The tension between a local dimension and a more cosmopolitan one has become increasingly crucial in Amitav Ghosh’s writing. Whereas his earlier works, such as In an Antique Land, tended towards what was defined as a “subaltern cosmopolitanism” (Hawley 2005; Grewal 2007), more recent novels show attention for a local dimension as well: Bengal. In Bengali cultural tradition, nationalism and cosmopolitanism have always been at the centre of poetic reflection. The influence of this cultural and artistic tradition on Ghosh’s works can hardly be overestimated. Therefore, an examination of how nationalism and cosmopolitanism were dealt with by Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray will contribute to the full understanding of Ghosh’s work. In particular, this paper will demonstrate how Amitav Ghosh, despite his increased focus on the local, does not embrace nationalism, as Bankimchandra Chatterjee, but reproduces the situation of “ideological liminality” (Saha 2013: 21) between the local and the global that can be found in the works of Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray.
As the anglophone Indian novel exists in the in-between space between transnational and local cultures, it has repeatedly staged the encounter between a variety of cultural dimensions while remaining acutely aware of the way they interact with historical and political discourse. This essay examines four novels—Raja Rao’s Kanthapura, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Anita Desai’s In Custody and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide—that have conceived their narratives as a site of encounter between cultures in response to articulations of Indian national identity. The essay stresses the authors’ shared concerns but also the different formal solutions and ideological positions they adopt. Rao—a pre-Partition author—deals with otherness within a nationalist paradigm. Rushdie, Desai and Ghosh, on the other hand, tackle otherness in different modes that are dependent on their writing after Partition and in a climate of growing violence and fundamentalism.
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