Amitav Ghosh

By Anshuman A. Mondal

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jul 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781847796189

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Amitav Ghosh

CONTEMPORARY WORLD WRITERS

SERIES EDITOR JOHN THIEME

ALREADY PUBLISHED IN THE SERIES

Peter Carey BRUCE WOODCOCK

Maxine Hong Kingston HELENA GRICE

Kazuo Ishiguro BARRY LEWIS

Hanif Kureishi BART MOORE-GILBERT

Rohinton Mistry PETER MOREY

Timothy Mo ELAINE YEE LIN HO

Toni Morrison JILL MATUS

Alice Munro CORAL ANN HOWELLS

Les Murray STEVEN MATTHEWS

Caryl Phillips BÉNÉDICTE LEDENT

Amy Tan BELLA ADAMS

Ngugi wa Thiong’o PATRICK WILLIAMS

Derek Walcott JOHN THIEME

Amitav Ghosh

ANSHUMAN A. MONDAL

Copyright © Anshuman A. Mondal 2007

The right of Anshuman A. Mondal to be identified as the author of this work

has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and

Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK

and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

Distributed exclusively in the USA by

Palgrave, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA

Distributed exclusively in Canada by

ubc Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall,

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN 978 0 7190 7004 4

First published 2007

16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07     10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Typeset in Aldus

by Koinonia, Manchester

Printed in Great Britain

by CPI, Bath

for Joanna, with love

Contents

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

Series editor’s foreword

Contemporary World Writers is an innovative series of authoritative introductions to a range of culturally diverse contemporary writers from outside Britain and the United States or from ‘minority’ backgrounds within Britain or the United States. In addition to providing comprehensive general introductions, books in the series also argue stimulating original theses, often but not always related to contemporary debates in post-colonial studies.

The series locates individual writers within their specific cultural contexts, while recognising that such contexts are themselves invariably a complex mixture of hybridised influences. It aims to counter tendencies to appropriate the writers discussed into the canon of English or American literature or to regard them as ‘other’.

Each volume includes a chronology of the writer’s life, an introductory section on formative contexts and intertexts, discussion of all the writer’s major works, a bibliography of primary and secondary works and an index. Issues of racial, national and cultural identity are explored, as are gender and sexuality. Books in the series also examine writers’ use of genre, particularly ways in which Western genres are adapted or subverted and ‘traditional’ local forms are reworked in a contemporary context.

Contemporary World Writers aims to bring together the theoretical impulse which currently dominates post-colonial studies and closely argued readings of particular authors’ works, and by so doing to avoid the danger of appropriating the specifics of particular texts into the hegemony of totalising theories.

Preface

Readers familiar with the Contemporary World Writers series will immediately notice that the organisation of this book does not follow the pattern of previous contributions. Rather than a chronological, novel-by-novel approach, this book offers a more thematic organisation as the best way to approach Ghosh’s work. It is up to the reader to evaluate whether this is justified or not. Although all writers hope that all readers will read their books from start to finish, those who are looking for treatment of specific texts can find guidance as to which chapters emphasise which texts in the final section of ‘1: Contexts and intertexts’. An explanation of the rationale for organisation of this book can also be found there.

Throughout the book, many terms are employed which may be more or less familiar with literature students but which may be unfamiliar to the general reader. It is hoped that these are explained as thoroughly and accessibly as possible, but readers may wish to follow up some of the debates that surround these terms for it is within this wider context of knowledge that the calibre of Ghosh’s work can be most fully appreciated. Some of the key texts in the field will be indicated in the notes at the end of the book, along with full citations of Ghosh’s published works; the extant criticism can be found in the bibliography.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for supporting the completion of this book by awarding me a Research Leave Grant for the period of October 2005 to February 2006. I would also like to acknowledge the Department of English at the University of Leicester for a period of study leave January–September 2005. Without these two periods of leave from the rigours of teaching and administration, this book would not have been completed when it was. Particular thanks are due to John McLeod, whose kind words of support were instrumental in my securing the AHRC award. Also, for ensuring that the duties and responsibilities of a new job did not interfere with the final few weeks of this leave period, I am indebted to William Watkin and Steve Dixon.

To John Thieme, general editor of the Contemporary World Writers series, I owe my heartfelt thanks for responding to and supporting this project, and indeed for recognising that the time had come for a full-length study of Ghosh’s work. As a Ghosh scholar himself, he has offered advice which I have always found welcome and constructive. I owe a debt of gratitude to Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, and her doctoral student Joy Wang, for securing me a copy of her essay along with the other essays published in the OUP India edition of The Shadow Lines; a large section of the concluding chapter would not have been possible without their assistance. I would also like to make special mention of Claire Chambers, who sent me a copy of her dissertation and thereby saved me a trip to Leeds. Her generosity was equalled by the usefulness of her excellent dissertation, to which I make reference in Chapter 2 in particular. Emma Parker supplied me with a reference that was overlooked in most of the bibliographies and databases, and I would like to thank her and my other former colleagues at the University of Leicester – Phil Shaw, Mark Rawlinson, Michael Davies, and Martin Halliwell – for their friendship and intellectual input. Special thanks, in this regard, are due to George Lewis whose companionship has always been highly treasured. Clare Anderson, Claire Mercer, Sydney Jeffers, Prashant Kidambi and other fellow-travellers in the Post-Colonial Seminar at Leicester have all accompanied the gestation of this book and have probably been subjected to the usual moans and groans over a convivial drink and curry. Thanks also to my former student Jenny Richardson for taking the trouble to read a draft of this book to ensure that it remained accessible to the intelligent general reader.

My heartfelt love and respect are due to my parents, Ansar Ali and Anjulika Mondal. Finally, to Joanna Herbert I cannot say enough how much her love and support has meant to me. I dedicate this book to her to repay in some small measure that debt which can never be redeemed.

Abbreviations

References to Ghosh’s extensive non-fictional works can be found in the notes at the end of the book in the relevant chapter.

Chronology

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