ABSTRACT
In the narrative progression of the novel, Amitav Ghosh sequences the Zachary-Serang Ali encounter in lascar pidgin before the reader enters the multilingual cosmopolitanism of colonial India. This further displaces any possible exotic pleasure of the monolingual metropolitan reader, because by she is attuned to the textual expectation that Ghosh’s reclamation of the interrupted conversations is not going to take place solely in English. The text becomes a playground for the multilingual readers’ horizons of competence in her various languages, and the linguistic play is presented as normative and natural since the characters who speak these languages in the text not only expect but also often thrive in the multilingual semiotic situations. The reader, therefore, is multilingual, while the reading process is translingual. In explaining why he prefers the term ‘translingual’ over ‘multilingual’, Suresh Canagarajah says, The term multilingual typically conceives of the relationship between languages in an additive manner.
