Colonial Landscape Navigation: Postcolonial Ecocriticism in Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh

Abstract

This article examines how colonialism, ecology, and postcolonial viewpoints interact in Amitav Ghosh’s novel. The main themes and theoretical frameworks used to analyse the novel’s representation of a colonial environment and its ecological repercussions are highlighted in this study. Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh brings readers to a 19th-century India firmly enmeshed in British colonialism. This work explores the intricate interactions between people and the environment, exploring the massive ecological changes brought on by imperial conquest via a postcolonial eco-critical perspective. This study reveals the novel’s ecological roots by looking at how Ghosh questions conventional narratives and presents a criticism of the effects of colonial rule on both human and non-human beings. The research emphasises the function of landscape as a place of contestation and resistance, illuminating how nature is exploited and perverted within the colonial setting by drawing on postcolonial theory and eco-critical frameworks. Important problems about power dynamics, environmental justice, and the connections between capitalism and ecological degradation are brought up by Ghosh’s depictions of the opium trade, the transatlantic slave trade, and the privatisation of nature.