LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 13:11 November 2013
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
         C. Subburaman, Ph.D. (Economics)
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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Fragmented Identities: A Study of Amitav Ghosh's The Glass Palace

Sonia, M.A, NET, Ph.D. Research Scholar

The Question of Identity

The question of identity which has always been crucial to human existence does increasingly command serious attention in today’s fast changing, alienated and volatile world. In this era of globalization where a large number of migrations take place and where there is no pure race and nationality hybrid, fragmented identities come into being. Amitav Ghosh is a postcolonial diasporic writer who reveals the dialectics of imperialism in its journey from the periphery to the centre and whose writings echo a deep core of colonialism based on power politics. Writers like Salmaan Rushdie, Kiran Desai, V.S. Naipaul and Rohinton Mistry are writing in the same space, using novel as a means of cultural representation. These writers of 1980, “aimed at enhancing an Indian cultural identity and projecting Indian cultural and historical heritage to enable an assertion of the Indian self,” (Jain 32).

Amitav Ghosh - Postcolonial Writings

Among all of the writers mentioned above, Amitav Ghosh plays a significant role in the postcolonial writings. For him identity is not given, but constructed and contingent. Ghosh's life manifests in subjectivity, geography and language toward multicultural and fluid identity. In almost all of Ghosh's work, the persistent theme of identity finds a direct reflection. In his novels characters like Ila in The Shadow Lines, Reid and Afat Ali in Sea of Poppies, Piyali in The Hungry Tide, and Arjun in The Glass Palace are the products of either racial or cultural mix and show how they struggle to relocate their identity in the multicultural society they live in. They eventually discover that their identity can't be fixed because they are the fruit of the intermingling of multiple cultures. Their identity is unfixed and ever changing.

The Concept of Identity

Today the question of identity has acquired increasing visibility and salience in recent years in social cultural theory as well as in a number of different fields of research in the social scientific, cultural studies and humanities. The concept of identity deployed in Ghosh’s works is not essentialist identity, but a strategic and positional one. It does not signal the stable care of the self unfolding from beginning to end through all the vicissitudes of history without change. Rather it accepts Hall’s idea about identity:

Identities are never unified and in late modern times, increasingly fragmented and fractured, never singular, but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices and position. They are subject to a radical historicization and are constantly in process of change and transformation. (Hall 4)

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

Sonia, M.A, NET, Ph.D. Research Scholar
Department of English &Foreign Languages
M D U Rohtak 124001
Haryana
India
soniaphougat8@gmail.com
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