Amitav Ghosh: A Novelist of Excellence

Amitav Ghosh is such a novelist who has a rare talent of presenting what is generally known as non – fiction as a fictional art. Non – fictional works have a great deal of influence as well as inspiration on Ghosh’s fiction. Ghosh, a globe trotter, has been to many parts of the world. Most of his novels and works are transformed travelogues. All these experiences and memories provide him the raw material fictional works. All writers, all artistes, are involved in the quest to read and / or construct our importance in (and to) an infinite universe in which we are but accidental specks, infinitesimal creatures struggling with, and controlled by, our genetic inheritances. We need to narrativise our parasitical, seemingly irrelevant existence in order to salvage any dignity at all. Amitav Ghosh is most of all involved in this quest for narrative significance, in trying to find a place for himself and other human beings in the universe, and thus to re-order it. This quest is expressed less in philosophical terms and more in political and social terms.