Amitav Ghosh

Anshuman A. Mondal

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780719070051
• eBook ISBN: 9781847796189
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Amitav Ghosh is an authoritative critical introduction to the fictional and non-fictional writings of one of the most celebrated and significant literary voices to have emerged from India in recent decades. It is the first full-length study of Amitav Ghosh's work to be available outside India. Encompassing all of Ghosh's fictional and non-fictional writings to date, this book takes a thematic approach which enables in-depth analysis of the cluster of themes, ideas and issues that Ghosh has steadily built up into a substantial intellectual project. This project overlaps significantly with many of the key debates in postcolonial studies making this book both an introduction to Ghosh's writing and a contribution to the development of ideas on the 'postcolonial', in particular, its relation to postmodernism. Aimed at students and the general reader, this book is an ideal introduction to one of contemporary literature's most fascinating writers.

1

Contexts and intertexts

In June 1997 The New Yorker magazine published a special issue on English language Indian fiction to commemorate India and Pakistan’s fiftieth anniversary of independence from colonial rule. Inside is a photograph of some of the most celebrated English language novelists to have emerged from the subcontinent in recent decades, writers whose presence on the bestseller lists of Western literary markets has been accompanied by the unprecedented density of their citations for major literary prizes – Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Arundhati Roy, Rohinton Mistry, Amit Chaudhuri, and Vikram Seth amongst others.¹ At the back, slightly out of focus, is Amitav Ghosh; the perspective of the shot distances him and he appears somewhat marginal to the main group. The photograph is a large one, taking up almost three-quarters of the double-page spread, but on its left-hand margin is some text, a fragment of an article on the ‘forgotten army’ led by the Indian nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose, which had fought the British alongside the Japanese in South East Asia during the Second World War. The article is by Amitav Ghosh.² This fortuitous layout perhaps emphasises with appropriate clarity Ghosh’s literary concern with margins – marginal peoples, histories, episodes, knowledge systems, and beliefs.

Paradoxically, Ghosh has become one of the central figures to emerge from the English language literary field after the success of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children opened up the international Anglophone markets to the new writing emerging from the subcontinent in the 1980s. Moreover, he has developed a substantial body of work that resonates with some of the central concerns of what was then also an emergent field of criticism: postcolonialism. In all his major works, and in his essays and journalism, Ghosh meditates upon a core set of issues but each time he does so from a new perspective: the troubled (and troubling) legacy of colonial knowledge and discourse on formerly colonised societies, peoples, and ideas; the ambivalent relationship to modernity of the so-called ‘developing’ or ‘Third’ world; the formation and reformation of identities in colonial and post-colonial societies; the question of agency for those previously seen as the objects but not subjects of history; the recovery of lost or suppressed histories; an engagement with cultural multiplicity and difference; and an insistent critique of Eurocentrism in general.

In many of his public pronouncements, Ghosh has disavowed the idea that his work is a representative example of postcolonialism, or that he is a ‘post-colonial’ writer; indeed, he has claimed that he does not really know what the term means.³ Nevertheless, he is on friendly terms with many of the critics and theorists who have done much to define the field, and who in turn acknowledge his work as a crucial index of many of the themes, issues, and problematics that constitute the multidimensional nature of the post-colonial predicament today. A critical examination of Amitav Ghosh’s writing is thus an opportunity not only to ascertain and evaluate his own predilections and concerns but also to explore the limits and possibilities of postcolonialism itself as a critical practice.

Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in July 1956, the son of a diplomat and housewife. Although the family had hailed from eastern Bengal and migrated to Calcutta before the Partition cataclysms of 1947, the figure of the ‘refugee’ is one that has continued to inform his fiction throughout his career, most prominently in The Circle of Reason (1986), The Shadow Lines (1988) and The Glass Palace (2000). Other less forcibly displaced persons – economic migrants, travellers, students, researchers on field trips – populate his fictional and non-fictional work and constitute his central characters. Perhaps his early childhood accompanying his diplomat parents to their postings in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan), Sri Lanka, and Iran may have attuned his sensibilities to the rewards of travel and its possibilities for a writer who is keen to examine the world from the perspective of the unsettled, or uprooted – possibilities that might offer insights unavailable to others. He has remarked that ‘travelling is always in some way connected with my fictional work’,⁴ and others have noted that Ghosh visualises ‘movement’ as in some way fundamental to human experience, not necessarily seeing it as involving a physical journey (though it often does) but also as a potentiality that inhabits the consciousness of even those people often regarded as ‘settled’, such as peasants.⁵ Indeed, much of his work challenges the assumption that human history is one of ‘settled’ populations and ‘stable’ cultures.

On the other hand, Calcutta, his native city, exerts a powerful influence on Ghosh’s imagination. Its presence is marked and mediated by his birth into what is known as the bhadralok, the upper and middle sections of Bengali society that emerged in the nineteenth century as a consequence of the reorganisation of the Bengal economy under colonial rule. Roughly translated, the term means ‘gentle folk’, and the bhadralok of Calcutta constitutes Bengal’s intellectual, cultural, and political elite, though at its lower reaches the economic position of many bhadralok families can often be precarious – a situation that is memorably captured, as Meenakshi Mukherjee observes, in the precise class positioning of the anonymous narrator of The Shadow Lines whose family is ‘Bengali bhadralok, starting at the lower edge of the spectrum and ascending to its higher reaches in one generation, with family connections above as well as below its own station’.⁶ She goes on to add that this class location determines in many ways the spatial experience of Calcutta itself, creating an imaginative geography of the city that, as with all cities, associates certain localities with certain classes. In other words, the physical environment of the city comes to represent itself to the mind of its inhabitants in particular ways, as, for example, it does to the narrator when he visits some poor relations in a part of the city that backs onto Calcutta’s ever increasing slums. Thus, if travel is a key register of Ghosh’s awareness of the importance of space in human experience, it is nevertheless his recognition that space is not an inert physical dimension exterior to human consciousness but is rather intimately shaped by the particular ways in which it is imagined that determines his examination of culturally created spaces, such as nation-states, and the borders – both physical and imagined – that delimit and define them.

But perhaps the most important impact that Calcutta has had on Ghosh’s imagination is through its status as an intellectual and cultural centre. Of all its identities, it is this perhaps above all that appeals to the Bengali cultural imagination and that of the bhadralok in particular. Established by the British as a trading outpost for their operations in India, Calcutta quickly became the richest city in Asia and British India’s capital – the second most important city in the British Empire. Wealth, power and privilege soon helped establish it as a cultural and intellectual hub, along which traffic between Indian and European ideas helped construct a vibrant, ‘modern’ vernacular culture and rich intellectual heritage that today, since its decline as a political and economic capital, is cherished by Bengalis as a living bridge to its period of greatness. To the bhadralok, knowledge and culture still represent access to the world at large, a cosmopolitanism that was brought into being early in the colonial period and which still persists in the arguments and addas (informal conversational gatherings), debates and discussions that take place in Calcutta’s legendary coffee-houses, its lecture-halls, student hostels, universities, parks, and around its bookstalls and bookshops (the annual book fair is still perhaps the largest of its kind anywhere in the world).

In a prize-winning essay about his grandfather’s bookcase, Ghosh has remarked on the catholicity of the books that he found there as well as its significant exclusions:

Textbooks and schoolbooks were never allowed; nor were books of a professional nature … the great majority … were novels. There were a few works of anthropology and psychology, books that in some way had filtered into the literary consciousness of the time: The Golden Bough … The Collected Works of Sigmund Freud, Marx and Engels’s Manifesto, Havelock Ellis and Malinowski.⁷

These books were hardly read, Ghosh notes, because his family were ‘busy [and] practical … with little time to spend on books’, but the glass-fronted bookcases ‘let the visitor know that this was a house in which books were valued; in other words, that we were cultivated people. This is always important in Calcutta’ (‘The March of the Novel’, 288).

However, despite its past eminence Calcutta has always been something of a marginal centre – first within the British Empire, then within India itself, after the transfer of the capital to New Delhi in the latter decades of the Raj – a paradox that has always generated a great deal of ambiguity in the Bengali intellectual imagination about its relationship to modernity. Ghosh notes, for example, that of the novels that made up the bulk of his grandfather’s books, ‘About a quarter … were in Bengali – a representative selection of the mainstream tradition of Bengali fiction in the twentieth century’, whilst the rest – the vast majority – ‘were in English. But of these only a small proportion … had been originally written in English. The others were translations from a number of other languages, most of them European’ (‘The March of the Novel’, 290). Displaying as it does the characteristic literary cosmopolitanism of Bengali intellectual culture, the bookcase also bears testimony to the inequality of the literary and cultural cosmopolis and the subordinate status of the Bengali tradition. Furthermore, it is English, the coloniser’s language, that enables access to this international literary scene, reinforcing the sense of dependency. Calcutta, then, perhaps offers Ghosh something more than a familiar environment, both social and physical; its importance lies as a signifier of colonial relations as mediated through the global hierarchies of culture. Most notably in The Calcutta Chromosome (1996), but also in The Circle of Reason, the city is both a metaphor for the knowledge/power relations initiated by colonialism, and the stage on which Ghosh re-enacts what has been called ‘the battle for cultural parity’ that the Bengali cultural elite have waged ever since.⁸

Given the reverence for knowledge (mixed with a fair degree of dissident irreverence, to be sure) that pertains amongst the Calcutta bhadralok, it is unsurprising that Ghosh’s academic achievements and interests have intersected with his literary ambitions throughout his life and career. As a student at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University, a college that has produced several other world-class writers, he graduated with a BA in History, followed by an MA in Sociology. Like many other academically minded and intellectually gifted students, he embarked on what Edward Said has called ‘the voyage in’ to the colonial metropolis to undertake doctoral research in Social Anthropology at Oxford University.⁹ This would prove to be a pivotal period in his development as a writer, giving him the opportunity to travel to Egypt to pursue fieldwork for his doctoral thesis. That experience would eventually germinate into his ground-breaking and perhaps most important work, In an Antique Land (1992). He returned to India to work as a Research Associate and then Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Delhi University, and at this point began to write his first novel, The Circle of Reason, which would be published during his tenure there. On leaving Delhi University, he has since held a number of academic posts in America and India, most notably at Columbia University, at City University New York (CUNY), where he is Distinguished Professor in Comparative Literature, and Harvard, where he is currently a Visiting Professor.

This academic biography, which runs in parallel with his career as a novelist, essayist, and journalist, alerts us not only to his personal investment and proximity to institutionalised knowledge, but also to the debates about knowledge itself across a number of disciplines that inform his work. The striking interdisciplinarity of his work and its close relation to academic debates about the nature of knowledge that have taken shape in the latter decades of the twentieth century – in other words, to ‘critical theory’ – is obvious, notwithstanding his own disaffiliation from it. Despite his denials, such links to current thinking in the academy are an important dimension of his work and one that gives his writing an intellectual rigour and substance that his contemporaries can seldom match. What really sets him apart from much academic discourse is the accessibility of his work, the ways in which his intellectualism is worn lightly on the fabric of his prose.

Amitav Ghosh has published six major works, of which five can be unproblematically classified as novels. His first, The Circle of Reason, was published in 1986 to some acclaim, notably by the distinguished novelist and critic Anthony Burgess. It is an episodic, picaresque novel in three parts, linked only by a young boy with a potato-shaped head called Alu, and a half-hearted young intelligence officer, Jyoti Das. In the first section, Alu arrives as an orphan at the house of his uncle, Balaram Bose, a village schoolmaster with an idiosyncratic regard for scientific knowledge who values both ‘mainstream’ or ‘orthodox’ science and ‘pseudo-sciences’ such as phrenology. Although declaring himself to be an admirer of ‘Reason’, Balaram’s behaviour is ironically portrayed as being both rational and irrational, and his increasingly obsessive and erratic behaviour becomes mono-maniacally fixated on a feud with a neighbour, Bhudeb Roy. This neighbourly feud, in turn, is mistaken by the state authorities as potentially political in nature and by the time Alu escapes as the sole survivor of the disastrous denouement to Balaram’s conflict with Bhudeb Roy he is a wanted fugitive, having been absurdly identified as a political extremist and threat to the state.

In section two, Alu, along with other illegal Indian migrants, finds himself smuggled into the Gulf emirate of Al-Ghazira where he lives in a boarding house run by an ageing former courtesan, Zindi at-Taffaha, along with a multi-ethnic, multilingual, diasporic community of illegal immigrants from India, East Africa, the other Arab states, and Bangladesh. Like the others, Alu works illegally as a labourer, but one day a half-finished shopping mall which he is helping to build collapses on him. Miraculously, he survives and on his rescue he reprises the ghost of his uncle Balaram by embarking on an idealistic project to set up a money-free commune. Once again, this is misinterpreted by the state and, whilst Alu is on a shopping trip, the community is attacked by the authorities and many are killed, or captured and deported. Alu escapes with Zindi, but is followed by Jyoti Das, who has tracked him all the way to al-Ghazira from north-eastern Bengal.

The final section takes place amongst the dunes of Saharan Algeria with Alu, Zindi and their companions still on the run from Jyoti Das who has, by now, given up trying to arrest them and is only going through the motions. They find refuge with an Indian doctor who is part of a small community of Indians working in this remote corner of Algeria. This doctor is actually the daughter of one of Balaram’s college friends, and unbeknownst to Alu and Zindi she is also offering hospitality to Jyoti Das. In a burlesque conclusion, Alu and Zindi realise that Das has no intention of arresting them. After the death of one of their companions, Zindi and Alu prepare to return to India and Das himself journeys on towards Europe, leaving behind his job.

A highly ambitious novel, The Circle of Reason is both loosely plotted but also knitted tightly together by a series of motifs and recurring images, such that its open-ended episodic linearity is cross-hatched with patterns that draw on its central metaphor of weaving, which is used as a metaphor for the process of storytelling; at the same time, the history of weaving is used as a synecdoche for the nature of Reason, which is both liberating and oppressive; linear and straightforward, and circular and convoluted; reasonable and unreasonable. The novel dramatises the encounter of colonial, pre-colonial and ‘para-colonial’ knowledges within a colonial and post-colonial milieu, demonstrating how the formation of colonial power/knowledge complexes is both reproduced and ironically subverted by its reception in colonised societies; how ‘subaltern’ peoples, in the form of illegal immigrants in a fictionalised Gulf emirate, both elude and fall victim to the ‘logic’ of the modern state; how diasporic connections increasingly traverse and transgress the boundaries imposed by such raison d’état; and eventually how ‘Reason’ is thwarted by its necessary imbrication with the emotional ties of custom, tradition, and human sympathy.

Whilst writing The Circle of Reason in Delhi, Ghosh was to witness at first hand the anti-Sikh communal riots that followed in the wake of the assassination of the Indian Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984. The experience shook him deeply, so much so that he felt unable to write directly about it until more than a decade later, in an essay entitled ‘The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi’.¹⁰ Nevertheless, as he admits in that essay, it was an episode that was pivotal to his development as a writer because it informed his next novel, The Shadow Lines, and in a more oblique way, its successor, In an Antique Land.

Dispensing with the marginal but perceptible elements of magic realism and fantasy which indicated that The Circle of Reason was in muted thrall to the spell cast by Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, The Shadow Lines also distinguishes itself in terms of its tightly plotted structure and the greater realisation of its individual characters. The technical skill displayed in his first novel, however, is sharpened and put to brilliant effect at the service of a narrative in which time and space is fluid and constantly shifting from one location to another, and from one given moment to another without any forced transitions. Being, in part, a novel about memory its form mimics the ebb and flow of subjectivity, as it struggles to make sense of a difficult trauma that is at once both personal and subjective and yet intersects with larger historical forces and public events.

The shadow lines of the title are accordingly both subjective and objective; experiential and political; they are those invisible borders that mark the transition from youth to maturity, the past from the present, and those intangible but deeply felt markers of identity that mark oneself off from others, one’s own ‘community’ from others’, the correlates of which constitute the material borders of political entities such as nation-states which physically mark and limit the spatial and temporal coordinates of their citizens’ experiences. In its form, however, the novel also enacts the transgression of these shadow lines, moving across space and time with an ease that challenges the categorical permanence that political borders aspire to represent.

An unnamed first-person narrator, through whose consciousness everything that happens in the course of the narrative is mediated, recalls his boyhood admiration of his uncle Tridib, whose death in a communal riot is the pivot around which the narrator’s mnemonic peregrinations revolve. The narrator himself, however, was not present at Tridib’s death so his attempt to make sense of it is haunted by this absence. Around this absent centre, the narrator’s swirl of memories is constructed through the assimilation of other people’s recollections of the event: Tridib’s younger brother, Robi, and May Price, an Englishwoman with whom Tridib was becoming romantically involve...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Series editor’s foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Chronology
• 1 Contexts and intertexts
• 2 The ‘metaphysic’ of modernity
• 3 Looking-glass borders
• 4 Tiny threads, gigantic tapestries
• 5 Critical overview and conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index