Multiculturalism and identity politics in the novels of Amitav Ghosh

Abstract Multiculturalism is nothing but a perspective on or a way of viewing human life. “Multiculturalism is a body of thought in political philosophy about the proper way to respond to cultural and religious diversity.” The central insights of multiculturalism are that human beings are culturally embedded as they live within a culturally structured world and organize their lives and social relations in terms of a culturally derived system of meaning and significance. Moreover, different cultures represent different systems of meaning and vision of life. All cultures are equally rich and deserve equal respect for its members. Every culture is internally plural and reflects a continuing conversation between its different traditions and strands of thoughts. Cultures grow out of conscious and unconscious interactions with each other, define their identity in terms of what they take to be their significant other, and are at least partially multicultural in their origins and constitution. So multicultural perspective is composed of the creative interplay of these insights- namely the cultural embeddedness of human beings, the inescapability and desirability of cultural plurality and the plural and multicultural constitution of each culture.,