Humour Through Incongruity in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppie

Abstract

Humour as a literary device is mainly explored to see how a geographical imaginary is evoked in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies. Humour is being studied from the perspective of incongruity, or juxtaposition of mismatched cultural frames, that compel the reader to understand the discourse at hand differently through distant reading as suggested by Franco Moretti. The use of tropes will also look at a historical consciousness in the narrative as a deliberate move by the narrator in driving the discourse in a direction that does not limit reading the humorous event as merely postcolonial or imperial. Rather it opens up the space to understand strands of life in the Indian context which were integral to its culture and people.