Deepak T. R.
Amitav Ghosh is one of the popular names in the modern-day literature. The Indian-born novelisthas come out with extensive range of fiction in the genus of history. His novels shed light on how theSouth-East Asian populace deals with the identity predicament at different echelons. The art of telling atale is a 'narrative' which came into practice long before it got its name. A narrative takes its form as andwhen we start articulating our feelings and thoughts. The concept of Bakhtin ascertains 'polyphony' as animperative feature of the novel. It has forbidden the monologist form of the traditional novel. Voice,variety, viewpoint, and philosophy of social worlds are the objects of the author's knowledge. These arevery much subservient to the artistic vision where the opinion of the author is always considered the final.For Bakhtin, the foremost principle for a novel is to be polyphonic – the freedom and independence of thecharacters within the range of the author.The literary works of Amitav Ghosh are polyphonic in nature. He deliberates his charactersindependently and breaks himself from imposing ideological control over them. Different characters inthe novel who also act as narrators accomplish their roles through their distinctive linguistic expressions.This leads to the discovery of 'heteroglossia' in the novel. The bibliophile can witness the changes in theirlanguage with respect to the social, cultural and economic status. Ghosh, through his novels experimentswith the hierarchy and the regular closure, but chooses open-endings and incompleteness which areconsidered as the real features of polyphonic novels. By allowing the readers to understand the closure intheir own manner, he leaves his philosophical tensions unresolved. Hence, the paper makes an attempt toexplore how Amitav Ghosh has presented the polyphonic technique from a new perspective in The GlassPalace (2000) and The Hungry Tide (2004).
Polyphonic, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, Story, Narration, Independent.