The document summarizes a research paper presented by I. Angeline Priya on the narrative techniques and paradigm shifts in selected novels of Indian author Amitav Ghosh. It discusses Ghosh's background and major works, and analyzes how he uses nonlinear and experimental narrative forms to explore postcolonial themes like history, identity, and cultural interactions across borders. The research examines specific novels like The Shadow Lines, The Circle of Reason, and The Calcutta Chromosome to show how Ghosh challenges conventional storytelling through magical realism, embedded narratives, and blending of different time periods.

1. Name of the Scholar: I. Angeline Priya 11227
Discipline : English Literature
Title: “Narrative Technique and Paradigm Shift in Select Novels of
Amitav Ghosh”.
Date: 06/03/2020 Venue: Research department of English
St. Mary’s College (Autonomous),
Thoothukudi.
Name of the Supervisor Name of the Examiner
Dr. L.A.Emmanuel Catherine Dr. K. Ravichandran
Associate Professor(RTD) Associate Professor
Department of English Department of English
St. Mary’s College (Autonomous) Tiruvalluvar University
Thoothukudi Serkadu, Vellore.

2. WELCOME

3. I.ANGELINE PRIYA
RESEARCH SCHOLAR
ST. MARY’S COLLEGE (AUTONOMOUS)
THOOTHUKUDI

4.  Indian English literature is one of the richest
and vibrant literatures of the world.
 A large number of Indian writers have used
novel for their creative expression.
 These novelists have their own choice, plot,
characters, narration, setting that is time
and place of action, style, atmosphere,
technique, or implied philosophy of life.

5.  The closing two decades of the twentieth millennium in
particular, witnessed the flowering of Indian English fiction
with the advent of a
host of novelists such as Salman Rushdie,
Amitav Ghosh, Allen Sealy, Upamanyu
Chatterjee, Gita Mehta, Vikram Seth,
Anita Desai, Shashi Deshpande, Dina Mehta,
and several others.

6.  One of the foremost Indian diasporic writers.
 Born in Calcutta in 1956, Ghosh graduated from the Delhi University.
 Ghosh spent time in Srilanka, Iran and East Pakistan, while being based at
boarding school in India.
 Ghosh brings to the English language an ease and a felicity of expression
which endows all his fiction with a quality of its own.
 Robert Dixon says “Ghosh develops a style of writing that is sufficiently nuanced
and elusive to sustain the “theoretical fiction’ of a recovery of presence without
actually falling back into essentialism.”
France’sPrix
Medicis
Award
Sahitya
Academi
&Ananda
Puraskar
Arthur C
Clark
award
International
Book award
Crossword
Book Prize
Prestigious
Crossword
Book Prize

7.  Ghosh is a Historian, Archaeologist and Anthropologist by
training and this is evident in his writings as well. He has broken
the paradigms and created new forms by evading the boundaries
of History, fiction and social anthropology.
 Each one of his novels is concerned with the impact of the
colonial encounter on the political, social and cultural lives of the
now independent countries like India, Bangladesh, Burma and
Egypt.
 He is a writer of the shifting ongoing migrations and transnational
cultural flows in different countries over different continents.
 His stories effortlessly cross international borders and easily travel
beyond compartmentalization or classifications of domains like
History, fiction etc.

8.  Narratology is a branch of structuralism, but it has achieved a
certain independence from its parent.
 Narratology is defined as the study of how narratives make
meaning, and the machanisms and procedures which are common
to all acts of storytelling.
 The basic distinction between ‘story’ and ‘plot’ is fundamental to
narratology.
 A famous Russian formalist critic Vladimir Propp’s approach
forms a much more basic narrative material which can provide the
shadowy deep foundations of complex realist functions.
 Greard Genette , one of the most prominent narratologists, whose
work has its focus , not the tale itself so to speak , but how it is
told and the process of telling itself.

9. single ended’, ‘double ended’
or ‘intrusive’ narrative.
met narratives (narrative
within the narrative)
Frame Narrative  Embedded Narrative

10.  Sensitive and Multifaceted view
 Medium that incorporates various aspects of
life
 Magical realism – first used by Latin American
Writier Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
 Indian Fiction – Salman Rushdie
 Shifting of Time And Space
 Post Colonialism
 Humanistic Narrative
 Realistic Narrative

11.  The Shadow Lines – Complex Narrative
structure – Theatrical Technique.
 The Circle of Reason – Non-Linear Narrative
 The Calcutta Chromosome – Magical Realism –
Non-Linear Narrative Technique
 The Glass Palace – Polyphony and
Heteroglossia Narrative – Photo Montage
Technique
 The Hungry Tide – Investigation – Expedition
 The Sea Of Poppies – Unrevealed aspects of
Colonial Rule

12.  Realism is counterfeit to romanticism
 Steven Earnshaw “ A common stated aim of
the realists was to present the world as it
really is, to hold up to reality”.
 Social realism – Realistic presentation of
social, cultural, political and religious
conditions of the term.
 Magic realism – brings forth the
alternative truth of the narrative

13.  The Circle of Reason – Alu, Balaram and Toru
 Human experience is made up of repetition,
contradiction, multiplicity and circularity.
 The Sea of Poppies – real socio-cultural scenario of 19th
Century- rottenness of Social life.
 The Calcutta Chromosome – admixture of fantasy and
realism.
 The Hungry Tide – Celebration of syncretism
 The Shadow Lines – Modern man’s perennial
Problem of alienation, quest for freedom &
Existential crisis.
 The Glass Palace- Obliteration of human rights.

14.  Postcolonial Historiographic Metafiction
 Ghosh explores events and incidents of history in
fiction to awaken their conscience and interrogate
history as well as truth.
 The Sea of Poppies – dictionary
notions of Marginality.
Narrative frame of a sprawling historical novel
through a former slave ship “Ibis”.

15.  The Glass Palace – Most eloquent example of Post
Colonial text.
 Imperialist epistemology that works through
western consciousness.
 The Circle of Reason – Monopolization of oil in the
Middle East.
 The Calcutta Chromosome – counter science is
secretive with unknown technique and procedure.
 The Hungry tide – magnifying lens on a
micro culture within the region
- sundarbans.
 The Shadow Lines – A parallel attempt to
reconstruct history by eschewing the received,
official interpretation of events.

16.  Ghosh travels across time & space to represent
the alternative facts of life & reality.
 Past is not something dead but helps to
understand the present better and constitute
better future.
 The Circle of reason – defence of reason, logic &
rationality – Zigzag of time and space.
 The Shadow Lines – ‘once upon a time’ type of
story – gong away and returning
 home.
 Stream of consciousness narrative
pattern.

17.  The Calcutta Chromosome – amalgamation of
hsitory, philosophy, sociology, literature and
science – three points of time – blends the
theoretical conjectures of fact & fantasy.
 The Glass palace – collapse these margins &
is metaphorically, at home everywhere.
 The Hungry tide – a story of exploitation of
the refugees inhibiting Morichjhapi island.
 Cross cultural barriers, communication and
relationship between the past & the present.
 The Sea of Poppies – Connection between the
war bodies, the Atlantic and the
Indian Ocean – Opium war.

18. Change and transformation are an
inevitable part of life and nature.
Every individual portrayed by Ghosh
depicts the strenuous and ambivalent
journey of self-discovery & Self-
attainment.
Novels of Amitav Ghosh traumatizes the
foremost uptodate problems – engage the
reader’s creativity with intellectually
captivating narrative style.

19. The scope of this dissertation is to reflect
the diverse views of Amitav Ghosh and
his beliefs through different voices and
also reveals the innate contradictions in
thought and attitude of the society
through his narrative technique are
clearly defined.