EXAMINING SUBALTERN AGENCY IN AMITAV GHOSH’S NOVELS

Abstract

The dissertation explains who the subalterns are, in detail, and the legitimacy of the nomenclature is problematized as well. The subalterns are the non-elite mass of South Asia whose voice remained unheard in the written history of the land. The subaltern scholarship came as a reaction to the Cambridge school of interpretation of India’s colonial history in 1982. Against this pedagogical background of South Asian history, in my dissertation I have tried to examine the following objectives: (i) Ghosh’s credibility of registering the agency of the subaltern, (ii) Inspection of the binaries in all of his writing e.g. science-pseudo science, tradition- progress, colonialism-nationalism-cosmopolitanism, etc. and (iii) Problematizing the production and distribution of knowledge. Besides explaining objectives and methodology, in the first chapter, I have given a brief biographical note on Amitav Ghsoh and the scheme of next chapters of the thesis. The second chapter tries to analyse how Ghosh presents the relation between the poles of various binaries how these binaries are put along the elite-subaltern divide. I have taken up The Circle of Reason and The Calcutta Chromosome in this chapter. In the first section, I argue that while portraying these relations Ghosh shows that the ideas which are generally perceived to be opposite to each other, in reality are not so much antithetical. Science and pseudo-science or religious rituals is the most prominent binary in The Circle of Reason and The Calcutta Chromosome. In both of these novels, Ghosh hints at certain binaries but resists the formations of such binaries in order to refute the long-standing European claim on modernity. Here my argument theoretically hinges on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s critique of European modernity in Provincializing Europe. Chapter III has discussed the problems in the representation of the subaltern in literature and media and the issue of subaltern agency against the background of national politics. In the pre-Partition condition, Ghosh shows that the subalterns were not represented at all. As the question of nation and freedom were at the centre of contemporary politics, the opinions of the poor and unprivileged who were marginal everywhere irrespective of their religious faiths, were never considered. Against the backdrop of nationalist politics, Ghosh makes a comparison between personal history and state-documented history. In the two novels The Shadow Lines and The Hungry Tide which I have taken up in this chapter, Ghosh addresses these issues.

Chapter IV discusses the commodification of labour and the intrusion of capitalism into Indian society in the context of Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke. In these two novels, Ghosh draws a detailed picture of how opium enslaves the entire social system of India. Ghosh actually tries to draw different facets of the history of opium trade and the Opium Wars. I have discussed how Ghosh through the portrayal of subaltern characters compels the readers to see many things which are not mentioned in the documented history of opium trade and Opium Wars. We see in these two novels, that the labour force, whether they are the farmers or the workers in the opium factories, are monetarily dependent on opium, and in their leisure hours they use it as a drug. In the Sea of Poppies, Ghosh depicts the plight of the peasants who are doubly exploited. For compulsive farming of poppies, they go bankrupt monetarily and then it leads them to choose indentureship in faraway islands. Ghosh also shows how colonialism facilitates the inroads of capitalism into Indian society. The text of these two novels are actually the most acerbic critiques of colonialism produced so far by Ghosh. Chapter V delineates the issue of the schism in the Indian people’s psyche irrespective of their social and economic position during the colonial regime. For this study I have taken up The Glass Palace and Flood of Fire. Ghosh describes in these two novels how both the elite and the subaltern Indians find themselves in a situation of being participants in the colonizing process and this realization has permanently planted a dilemma in their minds. Through his portrayals of various characters e.g. the Collector and Arjun in The Glass Palace and Neelrattan Haldar and Kesri Singh in the Flood of Fire, Ghosh gives a detailed nature of the dilemma of colonized Indians. What is interesting in particularly these two novels is that the characters come from various social and economic spheres of society, but no one could avoid the schismatic effect of colonialism. Thus from the entire fictional oeuvre of Amitav Ghosh, I have found that Ghosh has peopled his novels with characters from all parts of society. In the initial stage of this research, I have had a reservation myself which actually formed one of my research questions: credibility of Amitav Ghosh in registering the agency of the subaltern because of his socio-economic standing. In this study, I have found and realized that one does not have to portray only marginal characters in order to depict their marginality. Ghosh does not confine himself in depicting the details of the socio-economically less privileged people, but at times with the details of the well-to-do people’s lives

and specially the social transactions between people of different stations, the marginality or the stakes of the marginal becomes manifest in his texts.