Ibis Trilogy

English Language Teaching, how to discuss it the history of English teaching in India? How is our English? How do we read, pronounce and write it? Can a language be learnt by rote? Can a  language exist as a written language?  It is true that we like to carry it forward with grammatical exercises, phonetics and linguistics are not the talks of ours.

This article advances a conceptualization of the historical novel and addresses the genre's specificity via a reading of Amitav Ghosh's Ibis trilogy (2008–2015). To distinguish the historical novel from the trope of realism with which it is often thought to overlap, the article repurposes Georg Lukács's theorization of the genre via Marx's concept of “origin” (primitive accumulation) of the capitalist mode of production. Treating Ghosh's trilogy as an exemplary case, this article's reading focuses on how the text's formal attributes are central to its narration of colonial capitalism. The article concludes by suggesting that in narrating events from the standpoint of the surplus population produced by the capitalist mode of production, Ghosh is confronted with the limits of the novel form.

This research seeks to analyse Amitav Gosh’s novel Sea of Poppies in order to explore the sociolinguistic strategy of code-switching with respect to its various types. The term 'code-switching' denotes the connection of elements from multilingual interaction. This phenomenon has been approached by various sociolinguists, linguists, anthropologists and sociologists. It refers to mixing between various languages to a certain extent that confuses the traditional sociolinguistic conventions. The study also focuses on the close ties between various languages and their strong impact on structure of Standard English as manifested in the selected text. The research is qualitative and descriptive, and the data has been taken from the textual conversations and dialogues of various characters of the novel. It attempts to classify code-switching into its different types exemplified by the selected data. This research attempts to highlight the variety of English language used in the lite...

A humorous telling of an encounter between a South Indian villager Muni, and an American enterpriser, who Narayan simply refers to as the "American". What ensues is the characters endeavouring to strike a mutually accepted signifier and failing, leading to a clash of signs, meanings, narratives, and understanding-enabling a double discourse of parallel meanings that never quite converge. The paper attempts to understand the geopolitics and cultural signifiers at play, that contribute to the misunderstanding, and Narayan's stroke of genius in his humor.

This essay begins with a critique of several arguments against the possibility of cosmopolitan thought and practice, and therefore, of a “cosmopolitan identity”.
In the first part, it takes as a historical example various aspects of the cosmopolitanism of European Jews: was it real or imagined by antisemitic, xenophobic and nationalist citizens of Europe to justify exclusion and persecution? Was it forced upon these people by the oppression they suffered in the diaspora, or was it deliberate (and idealistic/utopian)?
The second and third parts study several manners of constructing cosmopolitan characters and collective cosmopolitan identities in literary fiction, first with the figure of Casanova, then through a detailed analysis of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Enchantress of Florence.
Some close readings lead us back to European Jews from the Middle Ages to the 18th century, with the legend of the Jewess of Toledo and its many rewritings.
Amitav Ghosh’s oeuvre and particularly his Ibis Trilogy introduce us to the represented fullness of a cosmopolitan world in the guise of a historical fiction situated grossly in the mid-19th century. But can this elaborate geographical, linguistic and symbolic construction, full of extraordinary personalities and unusual encounters, constitute a paradigm for a viable cosmopolitanism today?
The answer partly depends on what we mean by “narrative identity,” self-othering and the relational nature of selves in formation. But, in any case, literature and art can help because of their anaphoric character and the open-endedness of time in the aesthetic experience.
KEYWORDS
Cosmopolitanism - Diaspora - Jews - Multilingualism - Narrative Identity - Nomadism - Casanova - Salman Rushdie - Amitav Ghosh

This article examines the invention, dissemination and politicization of a certain variety of polyglot prose by contemporary Indian English writers as offering a philosophical challenge to the hegemony of the British Anglophone world, revisiting and rewriting the power equations that have prevailed between these worlds from the era of colonialism to the present. The article identifies this prose as 'Inglish', which demarcates it from standard English for the way it places India and its regional languages at its centre. The broad references to R. K. Narayan (from an earlier generation) and Salman Rushdie and Upamanyu Chatterjee (from current writing) seek to survey the various ways in which this prose has been utilized across time, but the particular focus of this article remains Amitav Ghosh's most recent novels, Sea of Poppies (2008) and River of Smoke (2011), which are both mostly set in the 19 th century. Using the 19 th -century setting to reflect on real time, Ghosh's novels manipulate language to wield it as an index and reflection of the power equations between nations whose relations have evolved with changing global politics. The novels also provide a range of competent deliberations on current and future linguistic mutations, commenting on the strengthening of links between India and its diasporas in the contemporary era. In particular, this article seeks to illustrate how Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke question and displace the hegemony of a global 'north' in favour of an emergent but stronger 'south-south' cooperation that leads to the construction of an 'alternate' hegemony that is less led by political and economic dominance and more 'integral' in its nature.