Histories of the Indian Ocean: Perspectives on Historiography and Fiction in Amitav Ghosh's "Sea of Poppies" and "River of Smoke"

Abstract English Version Among the literary production of the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh, the latest novels (Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke) constitute a sort of summa literaria that brings together this author's two souls: that of the writer and that of the historiographer. The novels, part of the announced Ibis Trilogy, collect and develop this author's thought, which sees fiction-writing as a necessary complement to historiography, within an interdisciplinary vision of the knowledge of the past and of history-writing. Ghosh, as a novelist, has proved to be particularly concerned about the practice of research and about the analysis of the historical sources. Moreover, the concern about history is one of the principal topics of the contemporary Indian fiction. On the one hand, it is related to the critique of the eurocentric historical thought, especially with regard to the Indian experience; on the other hand, it is bound to the topic of language as metahistory, since language is seen as a symbol of a particular Weltanschaaung which obviously influences the writing of the past. The academic debate on the relationships between historiography and fiction writing has been subjected to an unprecedented revolution ever since Hayden White's works and the theories of a series of philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Paul Ricoeur. On the one hand, these works have highlighted the provisional and subjective character of the historiographical practice; on the other hand, they have brought to the forefront the centrality of the narrative element in this kind of writing. By doing so, they have distanced history as a discipline from the typical objectivity of science, defining it as a practice whose task is to map the relationships between the real and the imaginary. Given these premises, the analysis focuses first on Ghosh's literary production in general, tracing the emergence of a kind of hybrid writing, in-between historiography and fiction, which goes under the name of ´fictional history`. The essential characteristics of this aesthetics are a series of ´strategies`; the first one is the critique of the concept of the nation-state, a pervasive metaphor used by the Western science, whose deconstruction serves Ghosh as a means to propose alternative definitions of cultural belonging, and to formulate a new kind of humanism of the postmodern era. Second, Ghosh chooses the individual and the individual experience, the subalterns' one in particular, as the core of history; third, he introduces the use of imagination with precision as the essential tool for an imaginative writing of history. The second part of the analysis regards the two already published novels of the Ibis Trilogy. The analysis of Sea of Poppies focuses on the individuality of the characters, described in the novel both as examples of an inescapable cultural difference, and as symbols of a plural humanity which challenges the canonical borders between cultures, introducing a view of the human experience as a process of movement and negotiation. In River of Smoke, the analysis focuses essentially on the critique of the form of the modern historical novel; Ghosh starts from this tradition and reinvents it, deconstructing its essential categories, in order to propose a new type of historical novel of postmodernity. In both novels, moreover, the importance of the linguistic research is highlighted as a central feature of this author's production; once again, Ghosh deconstructs the form of the English language from within, in the light of the experiences of colonization and globalization. Finally, a short outlook analyses Amitav Ghosh's blog, which is interpreted as a sort of digital archive that ´opens up` the normally ´closed` form of the novel and, once again, proposes a vision of fiction-writing as a practice ´beyond the borders` of forms, genres and disciplines.