Amitav Ghosh s texts offer multiple points of entry to recover and analyze the larger environmental

context
Ghosh as a writer who shows multiple place attachments
Locate Ghosh in the stream of cosmopolitan Indian fiction as well as
specifically in the literary-cultural tradition of Bengals bhadralok

The narratives of cosmopolitanism that have emerged in the wake of
economic globalization have largely focussed on elite cosmopolitans
Ghosh focuses on the movement of ordinary people begin centuries
ago
Such subaltern cosmopolitanisms begin centuries ago predate the
history of modern cosmopolitanism
It is argued that his engagement with these movements pre-empts the
discourse on cosmopolitanism and shows that in contrast to the
contemporary cosmopolitan narratives that privilege the movements
of the new professional, intellectual or artistic elite
But we should not imagine we can do so
very well by ignoring or wishing away national and local solidarities.
- We need to be global in
part through how we are national. And we need to recognise the ways
national and ethnic and religious solidarities work for others.---CRAIG
CAULHON
- Defining locals as those who remain at home and cosmopolitans
as those who move, Ulf Hannerz points out that those who move

physically are not necessarily cosmopolitans because they might
not travel psychologically at all.
- ALDAMA
- I mean our home was in Calcutta in some way, but we also moved around
a lot. And I think in compensation what I did was I just read.
-VESCOSI amitav ghosh in conversation
This is what I would want to tell my own children: that there's much that is
wrong with the world, and yet you have only this one life, as Rilke so
beautifully says, and you must live it completely, and inhabit this world and see
it in all its beauty. That was one aspect of it, the other was that I do think that
writers of my generation have a duty to address issues of the environment.
When we look at writers
of the Thirties and Forties, we ask "where did you stand on fascism?"
In the future they will look at us and say "where did you stand on the
environment?" I think this is absolutely the fundamentai question of
our time.
-- Talking of the Sundarbans, you say that the landscape is a sort of
world
apart. "4 mangrove forest is a universe unto itself" (p. 7) positively
hostile
to the presence of man. *t seems to me that the Sundarbans are a
character
rather than aplace.
Yes absolutely, I think they are very much. That's certainly what I
wanted the forest to become. I wanted it to have its own agency, its
own will. Because thats how I experienced it. But I think, again, there
is a sense in which, out of an Indian tradition, it happens that you
anthropomorphosize,
which is something antiscientific. But for me it's
natural, it's normal, I anthropomorphosize things: objects of the
natural world become people, become themes to me. So yes, it's
absolutely right.
-how an aesthetic form
How aesthetic categories central to enlightenment reason are reshaped and
reemployed in the postcolonial contexts....
- Unease with his own position
- Amitav Ghosh- concerned with ecologies of our everyday existence.
Instead of exhibiting romance for pristine, forlorn, wild settings, Ghosh
deals with the nature of the human habitat. His works deal with urban
nature and thus, help in expanding the classical notion of nature.
- Challenges the universality of modern science by foregrounding alternate
, native knowledge sytems which might have been lost, erased or
marginalized during the triumphant march of techno-scienticism.
- Post-colonial ecologies carry on the relational dynamics set by colonial
powers
- G tries to negotiate the dualisms ....non-dualistic view of the wold
- Excavation of subaltern ecologies
- SCIENCE
- Science &Technology part of the coercive apparatus
- Ghosh exhibits strange ambivalence in terms of place
- Earth as a safe , secure oikos or dwelling place

In Chapter 3, the nexus between colonialism , capitalism and Christianity
alluded to by Ghosh in The Glass Palace, and again in Sea of Poppies, is
analyzed as an ecocidal one.

In chapter 4,
Has analyzed Ghoshs engagement with science and technology is an ecocritical
one.
How ecocriticisms ambivalent engagement with techno-scientism is noticeable
in the works of Amitav Ghosh.
The narratives of The Circle of Reason & The Calcutta Chromosome prove ,
science itself is open to literary analysis .
Ghosh questions the concretization of boundaries around science , magic and
religion, and they being treated as separate, discrete ecosystems of knowledge.
These two works
Uncover the porosity of the constructed boundaries around & between these
disciplines
----subverts
---universality of modern rational scientific discourse
-science itself a modern , parochial, cultural construct
--science---received, hybridized & subverted by the colonized societies
---appropriates

Native knowledge systems fore grounded
Science-technology as coercive apparatus---signifiers of modernity

Chapter 1 is a detailed account of the development of ecocriticism as an
academic discourse that focuses on the relationship of literature with the
physical environment.

--CRONON---We need to see a landscape that is also cultural, in which
city, suburb, countryside and wilderness each has its own place .
(43)
--Ghosh reconceptualises the Euro- American notion of nature

Ghosh shows how a sense of placewhich is so central to his aesthetics
--takes urban landscapes as seriously as the natural landscpes
Can also be nurtured or achieved through urban experiences.
His novelsThe Shadow Lines, The Circle of Reason and The Calcutta
Chromosomecall to reframe urban issues as environmental issues
--change the dominant perception of what counts as legitimate spaces for for
experiencing nature or the environment ---includes urban landscapes
--reorient our environmental imagination


---natural places of human habitat
---deals with urban ---which unabashedly a human- built , human inhabited
environment.
City- imagination with precision- of places such as Calcutta , London, al-
Ghazira as spaces for multifaceted environmental understanding
--- urban as a site of environmental concern---reorients what Buell calls
environmental imagination

--Point to secluded spaces in the urban landscape
--risk society
--neglected spaces ---discourse of wilderness
--wilderness inside the cities rather than far away from it
---broadens the horizons of ecocritical enquiry
---problematized and expanded the notion of nature by expanding the horizons
of what constitutes nature writing
Environemental fiction

--environmental racism eco-Apartheid
---postcolonial ecologies & lingering ghost of the empire
---subaltern cosmopolitans challenge
--This study has highlighted the need of rerouting postcolonial studies