Lighting anti-colonial lamps

Amitav Ghosh, the renowned Indian writer, is visiting Korea this week to receive the 2025 Pak Kyongni Prize, sponsored by the Toji Cultural Foundation.

- KIM SEONG-KON

Ghosh is an internationally known, critically acclaimed writer who was “widely discussed and considered a top contender” for the 2025 Nobel Prize in literature.

Whatis especially crucial to Amitav Ghosh’s work is his examination of the various negative aftereffects and remnants of colonialism that are still persistent in former colonies, even though they are often inconspicuous or invisible. His recurrent themes include colonial history, cultural displacement, and the relocation of colonized people.

Ghosh’s 2000 novel, “The Glass Palace,” depicts the lives of three generations of the family of Rajkumar Raha, an Indian orphan, in an exploration of how European colonialism uprooted and ruined the lives of native people in India and other South Asian countries under the banner of capitalism. Through the sagas ofits characters, Ghosh’s novel suggests that the aftereffects of colonialism still cast a shadow over the lives of formerly colonized people.

In that sense, Ghosh’s seminal novel has a deep resonance with Pak Kyongni’s monumental epic “Land.”

Pak’s novel, too, portrays the lingering ills of colonialism in depicting how Japanese occupiers destroyed Korean lives, with many losing their property and having to leave their homeland in frustration. “Land” foreshadows how the specter of colonialism continues to haunt the Korean psyche. Pak’s theme revolves around Korea's colonial history that caused the Korean people's relocation as well as cultural displacement.