The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : An unforgettable evening for his fans

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Tuesday, Jun 28, 2011
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Karnataka

Karnataka - Bangalore

An unforgettable evening for his fans

Staff Reporter

— Photo K. Murali Kumar

A LIGHT MOMENT:Amitav Ghosh being greeted

BANGALORE: Acclaimed author and master storyteller Amitav Ghosh on Monday offered his small yet rapt audience a short peek into the journey of Bahram Modi, a Parsi opium merchant in Canton, and his chance encounter with Napoleon Bonaparte, who appears to play a cameo in the second book of the Ibis trilogy, River of Smoke.

Mr. Ghosh, who read a long excerpt from the much-awaited book, interacting with his adoring audience for a good one hour, said that he was happy to be in Bangalore, not only because many of his “writer friends” who lived here, but also because it is in many ways “India's books city”.

Researching his novels

In the interactive session, he fielded questions on a wide variety of topics, ranging from his approach to researching his novels to discussing characters in the first of the trilogy, Sea of Poppies, which seem to have left an indelible mark on readers.

Often witty, he fielded questions on his choice of language and complicated dialects with ease, even as he had the audience in splits with a reference to Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul. When asked what inspired the character of Deeti, the strong and key character in Sea of Poppies who appears in this one too, he said: “Characters tend to take a life of their own, and they just impose themselves.”

Strong matriarchs

Reflecting on her strength, he added: “Wherever the Girmitya diaspora has gone, they have had these strong matriarchs who wield a lot of power. Naipaul's mother, for one, was known to be a very powerful matriarch.”

He added on a lighter note, much to the audience's delight: “He himself was terrified of her…. And that's probably where his recent statements on women comes from.”

‘Narrow world view'

Mr. Naipaul had recently ruffled feathers across the world criticising women writers for what he called their “sentimentality” and “narrow view of the world”.

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