novel

Consider Sea of Poppies as a historical novel Indian English novel writing shares a literary community. For instance, during 1930s, novelists like Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao and R K Narayan had ‘Gandhi’ as a shared literary, philosophical and cultural influence. Then post-independence period of novel writing portrays the partition fiction and subsequently the trauma. The decade of 1980s onwards, novels are exhibiting the political scenario of the nation either it is by Rohinton Mistry or novelists like Nayantara Sehgal and Sashi Tharoor. It is this very national dimension that bears thinking about to situate the Indian English novel in the last decade. This kind of study has become a virtual routine of historical and postcolonial studies. Sea of Poppies (2008) as a representative novel of the Indian subcontinent returns to a self-reflexive question about the nation. This becomes a question with chronological, metaphysical, religious, personal, political, aesthetic, historical and geographical dimensions and India emerges not just a theme but also as a point of discourse or what subaltern historian Ranjit Guha terms as “the small voice of history”. A novel is also a home to a diverse range of people, cultures, languages and religions. A shared cocern, recurrent theme and a shared body of knowledge embibes history and nation. These come together to shape Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008). The novel broadens the definition of what it is to have a history, crafting the space of diaspora as a third space, neither homeland nor metropole, but a place where a history of its own is unfolding.
“If history forgets, fiction can remind us of many things.” Amitav Ghosh Amitav Ghosh, one of the chief fiction writers of contemporary Indian English writing has mingled history in fiction in such a way that both not only look as inseparable entities but also work as complimentary of each other. In his narration of history he becomes fictional and in his each mnemonic effort of