Archives of Unfair Trade in Amitav Ghosh's Fiction

Abstract

discovery of rubber and teak: "The rise of global capitalism all occurred together . Gold and silver from the West crossed the Atlantic or the Pacific, it ultimately found its way to Asia (east of Suez) to purchase the "riches of the East" and to allow the otherwise deprived inhabitants of the northwest Eurasian peninsula to share in the fabled Oriental splendours" . This idea stems from Edward Said's contention in Orientalism where he describes 'Orientalism' as the Western attitude that views Eastern societies as exotic, primitive, and inferior.This "ineradicable distinction between Western superiority and Oriental inferiority" is evident in Ghosh's postcolonial textual response in The Glass Palace where the margins write back and lay bare materialistic colonial intent of the past by reconfiguring and reliving the teak trade in the fictional space.