Between History and Identity: Reading Amitav Ghosh and Orhan Pamuk

Abstract

More than ever in its history of evolution novel as an elastic and promiscuous genre now crosses disciplinary boundaries and, in addition to delineating “universal” themes like love, betrayal, war, and death, illustrates the inevitable bearing of history and politics on literature. Along the line of this argument, this study intends to explore Amitav Ghosh and Orhan Pamuk in regard to their treatment of the issues encapsulated by “history” and “identity.” Following a comparative and historicizing mode this dissertation argues that Amitav Ghosh and Orhan Pamuk project transverse worlds with intersecting historical trajectories. Their major fictional and non-fictional works are found revolving around the themes of history and identity, or to be precise, issues of historiography and identity in the colonial and postcolonial periods. Although these issues appear as central engagements of most postcolonial and postmodern narratives, they become especially worth researching with respect to some particular writers like the ones I have selected because of their important locales, exceptional contexts, and unique mode of representation. Amitav Ghosh, loosely categorized as a postcolonial and postmodern novelist, takes his materials from the colonial and postcolonial political history and cultural canvas of India, South East Asia, parts of China, and parts of the Middle East, using the alternative lens of fiction vis-à-vis the officially recorded version. The complex issue of identity which may be political, geographical, economic, cultural, and individual in scope and nature appears as an overriding concern in his writings. In dealing with the issue in fictional terms he challenges histories influenced by the hegemony of the West, and writes, sharing the spirit of the movememt of writing history from below, a version of history that projects the predicament of individuals and is “humanized” by fictional characters. He shows how history is woven with hope and despair, with the elements of cross-cultural relation and the partitionist agenda. Sometimes, incidents of violence abounding in his writings make readers feel that the history of human civilization is the history of violence. While official histories often remain discreetly silent about the “violence chapter,” his fictional history deliberately breaks the spell of silence, for silence, to him, means complicity, encouraging the repetition of the “black spots” of history. Broadly in the same line of thought, Orhan Pamuk shows in microcosom what Ghosh captures in a wider spectrum of history. He invokes the romanticized past as “hyperhistory” and at the same time reveals the “black spots” in his country’s unspoken history. “A happy postmodernist” in his own words and a postcolonialist in the broad sense, he writes on the paradox and problematics of Turkish identity from the perspective of a revisionist reading of Ottoman and post-Ottoman history of Turkey coming to him from the sources of both internal and external Turkologists. The issue he handles becomes relevant to most eastern nations that were once under colonization in different forms and are still living the anxieties of identity. Although Turkey was never colonized, its present-day position in the global context is similar to that of the once colonized nations projected in Ghosh. The East-West conflict/compromise underpinning the Turkish condition, the country’s high vulnerability and sporadic resistance to neoimperialism, and the colonization of the psyche of the people compare obviously with the conditions of people depicted in the narratives of other postcolonial nations. Therefore, the novelists selected for this study can be “yoked together” (and of course, not by “violence”) for writing narratives of nations grappling with the question of identity in a similar vein; of course, their narratives ultimately go beyond the range of being “national allegories” and become a viable and vibrant space for “speaking to all.” Their major works project many characters who suffer from the cultural and human costs of boundaries arbitrarily drawn by colonial power structures in the creation of nationstates and attempt to foreground the cartographies people bear constantly in their mind. This study explores the canons of Amitav Ghosh and Orhan Pamuk with a view to studying in-depth the literary representation of the dynamics and formation of identity in the context of history related to the spread of transcontinental ocean trade, colonization, withdrawal of empires, rise of (ultra)nationalism, onslaught of globalization, clashes of cultures, East-West entanglements, and the role of colonial cities in shaping people’s sense of cultural belonging. The thesis is divided into five chapters: the first introducing the scope and parametre of the thesis with some theoretical discussions, the second and third on Amitav Ghosh and Orhan Pamuk respectively in relation to the area of this study, the fourth on comparative analysis of the two authors in the light of the discussions in chapters two and three, and the last for summing up and making concluding remarks. In the fourth chapter, the core analysis of the study, the points of divergence and convergence are explained for a comprehensive understanding of the authors who actually write in the great tradition of the “world novel,” not in the the novelistic tradition of a particular country or language. The way they critique both empire and nation as begetters of evils, man’s egoistic self, and disintegration of society constitutes a broad point of comparison. That their reflections on maps, boundaries, and partitioning of the past and the present bear some sort of resemblance is pointed out. Having a strong legacy of the eastern tradition replete with mystic stories and thoughts they invite comparison with each other in the use of mystic ideals to show the elusive nature of some of their characters’ quest for the self. In connection to their dealing with self-other binary, imperialist-native negotiation, East-West entanglement, convergence of the powerful and the powerless, and cultural conflict/negotiations from philosophical and mystic perspectives this study makes an emphatic use of the trope of master-slave relation as it comparably appears in Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land and Orhan Pamuk’s The White Castle. It shows how both the writers illustrate “transcendence in bondage” model through their treatment of master-slave relation without admitting the superioty or inferiority of either party. Their use of art and colonial cities in the interpretation of history and identity, their sense of “worldliness,” and their writerly campaign for a post-nationalist world-order particularly underlie the comparative analysis. In the context of Pamuk a post-secularist and post- Islamist worldview comes up for discussion quite relevantly. Moreover, since artists are the presenters of people, the multiple and in-between identities of artists in the globalized world draw some focus in the analysis of their writings. While based on thematic analysis the study also takes note of these writers’ common theoretical leanings in the areas of postcolonialism, postmodernism and the other relevant cultural, political, and critical theories of the time. Metafictional self-reflexivity as a postmodernist trait in many of their works comes up for particular discussion as it connects with the identity of the authors in relation to their fictional universe. Key Terms: Amitav Ghosh, Orhan Pamuk, Fiction, History, Identity, Culture, Self, Other, Nationalism, Nation-state, Partition, Geopolitics, Postmodernism, Postcolonialism, Empire, Imperialism, East-west, Subalternity, Worldliness, Exile, Modernity, Secularism, Hybridity, Social Capital, Syncretism, Mysticism, Ottomanism/Neo-Ottomanism, Orientalism, Occidentalism, Self-Reflexivity, Historiography, and Metafiction.