Reconstructing Private History in Amitav Ghosh's Novel "In an Antique Land”

Abstract

The act of using history in English literature is a good old practice since the times of chronicles. Many English writers have also used History as part of their fictional art. Amitav Ghosh frequently uses history in his novels. He freely mixes fact and fiction to cook a new dish called ‘Historical Fiction'. He tries to look into History from a new dimension, which was never looked before by historians. He places public history and private history side by side and discusses the effect of the historical incidents on common people. . In the novel ‘In an Antique Land' Amitav Ghosh tries to reconstruct the private history of an Indian slave whose history is unknown to this world until it is traced by the writer himself. This Research paper is an attempt to study how Amitav Ghosh treats history in his novel ‘In an Antique Land'. The aim of this paper is to analyse how Amitav Ghosh has reconstructed Private history of an Indian slave using Geniza documents.