Power Politics And Literature: A New Historicist Reading Of The Calcutta Chromosome

Literary texts, according to critics like Stephen Greenblatt and Alan Sinfield, are the vehicles of power because power and its subversion existing in societies have been tellingly presented in literary texts. So, to resist power, literary texts have become prime tools for the contemporary writers, and to meet this end they employ literature by showing their explicit interest in resistance and subversion of power. Therefore, the past has been used as an impetus for political struggle in the present by the new historicist critics, and it implies that literary studies are inseparable from the sphere of politics. So, wherever question of power arises, truth and politics intersects. Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome (1995) is a fine specimen of the power politics between classes. This paper will attempt to read this novel from the purview of power exhibited in its polymorphous forms.