With an introduction that places Amitav Ghosh in the context of his historical/cultural/social/political times, this anthology brings together both established and new critics in their perceptive grasp of Ghosh’s extraordinary oeuvre of fiction, starting from The Circle of Reason (1986) through The Shadow Lines (1988), In an Antique Land (1992) and The Calcutta Chromosome (1996) to the fairly recent The Glass Palace (2000), along with a reading of Countdown (1999), Ghosh’s best-known and most influential piece of political writing. A greater emphasis is placed on The Shadow Lines and In an Antique Land, which have received the widest critical attention and are, as yet, the Ghosh texts most taught in university courses across the world. An innovative ‘pedagogy’ section in this collection also explores these texts from both teachers’ and students’ perspectives, as they play out in classrooms at locations as far apart as Delhi and the American mid-west. An interview with Amitav Ghosh animates this anthology with an authorial intervention that – perhaps unwittingly – both validates and questions the praxis of literary criticism today in its peculiarly postmodern predicament.

Contributors : Kavita Daiya, GJV Prasad, Vinita Chandra,Neelam Srivastava, Roma Chatterji, Shirley Chew, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Rakhee Moral, Tapan Basu, Meenakshi Malhotra, Mita Bose, Neha Dixit, Arunima Sengupta, Srimati Basu, Neluka Silva and Alex Tickell.