An Interview with Amitav Ghosh

Meridian Writing presenter Harriet Gilbert met with the prize winning novelist to discuss his background, his influences and his ever changing style ofwriting.

Who Is Amitav Ghosh?

Born in Calcutta in 1956, Ghosh spent the majority of his childhood in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Iran and India. After graduating from St. Stephen's College,Delhi, he went on to study Social Anthropology and Philosophy at Oxford University.

His writing career began at the Indian Express newspaper in New Delhi and in 1986 his first novel, The Circle Of Reason, went on to win one of France'stop literary awards, the Prix Medici Estranger. Subsequent articles and novels were welcomed with high critical acclaim, winning Ghosh a number of awards,including the 1999 Pushcart Prize and the Arthur C Clarke Award for his high brow thriller, The Calcutta Chromosome.

In 1999 Ghosh joined the faculty at Queens College in the City University of New York as Distinguished Professor in the Department Of Comparative Literaturewhere he currently teaches writing, film and literature classes.

Novels

Amitav Ghosh's first novel, The Circle Of Reason, sent its silent, potato-headed hero from Bengal to north Africa, while subsequent books have taken NewYork, Calcutta and Cairo in their energetic stride. Their sense of movement is one of the few things Ghosh's works have in common: he's most emphaticallynot a man to write the same book twice. So far, he's given us magic realism, science fiction and even, in the brilliant In An Antique Land, a non-fictionmix of history and social anthropology. Starting from the brief mention of a 12th-century Indian slave and his north-African Jewish master that Ghosh stumbledacross while studying anthropology at Oxford University, the book gradually prised open a long-lost medieval world of trade, travel and international culturalexchange.

Ghosh's most recent publication is a novel called The Glass Palace. This time, he's written a turbulent epic family saga, one that follows several generationsof a wide-spread Indian-Burmese family as they're tossed here and there by 20th century events.

Ghosh is most emphatically not a man to write the same book twice

The Glass Palace

The Glass Palace opens in Mandalay, in Burma, in 1885 - just as the invading British army is ousting the Burmese royal family from the throne. The storycentres around Rajumar, an Indian-born orphan who makes his fortune in the teak forests of Burma. Haunted by a vision of the Royal Family and a memberof their entourage, he journeys to India, where they have been exiled. Dolly, the royal attendant, becomes his wife and their story is the beginning ofa journey through the century. From the vast rubber plantations in India, to World War II, the British collapse in Singapore and a relation's involvementwith the rebellion of the Indian troops against their British officers, this is a whistle stop guide to the 20th century through the eyes of the sub continent.

Rather than being a dry history, the novel connects both the characters and the reader by an intensity of emotion. There is also a strong political implicationthat over 50 years since India and Burma were granted independence, the methods of manoeuvring the Indian people by British Colonialism has left a significantimpression on the thoughts and structure of India. Ghosh comments:

'Lets take the example of governmental institutions, this is an area where you really see the legacy of the Raj. If we look at the rule of law - the Rajclaimed to be founded on this rule - but in fact what was unacknowledged wasthat there was one law for Indians and a different law for Europeans. So today when you go to India anybody who can put together a bit of money has theidea that they are above the law. When you look at the institution that the British left behind, on the face of it, it would appear to be based on therule of law, but actually it is not, it is accompanied by a rider which includes exceptions. The British claimed that theirs was an administration wherecorruption was absent, but indeed this is the greatest possible corruption. Itis an institutional corruption.'

The Picture Within The Book

Ghosh is not a writer to commit himself lightly to the page and each theme is thoroughly researched and recorded. His critics have argued that this tendencyto embark on large themes, merely serves as a way of unloadinginformation regardless of the plot. So when in The Glass Palace, one of Rajkumar's sons runs a photographic studio, it is unsurprising that Ghosh records,in detail, the processes of photography. Ghosh explains how the medium of photography provided him with a way of presenting a different view of India:

'I had a great friend ,who was a photographer, who died half way through my research for the book and that had a very powerful impact on me. For my friendphotography had a moral charge - he never took pictures of anythingoutside of India, which was strange because he lived for most of his life outside of India... he had to find a way of looking at India in a non orientalway.'

From Place To Place

Ghosh's life has been somewhat nomadic.This rootless existence is reflected in his novels as the characters spend most of their lives on the move. Whatdoes this authorial restlessness mean to him? Ghosh comments:

'I think that I was writing about globalisation long before it became fashionable.The thing about the novel is that it has always been associated with asense of place and I think that this is one of the great weakenesses of the novel... to my mind there has always been an untruth in the way that novelswere written, that they didn't correspond to the way that lives are lead.'

But hasn't globalisation changed? Are people less likely to live a nomadic existence now? Ghosh replies:

'Indian merchants and traders have always been travelling, but the difference between that sort of globalisation and the globalisation that we see today,is that today's is a globalisation of capital. This is a sort of managed travel that we see, it is basically white westerners who get to travel. If youwere to experience travel from my perspective you would know that it is a constant bother going to airports because I am Indian.'

I believe that literature is one of many paths to self awareness

English Writing

Over the past decade Ghosh has established himself as one of the best known Indians writing in English today. He admits that he sometimes feels uncomfortableabout writing in an adopted language and explains that, 'I do battle with myself'. But where does this conflict stem from? And what does it tell us aboutthe author? Ghosh comments:

'I believe that literature is one of many paths to self awareness. If I am working with an instrument that actually prevents my self awareness, I have toask myself, "what am I doing?". There is a conflict here, I have to acknowledge it and I have to see a way to step past it.'

Further Reading

The Circle Of Reason, Viking, 1986;Shadow Lines, Penguin, 1990;In An Antique Land, Vintage, 1994;The Calcutta Chromosome : A Novel of Fevers, Delirium & Discovery, Picador, 1997;The Glass Palace, HarperCollins, 2000.