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So much in the unsaid
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INTERVIEW History fascinates writer Amitav Ghosh. The process of discovering untold stories is also of one thing transforming into another he feels
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Photo:Murali Kumar
CONSTANT MOTION Amitav Ghosh
Let me not pretend to say anything new. Amitav Ghosh, with his large body of fiction and non-fiction, has attracted the attention of critics and academicians.
Any attempt to talk about his writings, and you’re hardly sure it hasn’t been articulated earlier. 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. 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 the country 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 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, 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. If R.K. Narayan were to write about Malgudi now, it would no longer be the same thing.
Does your essay on Satyajit Ray, transcend from being a tribute to being 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.
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.
Science is a major object of divide in the Circle of Reason. Commonly, science was associated with the West and hence a superior faculty of reasoning. Are technology and science now tools of a different kind of an empire?
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.
DEEPA GANESH
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Bangalore
Chennai
Coimbatore
Delhi
Hyderabad
Kochi
Madurai
Mangalore
Puducherry
Tiruchirapalli
Thiruvananthapuram
Vijayawada
Visakhapatnam
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