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Abhinaba Chatterjee
M. Phil (DU)

Voicing the Subalterns to Modernity:

A study of select novels of Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh is widely acclaimed for his major novels in which he has expressed

his concerns for the downtrodden people of the Indian society. In his major novels,

Amitav Ghosh’s sympathetic attitude towards the subaltern can be perceived. The issue

of subaltern in his works is to be studied in two manners: first the concept of subaltern as

a pretentious exercise, a kind of parallel exercise that existed during the colonial period

but never taken note of, as meant by Subaltern Study Group. Ghosh, in his works, talks

about the alternative histories and practices of people. Secondly, subaltern as an

approach that represent marginalized people and their issues.

Ghosh’s ‘grafting’ of the subaltern historical method into the fictional has been so

enthusiastically received by critics that it is impossible to find an essay or a commentary

that does not replicate in critical practice what Ghosh does in the creative. Ghosh’s

declaration that he is not writing the ‘19th century dynastic European novel form’ but a

‘contemporary memoir’, ‘a project in chronicling a family history’ has been echoed by

critics who re-presented it as a fictional practice tacitly set against subaltern theoretical

assumptions. This is apparent in critics developing interpretations based on the novels’

interest in the lives of ‘ordinary people’, a ‘more genuinely human experience’ and an

‘alternative history’. It also appears in a more sophisticated version of subaltern practice

that identifies a discussive basis in the vernacular, identified as the ‘other’ archive that is

‘grafted’ on the European novel form and haunts it. Bishnupriya Ghosh demonstrates
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that in The Calcutta Chromosome, two Indian language texts by Rabindranath Tagore

and Phanishwarnath Renu, are embedded in a combination of ‘ghosting’ and ‘grafting’.

The distinguished critic of subaltern is Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, whose pivotal

line is fully pertinent – Can the subaltern speak? – suggests that silence is the critical

characteristic of the subaltern identity. Ghosh’s works strongly confirm to the notion that

the subaltern can speak in contrast to Spivak’s concept of “subaltern cannot speak”, if

given a proper change and with an appropriate employment of discourse. Ghosh

purposefully brings subaltern characters into stories and focuses on personal histories of

these individuals. The marginalized characters help us perceive life, events and issues

from their point of view. B.K. Sharma stated, “Ghosh’s major concern ...is to universalize

subaltern history. These subaltern figures therefore are made the real heroes by their

sheer power of resistance to unbearable odds and adversities and rise to the status of

real makers of history.” Ghosh demystifies the image of the colonial subject as a naive

uncultured individual in desperate need of Western enlightenment and guidance. This is

illustrated in The Calcutta Chromosome, where the renowned Sir Ronald Ross is

miraculously led to the discovery of the malaria vaccine by a secret society of subaltern

‘researchers’. Through the thick fabric of a science fiction narrative, Ghosh unravels a

story of scientific knowledge in which traditional roles are shifted, with official authority

acting as a mere instrument in the subaltern’s hands. Accordingly, the possibility of

accessing research objects through pure knowledge is revealed as an illusion under the

premise that “in knowing something, you’ve already changed what you think you know

so you don’t really know it at all; you only know its history.”
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The merit of The Calcutta Chromosome resides in its multi-layered nature. Taking

the structure and plotting of a science-fiction novel as a basis, the author questions

again the identification of knowledge and science through the fictive recreation of a

‘counter science’, whereby the civil service scientist Ronald Ross is conducted

throughout his research by the subaltern Other. Again, the omniscient angle usually

reserved for the scholar is moved to marginality and the natives Laakhan and Mangala

are raised to positions of power as manipulators of knowledge. In this sense, Suchitra

Mathur describes The Calcutta Chromosome as a “postcolonial science fiction that

provides a re-visioning of science not only through an active blurring of the lines between

science, social science and fiction, but also by elaborating the contours of a ‘counter

science’ that offers a fundamental epistemological challenge to the dominant discourse

of science.”

Ghosh manages to elude the easy dichotomy between science and magic,

associated respectively with the Western and Eastern breach, by devising a plot in which

the final results of scientific research are directed and produced by the subaltern. Tabish

Khair has also highlighted the issue of subaltern agency in The Calcutta Chromosome

as one of its essential constituents: “Such an intricate plot insists on not only the

comprehensibility and agency of the subaltern, it also dismisses arbitrary and essentialist

dichotomy between the West and India.” For Khair, agency allows the subaltern to regain

his silenced role in the narrative of history, “for history can be seen as the plotting of

human experience and agency.”

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In The Hungry Tide, Ghosh defines the space of home in relation to the global

village. This novel summarises the events at Morichjhapi in 1979 and the subaltern

consciousness that Nirmal finds in therein. He not only emphasizes with the world but

also identifies with the refugees, as he understands the universal yearning of the

wretched of the earth, the millions without a home.

In this respect, Homi Bhabha emphasizes the importance of relation of social

power in his working definition of subaltern groups as oppressed minority groups whose

presence was vital to the self-definition of the majority group: subaltern social group

were also in position to subvert the authority of those who had hegemonic power.

In the novel, Nirmal’s diary entries recounting Morichjhapi and the plight of Fokir’s

mother Kusum, serves as true reality of the Sunderbans. The refugees fought for

survival. They became the victims of Morichjhapi after the water and food supplies were

cut off to the islands to coerce the refugees to flee. The question of rootlessness and

deprived classes who are the subaltern agencies, sit there helpless and listen to the

policemen making their announcements. They say that their lives and their experience

are not worth that dirt and dust.

Silence indeed is what interests the subaltern method – the silence of the

subaltern against the mainstream; the silence of the subaltern material and person that

urges articulation by a spokesperson; and the fictional method that draws on this

essential silence of the subaltern material as it structures itself around a repressed or

silent ‘point of beginning’. Ghosh has, in fact, transformed the subaltern method of

focusing and subverting with the help of the marginal into a fictional method where the
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recovery of the repressed primal scenes (the death of Tridib, the massacres and the long

march from Burma) also facilitate critique of subaltern practice. Many of the essays in

the ‘Subaltern Studies’ volumes focus on an incident of resistance from the past that was

erased from the mainstream history. Ghosh’s own essay on the slave of MS6 is a good

example of how the finding of a tiny, ostensibly insignificant fragment of history can

transform an entire period and shift it out of earlier modes of interpretation – finding the

busy exchanges between Egypt and India, long before the European discovery of these

worlds. But, as he takes this approach into the novels, he also initiates a further shift,

adapting the subaltern method of retrieving the historically repressed as a model for the

fiction where the repressed now becomes the point of origin for the novel.

However, I suggest that Ghosh, by retrieving and giving place/ voice to the

historically repressed event in the fiction, achieves a swerve from simply ‘righting the

record’ and releases the marginal as a referent in the present. For example, the

communal riots of the past are replicated in the animosities of the present: the riot in The

Shadow Lines during which Tridib is killed along with Jethamoshai and the

rickshawpuller offers a comment on the many instances of communal violences that has

marked the story of modern India; the massacre in The Hungry Tide refers the reader to

the disturbing ‘real’ presence of the illegal migrants from Bangladesh in different parts of

India, especially in the border states and the anger she provokes that may result in an

incident like the Nellie massacre in Assam in 1983; the long march from Burma and

Ghosh’s sympathetic representation of that country, and its people in The Glass Palace

is seen conjunction with its present where it is caught between the military junta, the
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democracy movement and the opinion of the international community. Such fiction

enters the realm of intervention in public discourse, or carries the potential, by

introducing considerations that create public consciousness about historical injustices.

By introducing new material in the field, the novels play these off against their historical

erasure but also against existing notions about these in the places of their occurrence or

arrival.

The Ghosh text offers these options by challenging itself with what it means to

represent the marginal and hitherto repressed and what constitutes subaltern speech.

And Ghosh undertakes this critique by selecting material that has overt subaltern

possibilities but also points the reader to that which this material itself silences. I argue

that this happens in Ghosh’s deliberate choice of the kind of material that has multiple

subaltern locations and trajectories. Such focus on the historical material deliberately

selected, juxtaposes what the novels contain as subaltern history and that which they

elide and which becomes visible only when the novels arrive in the darkened locations of

the other side and jostle for space with texts that tell an alternative story. There is a tacit

play here between the place of creation which, in the case of all three novels – The

Shadow Lines, The Hungry Tide and The Glass Palace – is the area in an around

Bengal demarcated by the subaltern studies collective, and the place where the novel

also arrives that is ‘other’ in having its own history of the same event. I am, in this

instance, also gesturing towards a voicing achieved by a specific location that may have

been marginal in India’s history as much as in subaltern history (as Assam is) – and it is

a participation of this location in the novel’s critique that sends new material into the field.
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These locations, that I call the ‘subaltern’s repressed’, by presenting alternative

interpretations of marginal history, invite intervention. This process works not against the

reader, who might accuse the text of being unaware but by sharing with or allowing the

participation of the reader who has knowledge of what the text elides. The rationale for

retrieval of these deliberate erasures is embedded in the text as much through erasures

as through tropes of silence that the novels show as versions of subaltern speaking. This

practice, though, has been read by critics as “an inadequacy of language to represent

emotion and the encounter with the other” (Huttenen), “humanism transcending

discourse” (Dixon) and “a postmodern recognition of difference” (Mondol).

Ghosh exudes a keen understanding of the political, sociological, historical and

cultural moorings of his subject with an eye of an anthropologist focussing on history.

Here is a thinker hailing from the discipline of anthropology and literature who revisits

past through his literary critical skills and begin a chain of intertextual interpretations o

those events from the past. He focuses on ideological tensions, contradictions within the

dominant power formations. It is not possible to study literature, as a criticism of life,

without such a holistic vision. Various positions taken by Amitav Ghosh and innovative

techniques through which he integrates history in literature land a deep insight into what

lay in human development before now.