosh's narrative framework. By unraveling the cultural nuances embedded in his works, the paper aims to underscore the significance of cultural representation as a cornerstone in understanding the intricacies of postcolonial identity and societal transformations in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do writers from regions with a historical experience of colonialism depict Western Orientalists in their work? What exactly does it mean to "reverse the gaze" and include the Orientalist within the frame of representation? The article considers the non-Western representation of Orientalists and Orientalism in literary texts from three different regions (Turkey, Mexico, and Bengal), concentrating in particular on Oguz Atay's Tutunamayanlar (The Disconnected), Ignacio Padilla's Antipodes, and Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land, but also referring to a wide selection of other texts in the process. It suggests three categories of such representation — parodic, empathetic, and authoritative, in ascending order of sympathy — and proposes, in the analysis of the various fictitious representations of Orientalists examined, a central link between Orientalism and the sacred. Finally, the question of the ironic representation of Orientalists — the extent to which a redemptive irony is adopted by structures of power as a tool of self-preservation — is also considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amitav Ghosh's Gun Island brings to the forefront the inadequacy of realist fiction in presenting climate crisis. Assiduously, the novel teems with alternative modes of narration that dispenses with the authority of accurate representations of crisis. In this essay, I am applying James Clifford's term "ethnographic Surrealism" in analyzing Ghosh's representation of catastrophe in Gun Island. The inception of Surrealism in 1920s and 1930s in Europe was a recourse for its proponents to find new ways to process the aftermath of WWI. Similarly, I argue that Ghosh is dismissing strict realist fiction in writing about catastrophe. The novel has been lauded for its improbable realities, implausible connections, and folkloric Bengali legends. Ghosh is juxtaposing otherwise clashing cultural discourses to creatively characterize climate change. In this way, Ghosh is requestioning the prevalent mode of responding, mainly categorized by concealing or denying, to climate crisis through offering non-western and unscientific solutions that work on blurring the boundaries of "real" and "surreal" in countering climate catastrophes. Ghosh, as Clifford would argue, is emphasizing that cultural norms and production of knowledge about crisis is part of "artificial arrangements." I argue that in writing about catastrophe, Ghosh does not start from the presupposition that reality is absolute; instead, Ghosh finds a utopia in reconstructing reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amitav Ghosh's novel The Shadow Lines (1988) is a prominent example of South Asian postcolonial writing in English and features in curricula and criticism as a nuanced instance of the intricacies and traumas of borders and histories in the Indian subcontinent. Nevertheless, both the novel and its critical analysis display a discernible lack of focus on the issue of sexual violation. In this essay, I undertake a close reading and feminist analysis of one character, May Price. I examine how Ghosh represents her in the novel and argue that critics have read her reductively, if at all. When she is discussed, critics either ignore her identity as a foreign woman who is sexually violated by the Indian protagonists (Tridib and the narrator) or problematically couch the incidents of sexual violation in the vocabulary of romantic love and consent. The narrative, focalized through its patriarchal narrator, whose perspective is obviously created through authorial choices, allows the character no agency to protest these violations and no space for redressal or any sustained reactive expression of opposition. Rather, May's hasty resolutions, absolute forgiveness, and belated consent seemingly turn these violations into seductions, exonerating the assaulters entirely. I highlight that The Shadow Lines and attendant critical reflections often choose to examine questions of nation, identity, and memory, which are unquestionably significant, at the expense of the representation and agency of women. In order to address this gap, gendered power dynamics need to be made central and not peripheral to postcolonial scholarship and discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses translatability and the figure of the illiterate "fanatic" – in the context of the Muslim Egyptian fellah – as the limit of World Literature. The illiterate/fellah's words cannot reach global readers due to crises of access and translation that characterize the world literary periphery, and forms of "killjoy" critical reading that can silence "subaltern" voices in the written text. Using as case studies Waguih Ghali's Beer in the Snooker Club (1964) and Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land (1992), it argues that one can side-step the modernizing binary of literacy and fanaticism and hear subalterns "differently" by listening for humour. Humour becomes an instance of surprising translatability between the fellah and global literary centres, allowing him to shed the pejorative connotations of "fanaticism" and highlighting points of resistance in the form of laughter that crosses barriers of literacy, nation, religion, and power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does it mean to be a writer from Northeast India? What does it mean to write from the margins of India? What are the limitations of Indian English writing when it comes to depicting marginal, radical literary traditions that question the idea of India? The author of The House with a Thousand Stories and There Is No Good Time for Bad News, Aruni Kashyap, shares his formative experiences as a writer, including the influences of Indian writers such as Amitav Ghosh, Assamese literary culture, and Indigenous oral storytelling traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on two cartographically estranged places which continue to be historically concomitant—lower deltaic Bengal and Burma. The aim of the paper is to do a comparative ‘pizza effect’ study using contemporary Anglophone writings by Amitav Ghosh. Within the methodological perspective, the theoretical framework of the paper stems from the discussions of ‘self-orientalisation’—a phenomenon in which a community’s comprehension of native culture is determined by its acceptance in foreign lands. The paper argues how the writings of Amitav Ghosh have triggered a ‘pizza effect’ in two modes: on the one hand, they have led to the re-discovery of ‘folklores’ by a new generation of Anglophone readers for whom these were lost, on the other hand they have led to the re-finding of a shared history between Bengal and Burma. The first of these modes of ‘pizza effect’ is studied through the literary analysis of a folktale from the Sundarbans—Bonbibi͞r Johura͞nama͞—and its representation and adaption in Amitav Ghosh’s novel—The Hungry Tide (2004). The second case of ‘pizza effect’ is evaluated by comparing Padma͞va͞ti, a seventeen-century composition by A͞la͞ol, a Bengali poet in the Arakanese court and representations of Burma and Arakan in contemporary works of Amitav Ghosh—The Glass Palace (2000), Sea of Poppies (2008), and Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma (1998).

A high orientalist text, but one that influences many postcolonial writers, Jorge Luis Borges’s story “The Garden of Forking Paths” imagines a Chinese garden-text that tracks all courses of actual and possible events, making all timelines, both real and virtual, seem equally present and deeply connected. Versions of this enhanced, multi-dimensional temporal awareness appear in the work of several Asian and Asian diaspora writers as they grapple with cataclysmic historical moments, from WWII to contemporary violent outbursts, and consider counter-narratives, ways events might have been otherwise. Using Haruki Murakami’s fiction as a departure point for examining South Asian diaspora fiction writers Michael Ondaatje, Amitav Ghosh, and Karan Mahajan, this paper explores factors that enable the presentation of enhanced time consciousness as linked to a mindfulness practice or that conversely predispose such apprehensions of deep temporal connectivity to become fleeting epiphanies, ones often tragically tied to global politics and globalizing technologies.

Popular rhetoric of the twenty-first century as the "Asian century" frequently coheres around China as a rising global superpower and thus focuses on its financial and material ambitions in sites across Asia and Africa. Such narratives, ensconced within the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) formation, re-entrench a problematic Orientalism while pushing further to the margins still the complex, long-standing regional histories. This essay juxtaposes Amitav Ghosh's Ibis trilogy and Kevin Kwan's Rich trilogy in relation to Indian Ocean histories of trade and exchange. Through world-historical events activated in these novels such as World War II and the first Anglo-Opium War, the essay's argument follows nineteenth- and twentieth-century transits between the South Asian subcontinent, the Malay Archipelago, and China. Taking circularity as a central analytic, this essay reveals how an elongated temporal frame that accounts from non-European vantages—even in contemporary Anglophone literature—reorients not only what we consider the past and present of Indian Ocean worlds, but also how those pasts bear on the contemporary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay revisits a debate about literary fiction's ability to depict the consequences of climate change. Philosopher McKenzie Wark's 2017 essay, 'On the Obsolescence of the Bourgeois Novel in the Anthropocene', offers one of many critiques of climate fiction, such as Amitav Ghosh's influential book, The Great Derangement. But while Ghosh sees a shortcoming in contemporary novels in their lack of representation of major climate events, Wark emphasises the importance of collective action, conversation, and connection, beyond the limits of literature. Since Wark's intervention, the global School Strike for Climate in 2019 and 2020 brought more participatory post-literary forms to represent climate change. Jean-Luc Nancy's theory of participation, that there is no mimesis without participation (methexis), sees a tense relation between the two rather than an opposition or conflict. I argue that Wark, by not undervaluing participation, disrupts a hierarchy that privileges the imitator at the expense of the imitation. To explore this relation, I consider how the slogan 'there is no Planet B' forms a snapshot of our twenty-first-century mimetic condition, from which no imitative representation will save us. Can Wark expand the vision of another relational kind of femininity in her later writing to support the demand to take part in transformational action against climate catastrophe, beyond mimetic representation carried in the form of the novel? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How might climate fiction inform public perceptions of climate change and its political stakes? While early proponents of climate fiction called on writers to move the public with visceral cautionary tales, recent climate fiction and criticism thereof aims beyond apocalyptic and catastrophic representation, reflecting broader debates regarding fear and agency in the climate imaginary. This context clarifies the modes of imaginative engagement pursued in recent English-language climate novels, including Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140, Richard Powers, The Overstory, and Amitav Ghosh's Gun Island. These works respond to patterns of denial and depoliticization by challenging their audiences to reimagine agency and responsibility in politically expansive and ethically demanding terms. Dramatizing complex interconnections between communities, generations, and species, as well as the obligations and possibilities for action to which they give rise, they enrich the climate imaginary by illuminating political potential amidst the overwhelming crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A high orientalist text, but one that has influenced and continues to influence many postcolonial writers, Jorge Luis Borges's story "The Garden of Forking Paths" imagines a Chinese garden-text that tracks all courses of actual and possible events, making all timelines, both real and virtual, seem equally present and deeply connected. Versions of this enhanced, multi-dimensional temporal awareness appear in the work of several Asian and Asian diaspora writers as they grapple with cataclysmic historical moments, from World War II to contemporary violent outbursts, and consider counter-narratives, ways events might have been otherwise. Using Haruki Murakami's fiction as a departure point for examining the South Asian diaspora fiction writers Michael Ondaatje, Amitav Ghosh, and Karan Mahajan, this paper explores factors that enable the presentation of enhanced time consciousness as linked to a mindfulness practice or that conversely predispose such apprehensions of deep temporal connectivity to become fleeting epiphanies, ones often tragically tied to global politics and globalizing technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Born from the elements, returning to the elements, how could we be distinctively this body or this spirit alone, devoid of the environment around us? Rosi Braidotti calls this strand of posthuman thought "contemporary critical posthumanism" which incorporates "ecology and environmentalism" with a special emphasis placed on relating to all "earth-others", since "it produces a new way of combining self-interests with the well-being of an enlarged community, based on environmental inter-connections" (qtd. in Opperman 2016: 26). In this paper, I have tried to look at the novel the Hungry Tide, with relation to the posthuman ecocriticism, contemporary critical posthumanism and James J Frazer's work The Golden Bough. I am looking into three aspects in relation to the novel and The Golden Bough: 1. The ecologically conscious beliefs of Fokir and the primitives in the Golden Bough 2. Ecology seen as divinity(and how it benefits the ecological conservation in these two works 3. The elimination of othering through ecological consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows how the formal tactics of Ben Lerner's hybrid novel, 10:04, respond to climate change. The article reads two related aspects of the text – its foregrounding of the medium and its use of appropriated images and poetry – in terms of their negotiation of a realist literary space which Amitav Ghosh has argued precludes engagement with extreme, unpredictable weather events. By focussing attention on aspects of a literary text typically overlooked in literary discussions of contemporary ecological issues, the article helps extend the purview of what it might mean for a novel to engage with a climate in crisis. This expanded understanding of engagement contributes both to the ongoing, collective exploration of contemporary climate change fiction and to the stock of critical tools with which to interpret it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mob mentality had always been discordant with the peaceful law and order situation in a state and nature. To the behaviour theorists, mob mentality had remained as a riddle. But if we trace the mob violence it has been existing right from the ancient times. In Greek literature also there has been mentions of mob violence. In the novels of Amitav Ghosh mob violence plays an important role and. in some novels, it is the catalyst. But in this paper, I have tried to present the impact of mob violence on human being as well as on nature. How nature has been the victim of greedy mob who in the name of settlement and livelihood has played havoc on nature. Violent mob by jeopardizing the flora and fauna of earth has violated the sanctity and equilibrium of ecosystem. This chapter examines the representation of collective violence in some fictions by Amitav Ghosh. The fictions narrate rioting in post-partition India and Pakistan in close relationship to nationalism and communalism, and in exploring this relationship, I will first examine the way in which the problem of the simultaneous national and communal divide caused by Partition is treated in the novels. My argument here is that the novels of Amitav Ghosh are an example of the kind of narration that does not write violence into a dramatized spectacle--instead, it avoids overt dramatization and attempts to balance collective violence with representation of the individual response to it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The multiple crises of the Anthropocene include a crisis in storytelling. Amitav Ghosh, for example, has claimed that not only is literary fiction incapable of representing climate change, it is also complicit in its concealment in the broader culture (2016). Ghosh suggests the increasing entwining of image and text brought about by the Internet could lead to a hybridity of form that will free readers from the unhelpful logocentrism of recent times. While agreeing with him on both the need for new forms and the importance of hybridity, we argue that he has overlooked the power of sound in storytelling. Drawing on a collaborative work-in-progress about birdsong and loss, we propose the acousmatic story as a response to the challenges of the age and also to an emerging understanding that all stories are entangled in a vast mesh of agencies, both human and other-than-human. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The archive as a metaphor emerges as a contentious zone in Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome. Not only does the plot of the novel revolve around several archival researches, but the negotiation of the archive becomes a post-colonial strategy of coming to terms with the history of colonial medical science. The novel intervenes and challenges the hegemonizing attempt of the pedagogical grand narratives of history, science and other forms of ‘objective’ disciplines to reveal the performative micronarratives – the ‘different’ stories, ‘different’ experiences, and ‘different’ histories. The archive becomes a potent metaphor of transculturalism itself in that it turns out to be a fluid and volatile space which not only stores textual traces but also creates the texts. Renegotiation of the archive by subaltern agencies, therefore, sets the archive perpetually in motion and reveals it as open to further change and reinscription. The Calcutta Chromosome delineates a post-colonial archival research which leads the researcher to the discovery of a counter-archive of indigenous, esoteric knowledge, posited as an epistemic ‘other’ to the colonial archive of scientific discourse.

Drawing upon the insights of Rabindranath Tagore, who coined the term viswasahitya to express his own understanding of comparative literature, this essay resituates translation as the cornerstone for new directions in world literature. While conventional understandings of world literature tend to reconfirm existing power structures and hierarchies, translation opens up the possibility of thinking beyond the national/global binary by interrogating the lines along which such binaries are conceptualized. Translation operates at the borders that are seen to divide cultures, languages, worldviews and geographies. This essay explores the dynamic relationship between translation and world literature within contemporary South Asian writing, through an analysis of heteroglossia, multilingualism and 'translatedness' in selected texts by Mahasweta Devi and Amitav Ghosh, opening up larger questions about multilingualism and also about the very discipline of comparative literature. Highlighting the role that translation has historically played in shaping power relations in the world, this paper projects the transformative potential of translation as the key to a radical reconceptualization of a world literature for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Winner of the 1997 Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction, Amitav Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome (1995) takes place within an apartment in a near-future, wrecked New York, where Antar, an immigrant computer programmer, finds himself cyber-investigating the mysterious disappearance of a colleague in Calcutta, brought there by the compelling desire to find out the truth about the transmission of malaria in 19th-century colonial India. Across various locations and temporalities the novel is then launched in a time-bending, overlapping post-modern narration which, through the multiple, ‘transfective’ embodiments of the malarial Plasmodium, refracts the global interconnectedness of human migrations, old and new colonialisms, and dynamics of hospitality and community formation. As I will discuss in my study, Ghosh’s fourth novel imaginatively re-negotiates Asian American writing in a globalized framework, inaugurating the author’s creative engagement, in the following decades, with broader and more ramified transatlantic histories across Europe, Asia and the United States. With a look at its circuits of publishing, readership, and reception my reading of the novel, therefore, will investigate how the deployment of a cyberpunk avatar aesthetic integrates, contests and re-inscribes South Asian American diasporic experiences and literary representations, particularly via gendered tropes.

Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies entails the issue of displacement to the level of environmental degradation. Any dislocation or displacement involves vulnerability of ecosystem. This paper will try to show how the British settlement in Sea of Poppies, by causing the rooted native uprooted from their own place, gives way to environmental disaster. Ghosh shows in Sea of Poppies how the pre-colonial pristine pastoral remains untainted for a long time until the occupation of the British settlers. This settlement destroys natural vegetation of the place to such an extent that the lives of the farmers become unbearable. The land is losing its fertility. The indigenous crops are uprooted only to produce non-native products. The local people are forced to become displaced. The capitalist mentality induces the non-native to drive away the native from their rooted place. More importantly, Ghosh also shows that British exploitation has resulted in the crime against humanity, forced displacement, impoverishment of people, animals and their environment. It has also created 'either/or' situations in contexts of land and resource shortage or degradation. The women, in particular, are shown as the most vulnerable. Even the colonizers are uprooted in order to be settled in an alien land. So are their animals and crops only to be acclimatized in a foreign land. So this paper will try to focus on the adverse effects of displacement on the ecosystem in Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]