![]() The Ibis Trilogy, in its exploration of these issues through the lives of various characters across differing economic, social, racial and caste strata, creates a rich historical narrative that attempts to address the archival gap. To illustrate this further, this thesis examines Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy, a series that elucidates the intertwining of capitalism, colonialism, and cultural interaction through trade in the period leading up to the First Opium War. While deriving facts from historical documents, postcolonial historical fiction uses the creative freedom literature provides to centre history of colonial periods on individuals. This thesis proposes an intervention in the practice of historical writing in the form of postcolonial historical fiction. The issue of making subaltern history visible has been a continuous and classic problem of postcolonialism. ![]() ![]() Moreover, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak notes in her germinal essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, the writing of history using such archives is also wracked with epistemic violence, in which the subaltern, a figure already made an Other, is not permitted to have a voice. However, the colonial archive is a contentious source-either having deliberate omissions or detailed documents shaped by colonial ideology. Writing postcolonial history has involved relying on the colonial archive. ![]()
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