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Photo: Murali Kumar K.

CONSTANT MOTION Amitav Ghosh sees his imagination as tied to two ends of a compass

Any attempt to talk about his writings, and you’re hardly sure it hasn’t been articulated earlier. Share the feeling with the unpresumptuous writer and he, looking rather bashful says, “Oh, yeah… a lot has been written about my works…”.

Speak about the tedious nature of these analyses and he’ll quickly add, “They scare me too… I don’t understand most of what is said, so I’ve stopped reading these theoretical pieces.”

Amitav Ghosh’s writing is about the unsaid, undiscovered stories of history. In most of his fictional works one finds him negotiating with the past even as he reconstructs the present. This can be extended to his non-fiction too. In his essay on the Moghul emperor Babur, a man with remarkable literary and language sensibilities, he quotes a poem that Babur wrote while fleeing from the Uzbeks.

“Like us many have spoken over this spring, but they were gone in the twinkling of an eye,/We conquered the world with bravery and might, but we did not take it with us to the grave.”

Calling it a unique literary work, he says, “Its tone is disarmingly open and trusting, and in self-revelation it yields nothing to the confessional memoir of the 1990s.”

He adds: “The Muslim fundamentalists of contemporary Afghanistan would do well to read ‘The Baburnama’: they would find that the past they want to return to is not quite what they imagine it to be.”

Excerpts from an interview with the writer who was in the city for a Toto Fund for The Arts event:

Yes, I think so. Calcutta is part of my imagination. In fact, I would like to see my imagination as tied to two ends of a compass. While one end is fixed in Calcutta, the other is moving, travelling and discovering.

People are dispersed, scattered and they are my subject of interest. I am fascinated by people who carry Malgudi with them. There is an interlocking of the global and local, which is of great interest to me. And that’s so true of today’s Bangalore. If R.K. Narayan were to write about Malgudi now, it would no longer be the same thing.

He could never leave Kabul behind. For us it seems like an unbelievable thing, but that was the case for him.

People in India take writing very seriously. The commitment of a writer must measure up to this seriousness. I write about issues, but only those that seem really important to me. I believe that one shouldn’t write without taking time and that becomes my boundary. It limits me from writing about everything.

Satyajit Ray is someone I admire and look up to. The strictness with which he worked, his incredible integrity… And yes, it’s true nobody else could discover and perceive the tenderness of human relationships like he did. In fact, Calcutta was going through difficult times then… but nothing changed his core, he continued to work the way he always did.

There are certain important things that we have achieved through this notion of a nation. I don’t think there was any other way in which we could have seen through the Independence movement.

What I meant is that there are no longer communities living in one place. We are a dispersed people, and so I think its time to speak of our culture in different terms. There are communities that are closely associated with the nation, but not within the geographical space.

Yes, I just don’t agree with this whole business of commonwealth. It is like whitewashing the imperial powers. And by accepting the award, it’s a way of legitimising the history of the empire. I thought it would be untrue to assimilate my book into this rubric after resisting it in my writings.

Cultures are very open, enmeshed in each other. This is what I discuss in “Antique Land”. Cultures are never any one thing, they are an amalgamation of many streams. That’s why I am constantly puzzled by the manner in which the English and French talk about “Englishness” and “Frenchness”. One can never talk about India in such definitive terms.

In India, there has always been an engagement with the abstract, mathematical thought. Science has drawn from popular thought. In the 17th century, a Dutchman wrote a Botanical treatise in the Malabars with the help of a local, Erava herbalist. This did not happen on unequal terms.

Now, there is a deep divide between the technology enabled and its have-nots. This is true of even the West and its impact is very destructive. But one of the ways in which we are fortunate is that anyone who can pick up a pen – the humble, the gifted, anybody – can make it to the IITs. This, however, was not possible 50-60 years ago.

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