The Poetics of Sp Place, it argues, is the ever-changing product of interconnecting flows that have been accelerated by diasporic movement and globalization; and such a view provides the novels with a focus for a consideration of the claims of conflicting epistemologies in areas such as ecology, human rights and historiography, as well as geography.
I shall be looking particularly at three interlinked issues: ways in which characters in the novels are seen, or see themselves, as in or out of place; possible sites of collaboration between diasporic and local characters; and alternative conceptions of place that are developed both by the characters and, implicitly at least, by the novels as a whole.
Both debate issues of belonging and cultural affiliation from the vantage point of the returning woman protagonist, while locating her thinking in relation to various local knowledges. Like Anil, who brings what she sees as Western methods of scientific inquiry to bear on her investigation of alleged Sri Lankan atrocities, Piya is also an empirical researcher, a cetologist who comes to the Sundarbans, or tide country, region of West Bengal to study the local river dolphins in their native habitat.
Seen from this viewpoint, then, places are the products of the multiple optics through which they are, or have been, viewed by different groups of people and at different moments in time. The novels do far more than simply represent traumatic events; they stage possible alternative scenarios, by offering visions of place that are at odds with the dominant discourses of their societies.
Anil and Piya are not necessarily out of place because they come to South Asia from the West, and conversely, seemingly rooted local individuals in the two novels may be out of place in the particular chronotopes in which they find themselves.
