The Novels of Amitav Ghosh and the Integral Hegemony of Inglish

Abstract

This article examines the invention, dissemination and politicization of a certain variety of polyglot prose by contemporary Indian English writers as offering a philosophical challenge to the hegemony of the British Anglophone world, revisiting and rewriting the power equations that have prevailed between these worlds from the era of colonialism to the present. The article identifies this prose as ‘Inglish’, which demarcates it from standard English for the way it places India and its regional languages at its centre. The broad references to R. K. Narayan (from an earlier generation) and Salman Rushdie and Upamanyu Chatterjee (from current writing) seek to survey the various ways in which this prose has been utilized across time, but the particular focus of this article remains Amitav Ghosh's most recent novels, Sea of Poppies (2008) and River of Smoke (2011), which are both mostly set in the 19th century. Using the 19th-century setting to reflect on real time, Ghosh's novels manipulate language to wield it as an index and reflection of the power equations between nations whose relations have evolved with changing global politics. The novels also provide a range of competent deliberations on current and future linguistic mutations, commenting on the strengthening of links between India and its diasporas in the contemporary era. In particular, this article seeks to illustrate how Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke question and displace the hegemony of a global ‘north’ in favour of an emergent but stronger ‘south–south’ cooperation that leads to the construction of an ‘alternate’ hegemony that is less led by political and economic dominance and more ‘integral’ in its nature.