Positioning of Identity in Amitav Ghosh’s in An Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler’s Tale

The present paper is a cognitive study of identity in Amitav Ghosh’s travel memoir masterpiece in An Antique Land (1992). The paper employs Michael Bamberg’s Narrative project (2012a) together with his Positioning Theory (2012b) as both tools and framework for analysis, respectively. In an attempt to position Ghosh’s view of his own identity and that of the Indian slave in the two parallel narratives, the research applies first Bamberg’s three traditions of narratives, the cognitive, textual and interpersonal performative. For a fully-fledged analysis, Peter Stockwell’s perceptual and relational deixis are borrowed from his Deictic Shift Theory (2002) and added to that of Bamberg’s textual tradition. In addition, Bamberg’s third tradition lacks details about body language and gestures, for it only covers intonation and pitch. Hence, Tom Grothe’s Taxonymy of non-verbal communication (2023) is adopted to fill in the gaps. As far as Ghosh’s character is concerned, a dual identity is detected: an agentive, proactive and changing identity is seen with positive characters who strengthen the bonds between the antique lands; whereas a passive constant identity replaces it when bothered by threatening characters who abolish any great history that had once existed between the two nations. However, the slave’s character as well as his master’s seem to take only one identity-one that is agentive, proactive and flexible.