Riots, Crowds and the Collective in Amitav Ghosh's Political Imagination. From The Shadow Lines to Gun Island

This article, using the riots in The Shadow Lines (1988) as a point of departure, maps a more general system of representations of multitudes within Amitav Ghosh’s work. Its implications, in turn, can shed light on Ghosh’s relationship with the idea of collectivity, which is more fraught with tensions and ambivalence than it may initially appear. More precisely, I argue that Ghosh’s work is deeply concerned with the various ways in which collectivities, masses and gatherings of different kinds can affect, enhance, diminish or threaten individual existences, and tries to find a reconciliation between the collectivity and the individual. As a result of these anxieties, Ghosh tends to represent crowds and multitudes chiefly in two modes: as an anonymous, dehumanized and threatening mass; or as a community of individuals bound together by spontaneous human solidarity. In turn, this tends to exclude from his imaginative horizon certain kinds of collectivities that do not fit in either of the two modes, such as various kinds of explicitly politically engaged movements. Besides The Shadow Lines – the moment in which Ghosh lays the foundations of this system of representations –, the article considers other works of fiction and non-fiction – most notably “The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi” (1995), In an Antique Land (1992), The Hungry Tide (2004) and River of Smoke (2011) – in order to show how the characteristics of this system have remained consistent throughout Ghosh’s career. The point of arrival, finally, is Ghosh’s recent work on climate change and migration – The Great Derangement (2016) and Gun Island (2019) – in which the shortcomings of this system of representations, as regards Ghosh’s intervention in current public debates, come to light with particular clarity.