Tracing the Footprints on Water: A Study of Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy
Amitav Ghosh seeks to construct an alternative historiography by situating his novels away from the mainland. Ghosh’s engagement with the oceanic world is not an attempt just to trace the colonial expansion, displacement and migration of people across the continents but also to reconfigure the contestatory nature of a monolithic organization. The fictional representation of marine water is informed by Ghosh’s near-obsessive concern with the interpolation of culture, dismantling of borders, and the malleable nature of identity. This paper seeks to focus primarily on Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy to recuperate the buried history of migration and displacement caused by colonial expansion. Ghosh explores the interrogative potentiality of aquatic journey that paves the way for the formation of new kinds of identity-based on shared and lived experiences. Sea of Poppies, the first of the Ibis trilogy traverses large geographical space to trace the expansionist trade route of European powers ruling over the vast aquatic world. In his Ibis trilogy, Ghosh shows how ocean, generally feared as something that robs people of their basic identity as pure, can offer momentary recluse from the boundaries of caste, even race. The motley group of passengers—ranging from convicts to deposed zaminder—are ferried across the Indian Ocean to work as indentured labourers, and this varied group forms identity based on their common experience. Ghosh contests the ubiquitous nature of borders as reinforced through a number of mechanisms employed or made to work on land by shifting the focus towards the sea. This paper will attempt to problematize the discourses surrounding the marine experience prized as the champion of European power. The paper will further explore the ‘contact zones’ unleashed by the ocean that offers a meeting point for the diverse groups of people and the re-formation of their identity. Ghosh’s recuperation of the history of the marginalized as done through the tracing of footprints dissolved in water subvert the story of victory attached with the European maneuvering of ocean.
