Exemplification of History and Historical Fantasy in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh has won many accolades for his fiction that is keenly intertwined with history. His fiction is characterized by strong themes that may be sometimes identified as historical novels. His themes involve emigration, exile, cultural displacement and uprooting. He illuminates the basic ironies, deep-seated ambiguities and existential dilemmas of the human condition. He, in one of the interviews, has observed, "Nobody has the choice of stepping away from history" and "For me, the value of the novel, as a form, is that it can incorporate elements of every aspect of life-history, natural history, rhetoric, politics, beliefs, religion, family, love, sexuality". Amitav Ghosh's success as a historical novelist owes much to the distinctiveness of his well-researched narratives. He remarkably manifests a bygone era and vanished experiences to life through vividly realized detail. The novels are largely set against the backdrop of major historical events such as the Swadeshi movement, the Second World War, the partition of India, the communal riots of 1963-64 in Dhaka and Calcutta, the Maoist Movement, the India-China War, the India-Pakistan War and the fall of Dhaka from East Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh. While focusing upon all his novels the paper aims at examining and elaborating Ghosh's historical touches and their implications. The paper also investigates the narrative techniques employed in his novels.