Anthropology in the Writing: Amitav Ghosh’s Craft of the Novel

Amitav Ghosh is a prominent figure of Indian Writing in English, but also of diasporic writing. In The Vintage Book of Indian Writing, Salman Rushdie appraises his work: ‘Amitav Ghosh’s most impressive achievement to date is the non-fiction study of India and Egypt, In An Antique Land. It may be (or it may not) that his greatest strength will turn out to be as an essayist of this sort’ (Rushdie 1997: xxii). But Ghosh has proved that he is more that an essayist. His voice is also heard through his many novels. In this regard, what makes Ghosh unique is his training as an anthropologist. His writing is then diffracted through the prism of research. This paper will show how anthropology sifts through his writing. Ghosh turns the novel into a document, an archive. In this study, In an Antique Land will help delineate the method of the novelist/anthropologist. Relying on Foucault’s appreciation of the document as the raw material to make sense of History (Foucault 1969), the analysis will scrutinize the novels as a piece of archive, focusing on the way Ghosh opens the genre—in the manner described by Bakhtin with the different speech genres. The study will thus analyze the way drama, painting but also films are interwoven in the fabric of the novels to illustrate how Ghosh combines his former life to his new.