Re-creating the Cultural Apparatus of Human Rights through Petrofiction in Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason

Abstract

The current paper reads petrofiction in Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason, where he approaches the climate change crisis by re-imagining an ‘exoticised’ past, negotiated in the present through narrative multiplicity and cultural specificity. Using Pramod Nayar’s work on the cultural apparatus of Human Rights, the paper examines characters in “from the egg seller’s end”, who instantiate the strategic exoticization and articulation of the liberatory potential of the exotic. There is a re-writing of the diaspora experience by employing the folkloric, and by extension, through exaggeration and parody. The extension of the human rights discourse to the folkloric, as suggested by Pramod K. Nayar, can help to re-vitalize and radicalize the universal human rights discourse. Nury and the Malik’s stories, read through Nayar’s lens, pose a resistance to the institutionalized abstraction of the human rights discourse by foregrounding rumour, communal voice and cultural memory, moving the conversation from literary style to political reality.