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 |