Empire and Exile: reflections on the Ibis trilogy

This article explores the relationship between “history” and “fiction” in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy. The novels constitute a means of exploring the relationship between the local and the global in the making of the modern world, in particular by focusing on ordinary people’s experiences of empire. Ghosh uses opium as a narrative device to articulate forms of imperial degradation, and connects it to the history of forced labor mobility. Despite a shared political project that seeks to give dignity to subaltern people in history, the novels’ literary representation of the lives of men, women, and children is in some ways more nuanced than historians’ empirical constructions, which are necessarily pieced together from fragmented colonial archives. Thus the line between Indian Ocean “history” and “fiction” becomes unquestionably blurred.