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Abstract
Philip Michael Ondaatje, a Sri Lankan born Canadian writer with Tamil roots, is a prolific poet and award-winning author of great calibre and rare literary charm. He is regarded as one of the most celebrated and versatile diasporic writers of Canada since the 1960s. In his works, Ondaatje focuses on the internal lives of his characters and exhibits an appeal with extraordinary personality types, the changing aspects of family life and the consequence of wars in the lives of individuals and homelands. Ondaatje’s writings reveal the postcolonial power dynamics and postmodern self-reflectivity from a multicultural perspective. Here by mixture of both frontier life and our position within the world themes are framed in the novel of Anil Ghost .It provides an enquiry into identity reflective of the cultural clashes that are inevitable consequence of such an interweaving of nationalities, histories, and border divisions. Anil’s Ghost is set amidst Sri Lanka’s civil conflict, focused on a period in the mid 80s and early 90s when the government was combating both Tamil separatists and Sinhalese insurgents. Ondaatje is quick to point out that the novel is not only about his native Sri Lanka. It is a harrowing, tough and lush narrative driven by the search for truth. It is about all cultures that try to obliterate or bury the truth.