Dalit Protagonists in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh: A Critical Study of Dalit Emancipation

Abstract

In one of his interviews, Amitav Ghosh says that literature cannot be analyzed as a political act; however, this proposition itself is a political statement wherein the pressures working on the writer and their precipitation in the writing are considered part of power relations present in all texts. According to Terry Eagleton, the power of texts resides in their suppression of what might be called their modes of production. Amitav Ghosh assigned important roles to Dalit characters in his novels however, like most of the upper caste Indian writers his diagnosis of the problems of Dalit life is wrong, he also finds the root cause of the problem in the unclean work they are doing. Because of the wrong diagnosis, their elucidations help the hegemonic castes and classes instead of serving the Dalits. Amitav Ghosh proposes the solutions of untouchables problems through NGO in The Hungry Tide, taking the Dalit character to foreign land in The Glass Palace, in Ibis Trilogy where they are face to face with death and forget caste differences and he tries to convert a physically challenged Brahmin boy to a lower caste who is already considered an outcaste due to physical deformity in The Circle of Reason. However, the introduction of flush systems, televisions, and founding NGO have proved more helpful to the upper castes. This paper analyzes the novels of Amitav Ghosh by taking into consideration the complex relationship between external colonialism, internal colonialism, and life of Dalits in India and abroad along with possibilities for their emancipation.