He brings together the destinies of migrants of the first-wave of the Indian diaspora. I contend that in Sea of Poppies (2008), he sets out to undertake a similar task as he focuses on Indian indentured labour. Chambers points out that the novel is peopled with faceless migrants going to Egypt hoping for a better life, and argues that Ghosh subverts the picaresque to expose globalisation (36). Building upon Claire Chambers’s analysis of Ghosh’s first novel, The Circle of Reason (1981), I will focus on the motif of the journey as associated with labour. His diasporic characters are a lens to expose the world’s globalisation and cosmopolitanism. In The Shadow Lines (1988), characters travel between England and India, and between India and Pakistan in The Hungry Tide (2004), they explore the Sundarbans Rivers. His writing focuses on interstitial spaces where characters travel, and the topos of the journey prevails in his fiction. The narrative open (.)ġ Amitav Ghosh, like other writers such as Bharati Mukherjee and Jhumpa Lahiri, is part of what Elleke Boehmer calls “migrant literature” (11).
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