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9 the Aquatic Ideal the House As Archive in Amitav Ghosh's Writings

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9 the Aquatic Ideal the House As Archive in Amitav Ghosh's Writings 9 The Aquatic Ideal The House as Archive in Amitav Ghosh’s Writings If Amit Chaudhuri’s novels loosely connect into one extended narrative of the complex interpellations organised through the agency of ‘home’, Amitav Ghosh’s writings – here I will mainly focus on The Shadow Lines (1988), with occasional glances at In An Antique Land (1992), The Calcutta Chromosome (1996), and The Hungry Tide (2004) – can be read as an ongoing archaeology of silence. Ghosh’s narrators are typically engaged in quests for suppressed histories hidden in the folds of overarching official historical accounts, and they come up with revisionist strategies that question “the dominance of one particular genre of historical narrative over all the others”.1 What, in Ghosh’s writing, is that one particular genre that dominates ‘all the others’? Further, what exactly are those ‘other’ genres, and how, if at all, does Ghosh recuperate them from the silence organised around them? Taking genre as a category that “embrace[s] all types of discourse, not only literary”,2 Ghosh’s plots of retrieval are structured in close affinity to the tripartite moves that give shape to what we have called the ‘critique of modernity’ text: the exposure of the universalist pretensions of the dominant; the recuperation of the silenced Other; and the claim to a heterogeneous, unified but uneven modernity. More than any other of the fiction writers discussed in this study, Ghosh addresses these issues in relatively direct engagements with the discursive regimes that ‘produce’ and regulate the “historical a prioris”3 – that is, the possibility or impossibility – of statements as discursive and articulatory events. The consultation of the archive – a regular topic in Ghosh’s texts – can therefore be read as a post-Foucauldian version of the sojourn into the ‘hidden abode of production’. 1 Guha, History at the Limit of World History, 49. 2 David Duff, “Intertextuality versus Genre Theory: Bakhtin, Kristeva and the Question of Genre”. Paragraph 25.1 (2002): 54—73; 58. 3 Michel Foucault [1969], The Archaeology of Knowledge. Tr. A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York & London (Routledge) 2004: 142. 230 Genres of Modernity My reading will trace Ghosh’s critique of the monopolistic archive of modernity, nationalism and the State, without, however, subscribing to the temptingly convincing notion that Ghosh’s agenda could be satisfactorily described as (merely) micropolitical. I will suggest that Ghosh’s archival endeavours, while devoted to the retrieval of some decentering and subversive “microstorias”,4 do not stop short at that point. It goes without saying that much of Gosh’s writing is concerned with a shift from the given grand narratives of nation and citizenship towards “the little stories of small places”, whose uncovering from “family chronicles and neighbourhood yarns”5 forms a leitmotif in Ghosh’s texts. Yet the ensuing discoveries invariably result in the reconstruction of fully fledged grand counter- narratives that contest the hegemonic discourse formations of nation, modernity, or postmodern cosmopolitanism. 9.1 Alternative archives In a well-known and frequently discussed passage in The Shadow Lines, Ghosh has his narrator find out about the monopoly and exclusiveness of the official archive and the concomitant suppression of any other form of recording: Searching for evidence of a 1964 riot in Calcutta which he himself had witnessed as a child, the narrator (at that point a Delhi University student in 1979) finds himself caught in “a struggle with silence”.6 Yet it is not that the riot in question had not been covered in the dailies. Far from it: The consultation of the neatly filed newspapers of the University Library retrieves, on the front page of the January 11 edition of an unnamed newspaper (should it have been the Times of India?), a “huge banner headline which said: Curfew in Calcutta, Police Open Fire, 10 dead, 15 wounded” (SL 224),7 and the editions of the subsequent days keep continuously reporting the gruesome events of communal violence in both West Bengal and East Pakistan. Why, given such coverage, should the narrator style himself as a researcher combatting an organised ‘silence’? Ghosh’s quasi- 4 Anjali Roy, “Microstoria: Indian Nationalism’s ‘Little Stories’ in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 35.2 (2000): 35—49, 35. 5 Anjali Gera, “Des Kothay? Amitav Ghosh Tells Old Wives Tales.” Amitav Ghosh: A Crtitical Companion. Ed. Tabish Khair. Delhi (Permanent Black) 2003:109—127; 110. 6 Ghosh, The Shadow Lines, 218. In the following, quotes in my own text with SL + page number. 7 It is striking that Anjali Roy should call this “a short report on the bottom of a back page mixed with cricket news and speech coverage” (Roy, “Microstoria”, 45). Such misreading obviously stems from the predication that Ghosh’s text were organised along a rigid binarism of official and microstorial/alternative archives when, in fact, The Shadow Lines no less than In an Antique Land emphasises the necessity of recuperating that which is buried and silenced within the hegemonic archive. .
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