Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy comprising Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and Flood of Fire redefines nation, identity and gender. Set against the backdrop of circumstances leading up to the First Opium war, it covers the period from 1838-42. Traversing the landscapes of India and China, Ghosh portrays a complex world, where the opium trade unfolded. As a diasporic writer, he grapples with the multiple interpretations of the nation and the self, forcing us to re-evaluate our received notions. These texts deal with all the usual postcolonial anxieties of cultural and national identity formation, re-writing the history of the early migrants from India, and offering an analysis of the social fabric of the times. But in painting a picture of our historical past, Ghosh also throws up the question of postcolonial space. If we understand the colonial discourse to be ideological and understand its function in aiding the spread and consolidation of imperialism, then we can expect postcolonial discourse to counter the claims of colonialism.



While the temporal (historical) analysis in contemporary critical theory is ubiquitous, the 1960s and 70s witnessed a “spatial turn”. There was an increasing awareness of the third element in the triad of historical-social-spatial. Space, although present, had become undermined by the dialectic of the historical and the social. A narrative would situate itself on a timeline and this understanding would lend itself to our interpretation of the society reflected in it. Space was seen as the background or setting in which actions are inserted. But, spatial critics have demonstrated that this would be a limited and faulty understanding of space. My objective is to demonstrate how narratives can (re-)create places represented in them and how form and content lend themselves to this end. I discuss how geography both enables and oppresses, releases and contains characters; how geography is linked to caste, race and gender identities.