Narration and silence in the works of Amitav Ghosh

Abstract One of the urgent questions in contemporary literatures is how to represent multicultural communities; should differences between groups be emphasized, or should their common “universal” features be highlighted? Finding a way of giving each group its own distinctive voice without simultaneously appropriating that voice remains a problem. This article aims to examine how the writing of Amitav Ghosh treats these problems in representing the encounter between different ethnicities and cultures.