Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh is an authoritative critical introduction to the fictional and non-fictional writings of one of the most celebrated and significant literary voices to have emerged from India in recent decades. It is the first full-length study of Amitav Ghosh’s work to be available outside India. Encompassing all of Ghosh’s fictional and non-fictional writings to date, this book takes a thematic approach which enables in-depth analysis of the cluster of themes, ideas and issues that Ghosh has steadily built up into a substantial intellectual project. This project overlaps significantly with many of the key debates in postcolonial studies and so this book is both an introduction to Ghosh’s writing and a contribution to the development of ideas on the ‘postcolonial’ - in particular, its relation to postmodernism. Placing his writing within the context of the development of Indian modernity and a modern Bengali vernacular tradition so as to enrich our understanding of the contexts that have shaped his work, this book argues that Amitav Ghosh’s exploration of the complex ambiguities of colonial and post-colonial relationships illuminates the ethical and political challenges of the post-colonial predicament. Amitav Ghosh is for students and teachers of postcolonial literatures in English at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and also those who share an interest in Ghosh’s intellectual project: historians, anthropologists, and political theorists concerned with South Asia, South-East Asia, and the Middle East.