Amitav Ghosh’s “history” is a threshold in Re-Constructing National and Cultural Identity: A Study

Abstract

As is well-known, history is often shaped by the socio-political perspectives of the Colonizers and therefore, the narratives generated by colonial history must utilize both the author’s imagination and empirical or factual research to create a broader view of historical reality. Amitav Ghosh, one of the most promising Indian writers writing in English has amazingly blended “history” with fiction which is profoundly attached to the re-construction of identity of the people in our postcolonial world. Indeed, one of the important concerns of historical reconstruction in modern third world literature is re-imagining the cultural cartography through the re-formation of national and cultural identities in the wake of emerging nation-states in the post imperial era. This paper clearly indicates how colonial history is incisively connected to the question of reforming national and cultural identity in today’s postcolonial reality.