![]() But Ghosh’s novel shows that the process of deterritorialization of English goes beyond this trend. Through this linguistic extravaganza, Ghosh outlines a program – which works at the level both of poetics and of ethics – for the deterritorialization of English, a process linked to the crucial questions raised by globalization, and in particular to contemporary language issues, which tend to equate the phenomenon of the worldwide spread of English with Globish, the utilitarian, matter-of-fact and uninspired language of international communication. The sheer extravagance of this linguistic crosscut section, the abounding wealth of words, sounds and meanings, compose a rich and intricate mosaic of languages, jargons and idioms. These languages sometimes mix and mingle quite freely to create puns and innuendoes to repeated comic effect: surrounded by a “confusion of tongues” ( SP 3 61), the French Paulette adapts her idiom to every communication situation she bends languages and mixes and creolizes them freely, recasting English in a new and inventive mould of displacement and relocation.ģ The narrator seems to revel in the boundless variety of languages, idioms and dialects available to him, as well as in the innumerable expressive possibilities contained within each language, and to give free rein to his unbridled linguistic facetiousness. 3 For greater clarity, page references to Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies in this article will be preceded wit (.)Ģ The most striking formal characteristic of the novel lies in the linguistic heterogeneity of the large cast of characters: the narrative interweaves the American English of Zachary, a mulatto freedman from Maryland, the Babu English of Baboo Nob Kissin, a Bengali clerk, 2 the Butler English of an affluent Anglo-Indian Calcutta household (see Kachru 41), the Cantonese pidgin English of a Chinese convict named Ah-Fatt, as well as various so-called “natural” languages or dialects, such as Bhojpuri, Hindi, Bengali, Chinese and French which all chime in with one another in the narrative.2 In Guru English, Srinivas Aravamudan vividly defines Babu English as a lingo which “from Rudyard Ki (.).This opening novel of the trilogy, which deftly merges fiction with research and scholarship, concentrates mainly on the motley crew assembled on board the ship, and on the various roundabout ways each character has wound up on the vessel. 1 The Ibis draws together a number of ill-assorted characters – seamen, convicts and coolies – which it is scheduled to transport to the Island of Mauritius. As in all of Amitav Ghosh’s fiction, this novel combines the novelist’s imagination with the anthropologist’s meticulous attention to historical accuracy, and curiosity about people and places. The novel is structured around this vessel that has been refitted to transport girmitiyas, indentured laborers with a signed contract (a girmit or agreement) who were taken to the imperial plantations of Madagascar, Mauritius, Fiji, or the West Indies following Britain’s abolition of slavery. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() 1 Amitav Ghosh studied history at Saint Stephen’s College in Delhi, before doing a PhD in social anth (.)ġ In Sea of Poppies – the first volume of a projected “ Ibis trilogy” – Amitav Ghosh, like some enthusiastic comparative linguist gone berserk, performs a crosscut section through the different languages and idioms spoken at one moment and in one place – in the late 1830s on a former slave-ship called the Ibis, presented as a nexus of displacement, a sort of petri dish of linguistic globalization in the making. ![]()
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