Histories of Displacement: Migration, Diasporic Consciousness, and the Quest for Sustainable Communities in Amitav Ghosh's The Circle of Reason and The Glass Palace

Abstract Amitav Ghosh is one of the pioneering authors in post-colonial Indian writing in English. His powerful narrative techniques enable the reader to travel not just through geographical space, but also through history and culture. This paper examines how Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason and The Glass Palace explore themes of migration, marginality, and diasporic consciousness within the broader context of cultural sustainability. Both novels are marked by displacement, either voluntary or forced, across geographies, reflecting how movements of people are entangled with political upheavals, economic survival, and cultural negotiation. His narratives portray exile and dislocation as vital in these fictions, suggesting that migration is not merely physical but deeply psychological and cultural. The displaced individuals strive to build meaningful community life in unfamiliar territories by navigating their fractured identities, negotiating between memory and adaptation. He shapes individual and collective identities, keeping focus on marginalised segments, and interrogates the systems of exploitation that perpetuate exclusion while also highlighting their acts of resilience. This paper focuses on two key areas: representation of migration, marginality, and diasporic consciousness in The Circle of Reason and The Glass Palace, and how they model sustainable, culturally rooted communities through narrative structure and shared historical memory.