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There’s so much in the unsaid
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In his works one finds writer Amitav Ghosh negotiating with the past even as he reconstructs the present
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Photo: Murali Kumar K.
ISSUES INTEREST HIM Amitav Ghosh
Amitav Ghosh, with his large body of fiction and non-fiction, has attracted the attention of critics and academicians alike. Speak about the tedious nature of their analyses and he’ll quickly add, “They scare me too… I don’t u
nderstand most of what is said, so I’ve stopped reading these theoretical pieces.”
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 Mughal 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.”
Excerpts from an interview with the writer who was in Bangalore for a Toto Fund for The Arts event:
Many writers have a marked literary territory. Faulkner, Hardy, James Joyce, Pamuk… Calcutta becomes an indispensable geographical location in most of your writings. Even when we talk of colliding worlds, do specific physical locations anchor a sense of rootedness, and become an embodiment of memories?
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 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.
You respond to issues in your immediate context, for instance, the Sahara project, the tsunami…
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. Does your essay on Satyajit Ray transcend from being a tribute to a comment on a disappearing way of life?
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.
In one of your interviews you have said the ideal of a nation no longer holds. What exactly do you mean?
There are some 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 it’s 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.
You refused the Commonwealth Prize for “The Glass Palace”. Did you have a problem with the label?
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.
Are cultures porous? Do you see them as separate entities or as constantly flowing? In an “Antique Land”, aren’t you trying to forge complex relations between cultures?
Cultures are very open, enmeshed in each other. This is what I discuss in “Antique Land”. That’s why I am constantly puzzled by the manner in which the English and the French talk about “Englishness” and “Frenchness”. One can never talk about India in such definitive terms.
DEEPA GANESH
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Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Coimbatore
Delhi
Hyderabad
Kochi
Madurai
Mangalore
Puducherry
Tiruchirapalli
Thiruvananthapuram
Vijayawada
Visakhapatnam
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