History in Amitav Ghosh’s works is not only a narrative of historical events but also a means of establishing an interconnection between the historical events and the ordinary individuals living during the times. The individual is hit by a historical impact and his story needs narration as much as to the country he belongs. Amitav Ghosh tries to reject the traditional mode of writing history and presents largely a re-visiting and a re-examination of history. Therefore it becomes necessary to understand how Ghosh uses facts and fiction in his writings. He presents the past of the nation as a subject matter that belongs to one and all – the aristocratic and the common people, the rulers and the ruled alike. Ghosh therefore displays the traumatic …show more content…
The narrator in The Shadow Lines presents unpleasant effects of nationalism through his grandmother, who initially supports nationalist ideology, but later turns against it after Tridib’s death in the riots. Hence Ghosh re-examines nationalism through a projection of post-independence loss of faith in nationalism springing from experiences of Partition, migration and displacement. Ghosh’s postcolonial re-interpretation of the past also reflects or asserts a postmodernist disbelief in traditional history, an indispensible characteristic of re-inventing of history. Post-modernist school of history challenges traditional history and its grand narratives, as one that is too imperfect and …show more content…
They are equally mindful of the need to fight against imposing rule of the British government as their historical counterparts. Patriotism in his protagonists does emerge very distinctly. His central character is an ordinary man who wants to make his presence felt, his voice heard. Ghosh’s sturdy assurance that nationalism also burns in the heart and spirit of unhistorical figures makes him give voice to their patriotic zeal. Hence his greatest and utmost concern in including history into his works of fiction is to bring to the fore ordinary individuals, who search for examples to create history for themselves. Refusing to allow his individuality to be inundated in the surge of history the ordinary citizen of a nation attempts to carve a place for himself in the period of history. Thus Ghosh’s novels re-create the ordinary citizen as a distorted and transgressed
Cody Blunt’s piece titled The Master of Shadows represents the assassin, Zed. This art piece was created in 2013 for the company Riot Games as the digital concept art for the character Zed. This piece can be found displayed as a representation of the character in their popular multiplayer online battle arena, League of Legends. In The Master of Shadows, Cody Blunt uses complementary colors, value, saturation, tenebrism, shape, and a small variety of different lines to capture the resting energy of Zed and provides a serene and mysterious interpretation of a lifeless city.
There is always a problem of historical inaccuracies in fiction. When certain historical events become a part of the narrative (especially when these events are controversial), it is important to understand what they mean in the author’s conception of history and reality in general. Far more important is to understand their place in this conception when we see that the author’s depiction of facts is unusual and what he does seems to be not the reflection of existing reality but the deconstruction of a different one. Terrorism, civil war, separatism – it is hard to remember the themes that would be more complicated and controversial in the modern world, because questions like these never have a certain answer. Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost is a good example of a novel that deals with the most important problems of contemporary history.
Step 1: Place the stick or branch into the ground at a level spot where it will cast a distinctive shadow. Mark the shadow's tip with a stone, twig, or other means. This first shadow mark is always west--everywhere on earth.
According to Lionel Trilling, novel is a perpetual quest for reality and one of the most effective agents of our imagination. The Indian novel in English has now become an integral part of Indian English. In between 1920 and 1950’s the themes in Indian English Novels were mostly depicted on national movements for political independence. After Independence most of the Indian English Novelists shifted their focus from nationalistic zeal to find new themes and portray them. They began to delineate from their works and set about for the individual’s quest for the ‘self’.
Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children employs strategies which engage in an exploration of History, Nationalism and Hybridity. This essay will examine three passages from the novel which demonstrate these issues. Furthermore, it will explore why each passage is a good demonstration of these issues, how these issues apply to India in the novel, and how the novel critiques these concepts.
A Nation Represents Itself in its literary heroes and villains. Discuss this idea with reference to one text. Heroes and villains in texts are often used to represent certain aspects and values of the nation they are associated with. The book ‘Things Fall Apart’ by Chinua Achebe represents Great Britain through its literary heroes and villains as a powerful force that imposes its beliefs on foreign cultures. The purpose of ‘Things Fall Apart’ is to reveal a more realistic version of the effects of colonisation in Africa in which the people of Africa suffered greatly, this suffering was accentuated by the racist views of the British towards the tribal Black people in Africa.
In this novel Ghosh says about the history of morichjapi settlers, which is considered by many critics as the study of “anthropomorphological study of migration, movement and settlement”. In Amitav Ghosh’s novel the setting plays an important role. Here in this novel “The Hungry Tide”, Sundarbans is a vast archipelago largely covered by mangrove and there are many small villages which are covered by seas. It is very difficult to live in such a place. Ghosh is amazing in the knowledge of anthropology, ecosystem of Sundarbans in his novel “The Hungry Tide”.
Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956. He is one of the leading Indian writers in English who interweaves nature with experience and history. His works show an interaction between nature and human. He has published many fictions such as The Circle of Reason (1986), The Shadow Lines (1988), In An...
Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, published in 1980, was perhaps the seminal text in conceiving opinions as to interplay of post-modern and post-colonial theory. The title of the novel refers to the birth of Saleem Sinai, the novel’s principal narrator, who is born at midnight August 15th 1947, the precise date of Indian independence. From this remarkable coincidence we are immediately drawn to the conclusion that the novel’s concerns are of the new India, and how someone born into this new state of the ‘Midnight’s child’, if you will, interacts with this post-colonial state. To characterise the novel as one merely concerned with post-colonial India, and its various machinations, is however a reductive practice. While the novel does at various times deal with what it is to be Indian, both pre and post 1947, it is a much more layered and interesting piece of work. Midnight’s Children’s popularity is such that it was to be voted 25th in a poll conducted by the Guardian, listing the 100 best books of the last century, and was also to receive the Booker Prize in 1981 and the coveted ‘Booker of Bookers’ in 1993. http://www.bookerprize.co.uk/
Rohinton Mistry’s “Such A Long Journey” is the story of turbulent life of Gustad Noble and his family, who lives in Khodadad Building north of Bombay. The story portrays the series of events such as his son Sohrab’s refusal to attend Indian Institution of Technology, hardships faced by his friends and family, political turmoil and chaos caused by the war between India and Pakistan. Gustad transforms from a stubborn, materialistic and awful person to an open-minded and more adaptive to circumstantial changes in his life. Ultimately, Gustad Noble journeys to a greater understanding of his role as a father, friend and citizen of India.
“The subaltern studies is certainly related to south Asia history, as Gramsci was related to Italy, its theoretical position, of studying how the continuity of supposedly pre-political insurgency brings culture to crisis and confronts power would make post-colonial studies more conventionally political. One major difference is that the disciplinary connection of post-colonial studies is to literary criticism rather than history and the social science. Subaltern studies has not pursed oral history as unmediated narrative, and its investigation and testimony have generally confined themselves to legal
“The only people for whom we can even begin to imagine properly human, individual, existences are the literate and the consequential, the wazirs and the sultans, the chroniclers, and the priests—the people who had the power to inscribe themselves physically upon time” (Ghosh 17). History is written by the victorious, influential and powerful; however, history has forgotten the people whose voices were seized, those who were illiterate and ineloquent, and most importantly those who were oppressed by the institution of casted societies. Because history does not document those voices, it is the duty to the anthropologist, the historiographer, the philosopher as well as scholars in other fields of studies to dig for those lost people in the forgotten realm of time. In In An Antique Land, the footnotes of letters reveal critical information for the main character, which thematically expresses that under the surface of history is something more than the world can fathom.
Postcolonial authors use their literature and poetry to solidify, through criticism and celebration, an emerging national identity, which they have taken on the responsibility of representing. Surely, the reevaluation of national identity is an eventual and essential result of a country gaining independence from a colonial power, or a country emerging from a fledgling settler colony. However, to claim to be representative of that entire identity is a huge undertaking for an author trying to convey a postcolonial message. Each nation, province, island, state, neighborhood and individual is its own unique amalgamation of history, culture, language and tradition. Only by understanding and embracing the idea of cultural hybridity when attempting to explore the concept of national identity can any one individual, or nation, truly hope to understand or communicate the lasting effects of the colonial process.
There are people bustling, merchants selling, Anglo-Indians watching, and birds flying overhead. How many perspectives are there in this one snippet of life? They are uncountable, and that is the reality. Modernist writers strive to emulate this type of reality into their own work as well. In such novels, there is a tendency to lack a chronological or even logical narrative and there are also frequent breaks in narratives where the perspectives jump from one to another without warning. Because there are many points of view and not all of them are explained, therefore, modernist novels often tend to have narrative perspectives that suddenly shift or cause confusion. This is because modernism has always been an experimental form of literature that lacks a traditional narrative or a set, rigid structure. Therefore, E. M. Forster, author of A Passage to India, uses such techniques to portray the true nature of reality. The conflict between Adela, a young British girl, and Aziz, an Indian doctor, at the Marabar Caves is one that implements multiple modernist ideals and is placed in British-India. In this novel, Forster shows the relations and tension between the British and the Indians through a series of events that were all caused by the confusing effects of modernism. E.M. Forster implements such literary techniques to express the importance or insignificance of a situation and to emphasize an impression of realism and enigma in Chandrapore, India, in which Forster’s novel, A Passage to India, takes place.
Rabindranath himself has confessed: “I took a few steps down the road, and then stopped”. With the chaotic and negative expressions of Indian struggle for independence that generated hatred towards the British in particular, paving way for an abhorrence against the Occident in general, along with the obvious impacts of the World War, Tagore in post-1917 emerged out as the critique of the modern idea of nation/ nation-state which was central to the aspiration of nationalism, sharing the common suspicion that one might find in Romain Rolland and Albert Einstein. In his book Nationalism, published in 1917, Tagore, along with criticising the “organizing selfishness of Nationalism” in the West, even criticised the Indian nationalists’ replication of this alien concept of nationalism, for according to him, “India never had a real sense of nationalism”: India’s reverence for ‘God’ and ‘the ideal of ‘humanity’ should not get replaced by the European concept of a limited ‘national identity’. The Indians felt betrayed by his anti-nationalism in such an extent that even poets like Satyen Datta mocked him in one of his