Cultural Memory and Performance: Representation of Mnemic Knowledge in Amitav Ghosh's River of Smoke

Abstract

This paper is a critical reading of the mnemic mode of representing, remembering and disseminating a community's history through visual archives and oral performance as represented in Amitav Ghosh's River of Smoke (2011). In the novel, Ghosh imaginatively characterizes Deeti, the matriarch of the La Fami Colver community, as creating a visual archive of her community's movement from the inland plains of various parts of Eastern India to the Mauritius. That the visual archive-called Deeti's Memory-temple-is not informed by a lithic logic (which was one of the governing principles of the modern European archival processes of the time), but is, instead, determined by embodied and performative acts of reliving memories is central to this paper. By moving away from a textual archive of memory and instead, paying attention to creative visual narrative forms, Deeti's mode of archiving, it is argued, is an illustration of other non-narrative traditions of archival methods already in place in Indic traditions. The paper highlights the imperial cosmopolitan vision that characterized European modes of assimilation of knowledge being countered by Deeti, enabling a discursive movement from technologies of memorialization to a cultural memory.