LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 19:12 December 2019
ISSN 1930-2940

Editors:
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         T. Deivasigamani, Ph.D.
         Pammi Pavan Kumar, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.

Managing Editor & Publisher: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.

HOME PAGE

Click Here for Back Issues of Language in India - From 2001

BOOKS FOR YOU TO READ AND DOWNLOAD FREE!

REFERENCE MATERIALS

BACK ISSUES

  • E-mail your articles and book-length reports in Microsoft Word to languageinindiaUSA@gmail.com.

  • PLEASE READ THE GUIDELINES GIVEN IN HOME PAGE IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE LIST OF CONTENTS.

  • Your articles and book-length reports should be written following the APA, MLA, LSA, or IJDL Stylesheet.

  • The Editorial Board has the right to accept, reject, or suggest modifications to the articles submitted for publication, and to make suitable stylistic adjustments. High quality, academic integrity, ethics and morals are expected from the authors and discussants.

Copyright © 2016
M. S. Thirumalai

Publisher: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
11249 Oregon Circle
Bloomington, MN 55438
USA
Custom Search

Return of the Repressed in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies

Nadeem Jahangir Bhat

Poppies
https://www.amazon.com/Sea-Poppies

Abstract

Amitav Ghosh belongs to the group of Subaltern Studies project and all his novels are an attempt to deal with the history of the subaltern. His Sea of Poppies has been hailed as story where the focus shifts from the so called “mainstream” to the peripheral subjects. It is a story of a group of indentured labourers on board Ibis, a slave ship, on way to Mauritius. Ghosh makes the stove away convicts and few women as the centre of his story and narrates the story from their point of view. This is in line with the notion that the discursive focus should be on the marginalized rather than the hegemonic. The novel revolves around Deeti and Kalua, the main characters of the novel, who defy social norms and exert their will, at the same time face to face with hegemonic imperial power structures.

Keywords: Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, Subaltern, Women, Hegemony, Patriarchy, Colonialism

The representation of postcolonial subaltern is based on the notion that discursive focus should be shifted from hegemonic to the marginalized. The main impulse of this transitional operation is to consolidate and centralize the subaltern’s peripheral position in society in social and political terms, as both are a result of systematic and structural marginalization. In postcolonial idiom, standard history is regarded as monologic representing the dominant discourse. It is believed that Official historiography, while constructing historical facts, selects from past from a particular national and ideological perspective. Postcolonial writers and theorists believe that the historiography is used by the imperial powers in a discursive way as an instrument to construct reality on behalf of the colonizer; and such history inevitably leaves out the histories of the colonized. This inevitably leads to the marginalization of many groups who are denied an official voice by hegemonic powers. For example, Ranajit Guha calls the history of Indian nationalism “a sort of spiritual biography of the Indian elite” (Guha, 1988: 34-41).

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Nadeem Jahangir Bhat
Assistant Professor English
Satellite Campus Leh
University of Kashmir, Srinagar
nadeem8384@gmail.com
Custom Search
  • Click Here to Go to Creative Writing Section

  • Send your articles
    as an attachment
    to your e-mail to
    languageinindiaUSA@gmail.com.
  • Please ensure that your name, academic degrees, institutional affiliation and institutional address, and your e-mail address are all given in the first page of your article. Also include a declaration that your article or work submitted for publication in LANGUAGE IN INDIA is an original work by you and that you have duly acknowledged the work or works of others you used in writing your articles, etc. Remember that by maintaining academic integrity we not only do the right thing but also help the growth, development and recognition of Indian/South Asian scholarship.