“The Conflagration of Community” Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason

Abstract

[Abstract: This paper seeks to shed light on the formation of communities in a transnational space in Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason which chronicles the lives of a motley group of people who, after many upheavals, land in the Arabian town al-Ghazira. Zindi’s household becomes a transnational space where cross- cultural caste, class, gender, and national collaborations blur all sorts of boundaries and enable the formation of new alliances. The paper tries to unravel how the novel presents the emergence of reconstituted families within contexts of domination and resistance. The paper argues how the narrative celebrates a free space which is supposed to be above all temporal or spatial constraints and also charts the decimation of this community both from cracks within its structure and finally by a repressive state power.]