Shiv Nadar University is a comprehensive, multidisciplinary, research-focused, and student-centric University offering a full range of academic programs at the undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral level. With state-of-the-art infrastructure, the University comprises of academic wings, sophisticated labs, international standard sports facilities, amphitheaters, auditorium, conference rooms and smart classrooms. The University&rsquo;s goal is to become internationally recognized for the quality of its research and creative endeavors and their applicability to improving quality of life, generating new insights and expanding the boundaries of human knowledge creativity. Committed to excellence in teaching, research and service, the University aims to serve the higher education needs of India and the world beyond.

Shiv Nadar University

This paper undertakes a hauntological reading of time and existence, in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019). Hauntology, Jacques Derrida’s portmanteau coinage (haunt-plus-ontology, or haunted-ontology, Spectres of Marx, 1994), is a concept that avers that “this instant…is not docile to time, at least to what we call time.” Therefore positing existence as something of “doubtful contemporaneity,” simultaneously contemporaneous and intergenerational, making the present non-contemporaneous, detecting in the present both past and future. Unlike Heidegger’s “care” where the individual is finitely contained within death’s horizon, hauntology ideates a collective global existence beyond the “living present,” enfolding “the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead.” Not to be confused with cliched ghosts, hauntology, holds time and existence as “spectral” because “effective presence” (norm, law, hegemonic discourse) and its “other” (disarticulated, invisibilised, spectralised presence- as-non-present) both constitute our existence. Gun Island, often called the “Bengali Da Vinci Code,” foregrounds 21st century’s human and eco-displacements inside a detective story. Its central query, “Desh Koi” (where’s home?), problematises our current existence into one of identitylessness, most evident in current refugee/migrant crises as-well-as ecological disasters. Ghosh avers that these are fuelled by disavowed criminal nexus between corporates, smuggling syndicates, and governments/regimes, whose closest analogues are archaic systemic oppressions, thus gridlocking us into a perennially violently unequal world. This paper asks why Ghosh theorises our contemporary constitutedness thus. It argues that Ghosh, in seeing our post-fordist contemporaneity as continuums of archaic habits of systemic injustices, considers our 21st century temporality as a cancellation of future, thus liquifying the concept of a homogeneous, empty, calendar, or teleologically linear time. Detective fiction, with its meta-reading detective figure and analeptic closure of the narratorial logico-temporal gap provides a structural shorthand for Gun Island’s braiding of past, present, and future, where medieval Bengal, and Venice, contemporary India, America, and Italy, coalesce, to detect our existences as globally interconnected continuums of transhistoric, transcultural processes, which manifest as temporal bleeds, indexing hegemonic injustices, despite their systemic disarticulations. Like Giorgio Agamben, Ghosh too believes that the hidden foundation of all regimes lies in the prestidigitated inner solidarity between imperii arcana (archaic sovereignty), democracy and totalitarianism (Agamben, Homo Sacer). Gun Island, limns these disavowed processes and avers that our conventional empirical sense-making systems remain short-sighted in noticing these connections. Ghosh asserts that until the spectral, that-is, spectres and spectre-making (spectragenic) processes, are visibilised, our identities and politics will remain congealed in unequal, violent relatedness, and time will bring forth nothing new. Gun Island imagines a just world fuelled by a collective awareness of equality without leaving anyone out. This entails transitioning from the tyranny of presences to an awareness of the spectral third, beyond the present/absent, seen/unseen totalising binaries. This third, a clarifying agent for the ineffable failure of our future, requires a spectral historiography wherein time and being is placed outside commonplace tempero-spatial fixities. This paper therefore studies Gun Island’s treatment of existence and temporality as attempts towards historicising those no-longer- here, and those yet-to-be.Keywords- Spectres, Hauntology, Detective Fiction, Temporality, Absent presences.

English

(SoHSS) School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Re-Temporalising the Cultural in India

Haunted Time in Amitav Ghosh's Gun Island

This paper examines the ambivalences, and tensions of the imperial project encoded in 19th century botanical codification of poisonous plants in British colonies, through the materiality of alkaloids in Sherlock Holmes stories. I argue that these tales reveal the orientalising gaze of botanical codifications which merged in the case of study of alkaloids with medico-criminal discourse on plants, that grouped indigenous plants, and indigenous people under the canopy of toxicology, constructing the native population as criminal and primitive, thereby giving imperial crimes a clean-chit. I contend that this bundling of forensics and the sociological was damage control of the faltering British self-image in the wake of Britain’s anti-opium movement and atrocities in the Boer war. The Holmes mysteries link phytotoxins to colonies’ cultural practices, thus reattaching criminality to the colonies, to re-institute British selfhood in metropolitan consciousness by creating via the flora of the colonies, a criminal Other. However, I point out that the institutional weight of imperial machinery could not fully contain the unease of Britain’s colonial contact. The anxiety of reverse-colonialism (1857 Sepoy Mutiny), continued to haunt the British psyche, appearing as exotic alkaloids that leave no trace, and can only be deduced by Holmes’ genius.&nbsp; Such that, plant poisons in these tales simultaneously repair British loss of self-prestige, as-well-as, self-subvert it. I study homicidal poisoning tales, “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot” and “The Sign of the Four,” as stories of revenant, disavowed (thereby spectral, intangible) imperial unease, using Jacques Derrida’s political idea of systemic evils as spectral (Specters of Marx, 1994). The plant-poisons of these tales, I argue, are conceptual tools, revealing spectres (not to be confused with cliched ghosts) of imperial anxieties, disturbing the stability of imperialism’s coerced archiving, gathering us under its revealing spectral shade.