• Parth Joshi

Twenty years have passed since the publication of Amitav Ghosh’s non-fictional anthology Dancing in Cambodia, at Large in Burma when this is being written – a slightly less popular one as compared to other non-fictional works like In an Antique Land (1992), Countdown (1999), The Imam and the Indian (2002), The Great Derangement (2016) and The Nutmeg's Curse (2021). That human kind has proved itself probably the ‘fittest’ to survive in the history of evolution in the past decades is unquestionable; questions only pertain to the ways and means it has used to attain the unsurmountable position that it presently holds in the ‘Great Chain of Being’. The questions pertaining to the stupendous repercussions of an unceasing thirst for material progress and power are as pertinent in 2022 as they were during colonial times and before. They seem only magnified as the world stands spectator to the grim realities of the evacuated “unreal cities” of Ukraine, decimated into “heaps of broken images” by the Russian troupes. Such crises pose serious challenges to human resilience and questions about the role or art, literature and cultural artefacts in society. Ghosh has responded to such man-made crises in his non-fictional works as in his novels. The present paper would try to look at how Dancing in Cambodia reaffirms the identity of a civilization in shatters and show its resilience through the medium of art.

Ghosh, Dancing in Cambodia, crisis, culture, art, resilience

"Crisis, Combat and Culture: Reading Ghosh’s ‘Dancing in Cambodia’ in 2022", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.9, Issue 6, page no.c552-c558, June-2022, Available :http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR2206267.pdf

"Crisis, Combat and Culture: Reading Ghosh’s ‘Dancing in Cambodia’ in 2022", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org | UGC and issn Approved), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.9, Issue 6, page no. ppc552-c558, June-2022, Available at : http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR2206267.pdf