Amitav Ghosh-Tangled paths of modernity

[Part 1]

In recent years a number of Indian and Indian-born writers who write in English have risen in the literary firmament and gained international acclaim and luster. Among them are writers such as Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Rohinton Mistry, Amit Chaudhuri, Arundhati Roy and Aravind Adiga. In today’s column, I wish to focus on the fiction and non-fiction of Amitav Ghosh.

He is not as flamboyant as Rushdie and lacks his star-power; however, he makes up for it by his seriousness of purpose and indubitable creative intelligence. Although he is the opposite of Naipaul in social vision and outlook, he shares with Naipaul a passion for precision, restraint and lucidity.

In it interesting to note that Ghosh has a connection to Sri Lanka in that he spent part of his childhood in Colombo. It is hardly surprising that every now and then Colombo makes its appearance in his pages as for example the sloping roofs of houses in Colombo in The Shadow Lines.

Amitav Ghosh was born in Kolkatta in July 1956;his father was a diplomat. He obtained his B.A and M.A from the University of Delhi and his D.Phil from Oxford University.

His chosen field of study was social anthropology, and it is hardly surprising that there is a deep ethnographic imagination pervading his writings. He taught for a time at the Delhi University, American University in Cairo, Columbia University in the United Stares, City University of New York and Harvard University; Later he decided to become a full-time writer.

Amitav Ghosh is the author a distinguished body of writing, both fiction and non-fiction, for which he has won some of the most prestigious literary awards both nationally and internationally.

The Circle of Reason (1988) was his first novel. It explores the character of an Indian man who is suspected of being a terrorist and decides to leave India for North Africa and the Middle East.

This is a novel which demonstrates the power of the crossing of genre-boundaries, blending of fact and fiction, fable and picaresque narratives. It also highlights an intersection of postcolonial and post-modernist impulses in the way it explores postcolonial sensibilities and foregrounds non-linear narratives and dense textual references.

His second novel, The Shadow Lines (1988) succeeded in generating a great deal of interest birth inside India and outside. Of all his novels, this is the one that has been the subject of intense discussion and analysis in India and it has been used as text in higher education in India.

To be continued