![]() ![]() ![]() In the words of Rajnish Mishra, 'the Ibis trilogy is Ghosh's most vehement indictment of the source of imperialism and colonialism'. It is the first volume of the Ibis trilogy. Sea of Poppies represents less a return to modernism, then, than the development of a new form of realism, one produced through a dialectical overcoming of the particular understanding of history that undergirds one aspect of modernist aesthetic form. Sea of Poppies (2008) is a novel by Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2008. ![]() Incommensurability is thus the object of Ghosh's critique, part of the imperial ideology his text works to undermine through its development of a universal history that emerges out of its multiple narrative structure. This is best seen in his inability to narrate the story of those “unconscious pilgrims of an exacting belief” that occupy the absent center of his text, precisely those subjects who are the focus of Ghosh's story of a repurposed slave ship transporting a group of indentured servants to Mauritius. What Conrad understands as a crisis in narrative form is, I argue, a function of his understanding of history as the absolute incompatibility of modernity and tradition, the West and the rest. This essay takes up the relationship between modernism and postcolonialism through a comparison of Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim and Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies. ![]()
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