Amitav Ghosh as a Secular Essayist

Abstract

Amitav Ghosh non-fictional prose establishes him as one of the major Indian intellectuals of the last 30 years. Although he abandoned academic writing rather early in his career, some modes of academic writing persisted in his prose. The most apparent is probably the amount of research that goes into his essays, which is tempered by references to himself as an observer or to some specific people, who serve as a foil to his subject matter. Another residue of academic writing may be Ghosh’s secularism, which has evolved since his first articles. While in the past he used to champion secularism both at a political and philosophical level, after the turn of the century Ghosh’s secularism became more nuanced, until he came to distrust the rationalism that usually accompanies secularism, without however discarding the political, pluralistic, tolerant connotations of the concept.