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Amitav Ghosh's tangled paths of modernity

The Shadow Lines which refer to the artificial boundaries that human beings create around themselves, in response to manifold challenges, explores the intertwined lives of two families - one Indian and the other English. The narrative unfolds against the social transformations effected and the cultural forces unleashed, sine the departure of the British as rulers of India. I will discuss this novel in greater detail later in this column.

His next novel, The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fever, Delirium and Discovery (1995) represents Ghosh's engagement with the science-fiction genre. This multi-layered novel advances an alternate understanding of the parasite that causes malaria.

This allows him the conceptual and representational space in which to explore some of his pet themes such as the production of knowledge, nature of human inquiry, western rationality and how they have been inflected by colonialism.

Amitav Ghosh's next noel, The Glass Palace (2000) is largely set in Burma (Myanmar) and narrates a family saga against the backdrop of a changing Burma - British rule, Independence and Burma's difficult march into the twenty-first century.

This is a historical narrative with epic leanings. The novel focuses on the activities of three families. Among all his novels, this is the one that has enjoyed the most commercial success. Unlike some of his earlier works which were marked by narrative and representational experimentations, The Glass Place moves along a straightforward narrative path.

It deals with the lives of three families - the deposed king of Burma and his followers, the rich timber merchant named Rajkumar and the family of Saya Jogn who in many ways acts as a mentor to Rajkumar. The narrative unfolds across a broad swath of space and time. This allows him sufficient narrative elbow room to explore his privileged themes.

Scope

This novel was followed by The Hungry Tide (2004). It is set in Bengal and deals with the interactions of a group of Americans and Indians. The scope of this novel is much smaller in comparison to his earlier works such as The Shadow Lines and The Glass Palace.

This is not to suggest that it does not carry within its weave some of the narrative strategies found in his earlier novels such as recovery of suppressed history through memory and piecing of temporal fragments.

While in some of his other novels, the narrative covers a period of multiple generations, here it is confined to about thirty years.

The novel deals with the experiences of Piyali Roy who is a daughter of an Indian domiciled in America; she is a scientist and has returned to her ancestral land to conduct research into marine mammals. Her contact with her ancestral legacy is minimal. As the story progresses the author introduces us to complicities of knowledge and power and human existence in interesting ways.

In 2008 Ghosh published The Sea of Poppies which was to be the first in his planned trilogy of novels. The story takes place along the Ganges and in Calcutta where poppies are grown and opium processed.

It deals with a number of variegated characters and their complex entanglements: a simple and pious Indian village woman, an American sailor, an Indian rajah, an evangelical opium trader and a French orphan who grew up in India. The second novel in the trilogy, The River of Smoke (2011) carries the story forward into Canton in China where opium is sold to a highly receptive market.

The Chinese administrators work hard to prevent the illegal drugs entering the land; It is having devastating consequences on society while British traders bent on making money sees it as a lucrative trade. It is against the somewhat sinister background that the characters play out their destinies.

As I stated earlier, Amitav Ghosh has distinguished himself as a novelist as well as a writer of non-fiction. His books such as In an Antique Land (1992), Dancing in Cambodia, at Large in Burma (1998), The Imam and the Indian (2002), merit close attention. Of these works, In an Antique Land is the most significant.

It is, I contend, in many ways, his most important work. It is an adventure of discovery in varied but interlinked worlds. It raises a number of weighty issues related to tradition, modernity, cross-cultural interaction, colonialism and its ambiguous legacy, anthropological research and reading history. Ghosh calls his book a subversive history in the guise of a traveler's tale.

In an Antique Land ( the title is from Shelley's Ozymandias, although Ghosh uses it for a purpose different from that of Shelley) cannot be easily located within known genres; it is at once traveler's tale, historical study, a mystery, anthropological inquiry, imaginative reconstruction and stitching of reality.

Imagination

In an Antique Land is a book that has stirred the imagination of many scholars representing diverse disciplines. For example, James Clifford, the well-known cultural critic in his book Routes, which is a collage of essays, reflections, poems and travel reports collected within the covers of a single volume, is seeking to uncover the complexities of an interconnected world whose cultures are ceaselessly on the move.

He finds Amitav Ghosh's work most inspiring and reflecting his own preoccupations. He observes that, 'for as we learn in the book (In an Antique Land) from which the story is excepted, Ghosh seeks to map his own ethnographic voyage on to older connections between India and Egypt, trade and travel relations, which precede and partly bypass the world's violent polarization into west and east, empire and colony, developed and backward.

This hope is shattered when he realises that the only common ground he can find with the imam is in the west.

The trajectory of different cosmopolitanisms is prefigured in a passing reference to the African Ibn Battouta, who visited the subcontinent in the fourteenth century.

As old patterns of connection across the Indian Ocean, Africa and west Asia are realigned along binary poles of western modernisation, are there still possibilities of discrepant movement. Ghosh poses, but does not foreclose, this critical question.' James Clifford line of thinking repays close attention.

In examining the complex body of writing of Amitav Ghosh - both fiction and non fiction - a theme that surfaces with increasing insistence is the nature of complex dramas of modernity. It is my contention that his writings give a cultural face to the tangled modernities we invariably experience.

Essay

In his book 'Dancing in Cambodia, at Large in Burma' there is an essay on the famous Angkor wat in Cambodia. He remarks that,' from the moment I entered Angkor wat I found myself awash in stories. I was puzzled by this in the beginning but now, looking back, several months later, it seems to that there was something inevitable in it.

For above all Angkor wat is a monument to the power of the story.' He goes on to say that,' but no story, no matter how loftily comic, is ever entirely free of its origins; as with all the best stories, this one too is partly an autobiography, an allegory about its own authorship.'

This statement by Amitav Ghosh, it seems to me, opens the door to his ambitions and achievements. He lives among a sea of stories that have to do with modernity; as a writer, it has been his task to pick out the more interesting and illuminating stories and give them shape, direction and literary shimmer.

His novels and non-fiction writings, in one way or another, confronts facets of modernity to shed greater light on them so that we could grasp them better. With this thought in mind, I would like to reflect on Ghosh's attempt to give cultural face to tangled and protean modernities.

Octavio Paz, the Nobel Prize-winning writer from Mexico once made the following observation. What is modernity? It is, first of all, an ambiguous term; there are as many types of modernity as there are societies. Each society has its own....since 1850 modernity has been our goddess and demines.

In recent years there has been an attempt to exorcise her, and there has been much talk of postmodernism. What is post-modernism if not an even more modern modernity.' This statement of Paz has a great relevance to Ghosh's literary endeavours.

Similarly, James Clifford, commenting on modern ethnography remarked that, 'the world is increasingly connected, though not unified, economically and culturally. Local particularism offers no escape from these involvements.

Indeed, modern ethnographic histories are perhaps condemned to oscillate between two meta-narratives; one of homogenisation, the other of emergence; one of loss, the other of invention.'

To be continued

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