This paper intends to trace out those functions of the British colonization, specially the opium trade run by the East India Company that constructed the socio-economic life of India and Canton, and how they are responsible for all these enigma of border crossings found in Ibis trilogy.ĭOI: 10.22161/ijels.51. Almost all the characters of the trilogy are diasporic, who undertake voluntary or forcible movement from their homelands into new regions, are revealed to be somehow connected with the colonization. Along with these effects, they also share some common grounds, an influential concern, the British colonization as well as the role of East India Company. The merchants, the sailors, or the trading company agents, who crosses the ‘black water’ out of their own interests, share some common experiences of homesickness, anxiety, anguish and adversity with those of the unwilling overseas transporters like the coolies and convicts. Diaspora and enigma of crossing the ‘shadow lines’, the geographical boundaries between countries and continents, find room in the trilogy which is a common feature of Ghosh. Keywords: Diaspora, Indentured Labor, Adversity, Anguish, Colonization.Ībstract: The Ibis trilogy of Amitav Ghosh, which comprises three historical fictions, Sea of Poppies(2008), River of Smoke(2011), and Flood of Fire(2015), is a documentary of the opium trade between India and China and the trafficking of people as indentured labors by the East India Company during mid nineteenth century.
Demonstrates how Ghoshs Ibis trilogy records the changing notions of. However, it concludes that overall Ghosh remains a historiographical torchbearer who over much of his career has explored the past connections and convergences of the Indian Ocean world well ahead of the academic curve.Vol-5,Issue-1,January - February 2020 Author: Tasnim Amin Contributes to the latest debates in postcolonial thought and globalization studies. It suggests that one weakness of Ghosh’s first installment in the Ibis Trilogy is his failure to read Victorian primary sources with a sufficiently critical eye. In addition, this essay addresses Ghosh’s credentials as a historian who tackles broader historiographical concerns by comparing his depiction of the British imperial trades in indentured labor and opium with the arguments made by certain revisionist historians. It argues that the standout features of these novels are Ghosh’s re-creations of historical spaces and historical languages, both of which provide invaluable insights for scholars and students, who rarely have the available time and resources to recover the same degree of microscopic detail.
This response to Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy examines the scholarly merits of these novels as works of microhistory, in which the author’s devotion to what we might term “thick description” (following the anthropologist Clifford Geertz) produces numerous fresh understandings.
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