Vol. 8, Issue 1, Part B (2026)

Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies is a reimagining of colonial history as it foregrounds lives previously excluded from imperial and nationalist historiography. Drawing on Subaltern Studies, particularly Ranajit Guha’s critique of elite historiography, this paper reads the novel as a literary counter-archive that restores historical agency to those hitherto marginal sections of society. Rather than centering administrators, policies, or nationalist leaders, Ghosh narrates empire through peasants, women, convicts, migrants, and racialised intermediaries whose actions rarely register as “political” within official historical records. Through an analysis of Deeti and Kalua, the paper shows how subaltern agency emerges through refusal, flight, these forms of action are not recognized by elite historiography consistently. Neel Rattan Halder’s trajectory from zamindar to transported convict reveals how subalternity itself is produced through law and dispossession. The figures of Zachary Reid and Ah Fatt further complicate colonial hierarchies, demonstrating how empire sustains itself by distributing partial privilege to some while rendering others permanently disposable. The novel’s polyphonic structure disrupts the linear, state-centred historical narration. This paper argues that Sea of Poppies does not merely recover forgotten lives; it interrogates the conditions under which history itself is written. In doing so, Ghosh transforms the novel into a site where subaltern lives emerge from the periphery they have hitherto been allocated in the colonial archive.