ABSTRACT
In The Writing of History , Michel de Certeau remarks that, in contrast to historians in the West, writers of historical narratives in India have shown an ability to accommodate concurrent but different temporalities without difficulty. Likewise, in his novel, The Hungry Tide , the Anglo-American Indian author, Amitav Ghosh, writes simultaneously in varying time-scales. For the eighteenth-century humanist, Giambattista Vico, the history of civilization is a series of cycles of growth, maturity, and decline which operate in terms of an internal logic independent of a larger providential or dialectical framework. In The Hungry Tide Ghosh traces impacts of late Victorian cosmopolitanism in the history of the settlement of the fictional island of Lusibari, founded by Sir Daniel Hamilton, a wealthy Scot who made a fortune in nineteenth-century Calcutta and, second, in the experimental settlement of Dalit refugees on Morichjhapi, in the Sundarban archipelago, in 1978 and 1979.
