Views from Other Boats: On Amitav Ghosh’s Indian Ocean “Worlds”

In reflecting on Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy, set in the waters of the Indian Ocean, this essay highlights the role a historical imaginary can play in undergirding the claims to explanatory truth made by historians in their interpretations of the past. While historians work within the conventions and strictures of professionalized practice and are uneasy about utilizing historical fiction to animate their work, the essay suggests, through a consideration of the books of Ghosh, that bringing these two modes of inquiry into relation with one another can produce a mutually beneficial dialogue about the nature of sources, archives, and the methodologies we use in producing accounts of the past. This is especially so for those stories involving individuals at the “margins” of history whose voices it is challenging to recover. The essay draws attention in this regard, though, to some of the problems in Ghosh’s attempts to reinscribe into the history of the ocean the idea of an Indian Ocean cosmopolitanism that is seen to have been eroded over time. It challenges, further, the trilogy’s reinforcing of a teleology of the ocean as a British lake whose dynamics were defined by the logics of empire and driven by the force of capital, by pointing to the continued significance of South Asian vernacular mercantile networks in maintaining commercial interests through institutional arrangements and mechanisms that East India Company capitalists could not penetrate or define.