Amitav Ghosh - Tangled Paths of Modernity

[Part – 2]

To some it truly sings a siren song What Amitav Ghosh fictional and non-fictional writings demonstrate to us is the way we can catch the complex forces unleashed by globalisation in the culture-specific interactive sites and moments that only gifted writers are capable of depicting. He deftly avoids the twin dangers of a totalising universalism and self-contained localism.

Another strategy of his from which we can learn some valuable lessons is the way he addresses the issue of human agency. The rise of such newer cultural thought-lines as post-structualism and post-modernism has resulted in the diminution, if not outright obliteration, of human agency. Amitav Ghish is somewhat sympathetic to the tenets of post-structuralism and post-modernism; at the same time he is deeply aware of their limitations.

This is particularly evident in the way in which he handles the concept of human agency. He recognises the importance the idea of social construction of identity, the way in which language and culture shapes human beings. At the same time he is also cognizant of the fact that there is a space of agency for human beings. They are not totally at the mercy of a kind of linguistic and social determinism. It is the way in which he identifies these spaces of agency and dramatises their significance that we as Sri Lankan writers and readers might find particularly useful.

Modern thinkers such as Michel Foucault who have exercised such a profound influence on the unfolding of contemporary thought have argued that modernity has a way of bringing in novel regimes of domination and disciplinarity. Consequently individual initiatives, freedoms and agency are stifled giving way to a form of insidious governmentality.

However, Ghosh through is narratives underscores the fact that the situation is more complex than most theorists would have us believe; there are spaces of agency available and it is up to us – especially up to novelists – to underscore this fact. Here, then, is another area that Sri Lankan writers and readers might find productive.

Analysis

The way Amitav Ghosh fashions a cultural imaginary through his created fictional worlds is a topic that repays close analysis. All writers strain towards a cultural imaginary through their fictional worlds. If we take Martin Wickremasinghe’s trilogy or Guanadasa Amarasekera’s chain of novels we see this clearly. Ghosh underlines the fact that meanings and significances associated with different cultures cannot be understood as reflections of the economic base; the value systems and linguistic mediations are equally important.

Through Ghosh’s novels – the incidents he depicts, the characters he portrays, the problems he identities and possible solutions he advances – a collective cultural imagination begins to take shape. It is this collective cultural imagination that I refer to as the cultural imaginary; it is volatile, many-sided, open-ended but very real and unavoidable at the same time. Sri Lankan novelists and short story writers – at least the more perceptive among them – are united in their desire to fashion this cultural imaginary.

How do we make sense of contemporary flows of experience? What valences do we attach to lived realities? In what ways do we recognise and resolve the inevitable conflicts between individual and collectivity? What are the tensions between citizen and nation? These and kindred questions receive a valuable explanatory light through the idea of the cultural imaginary. That is why influential novelists like Amiatv Ghosh rate it so highly. And we can, again, learn a great deal from the strategies adopted by Ghosh as a novelist as he seeks to encircle this fact.

Creative writings

Most novelists, directly or obliquely, in their creative writings address the issue of the nation-state. Amitav Ghosh is no exception. He recognises the importance of the nation-state as a functioning unit in the modern world. At the same time he realises the self-divisions, fissures, fault lines that mark the nation state and undermine it. The clash between these centripetal and centrifugal forces within the nation-state is one that Ghosh chooses to focus on.

It is also interesting to observe that Ghosh is of the conviction that nationalism and communalism far from being sworn enemies can operate in the same side of the fence. He reconfigures sensitively how blood and topography, time and memory, flow into each other within the perimeter of the nation-state. As opposed to these conflicts of nationalism and communalism, the author proposes a kind of syncretic unity which some critics have dismissed as overly simplistic. A passage such as the following bears witness to this ambition of Ghosh.

‘The mosque became a great centre of pilgrimage, and every year multitudes of people, Kashmiris, of every kind, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists would flock to Hazratbal on those occasions when the relic was displayed to the public. In the shadow lines the appeal of this syncretism is hinted at; it is developed more fully in his non-fiction work in an antique land.

As we grapple with our own issues of ethnicity, communalism, nationalism and neo-imperialism in Sri Lanka the path of imaginative apprehension that Amitav Ghosh has sought to clear is one that deserves closer study.

So far I have been focusing on the themes, contents and visions of Amitav Ghosh as an Indian-born novelist who writes in English. It is equally important for us to shine a light on his use of language and form.

- To be continued