The Politics of Language and Memory: Decolonization in the Fiction of Amitav Ghosh

Abstract

This paper argues that Amitav Ghosh's fiction enacts a decolonizing practice through two interlocking modalities: (1) the politics of language as his sustained creolization of English and foregrounding of multilingual contact zones and (2) the politics of memory as his construction of counter-archives that unsettle imperial historiography. Across The Shadow Lines (1988), The Hungry Tide (2004), the Ibis trilogy (Sea of Poppies, 2008; River of Smoke, 2011; Flood of Fire, 2015), and Gun Island (2019), Ghosh reimagines the Indian Ocean world as a polyphonic space where personal recollection, vernacular speech, and subaltern testimony reassemble histories fragmented by colonialism and the nation-state. Researcher coins four analytic lenses, such as vernacularization as a method, creolized narration, tidal memory, and the counter-maritime archive, to show how Ghosh's narrative forms, dictional strategies, and memory-work reframe sovereignty, belonging, and ecological vulnerability beyond imperial and nationalist frames. The paper demonstrates that Ghosh's decolonizing project lies less in thematic denunciation than in formal and linguistic innovations that restore the opacity, plurality, and mobility of colonized lives.