An Introspective Study of Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason

Abstract

The Circle of Reason (1986) by Amitav Ghosh charts the geographical and ideological journey of a young weaver, Alu, who is brought up in a small Bengal village. After being falsely accused of terrorist activity, he flees westwards to Calcutta, Goa, the fictional Gulf state of Al-Ghazira and finally to Algeria. Alu is clearly the main protagonist in the novel, although for large sections of the narrative he remains more a kind of silent centre, through which the various discursive threads in the narrative are woven together. Through the intermingling of these differing threads the novel also constitutes a generic mixture, containing features of the picaresque novel, magic realism, the novel of Ideas, the detective novel and Hindu epic.