Cultural and Historical Identity in Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke: A Postcolonial Perspective

Abstract

Amitav Ghosh is a prominent writer of present times. In his writings, Ghosh deals with the effects of colonialism on contemporary societies and cultures. By depicting the modern postcolonial situation, he problematizes the dominant discourse of culture and history. My paper proposes to examine and explore the cultural and historical identity in River of Smoke from the perspective of postcolonialism. He is considered an iconic figure in English Literature owing to his singular and unorthodox perception of history. Historical identity is a reservoir of past events and incidents. One of those historical incidents is the Opium War (1839-42), which has been dealt extensively by Amitav Ghosh in River of Smoke (2011) in sequential manner. In his fiction, Ghosh meticulously deals with many things:  the troubled legacy of colonial knowledge and discourse about formerly colonized societies and ideas, the ambivalent relationship to modernity of the so-called developing or ‘Third World’, and the formation and reformation of identities in colonial and post-colonial societies. The main purpose of this research paper is to examine in detail about the postcolonial traits with specific reference to the Indian diaspora.