Amitav Ghosh’s tangled paths of modernity

Continued from last week

He rejects the notion that modernity needs to be understood as a universal phenomenon where less developed countries seek to mimic the paths trodden by more developed countries.

He rejects the evolutionary model of modernity and argues that modernity needs to be understood in terms of specific historical conjunctures, social formations and cultural imperatives. This idea, it seems to me, underwrites many of his writings.

When we examine his novels such as the Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, Calcutta Chromosome and The Glass Palace this fact becomes evident. Modernity is a global phenomenon but it wears culture-specific faces.

In his novels, and non-fiction writings, Amitav Ghosh has sought to highlight the disjunctures and heterogeneities of modernity as they come into contact with diverse breathing cultures.

This of course demands a nuanced concept of culture which sees it as a site in which meanings are made, unmade and re-made. Ghosh is keen to dramatise the resourcefulness of men and women as they shape their modernites as well their inadequacies in doing so. In Ghosh’s novel modernity emerges as the meeting place of the global, national, regional and asymmetric power relations.

He highlights these abstract thoughts through vividly realised situations and complex interpersonal relations. Modernities are cultural imaginaries that are constantly de-stabilised and re-shaped in accordance with the ruling social forces. Ghosh’s characters bear witness to this truth.

Cultural modernity

The idea of cultural modernity has been central to the efforts of Sinhala novelists. From Piyadasa Sirisena onwards this has indeed been a central theme that has stirred the imagination of Sinhala novelists and short story writers.

For example, Martin Wickremasinghe in his trilogy (Gamperaliya, Kaliyugaya and Yuganthaya) explores imaginatively what it means to be an agent of cultural modernity. Similarly, Gunadasa Amarasekera has highlighted this theme from his conceptual vantage point. Many other Sinhala novelists have recognised the importance of this theme.

Modernity presupposes secularism, humanism, science, technology, reason and progress. However, these get inflected through diverse histories, geographies, cultures, traditions and religious sensibilities.

Ghosh is especially sensitive to this interaction; he pays close attention, in his fiction, to these spaces of interaction. What Amitav Ghosh’s body of writing does is to urge us to re-think and re-imagine this phenomenon from diverse perspectives and what it means to live in this age of instant global communication.

Globalisation is a phenomenon with which Sri Lankan writers are deeply concerned, and Amitav Ghosh has some important observations to make in this regard.

His novels such as Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines and The Glass Palace and works of non-fiction such as In an Antique Land enable us to perceive the complexities of globalisation and the most productive vantage points from which to view it.

Globalisation is a phenomenon that is increasingly impacting the lives of people throughout the world. In discussing globalisation, we very often fall into an easy binary – globalism as a totalising force that overcomes and obliterates localism.

However, Amitav Ghosh in novels such as The Shadow Lines and The Hungry Tide points out that globalism and localism are co-implicated and mutually constitutive.

What is interesting about the depiction of globalisation in Ghosh’s novels is the way he transcends this easy binary and focuses on what I term interactive sites and moments that manifest the complex give and take occurring between the global and the local.

These interactive sites are marked by uncertainties, discrepant desires, awkwardness, asymmetries of power, deceptions, manipulations, and instabilities. Indeed it is at these sites of interaction that one can perceive the full force of globalisation. If we take characters in Ghosh’s novels such as Tridib (The Shadow Lines) and Piyali Roy (The Hungry Tide ), we can understand the way characters operate in these spaces of interactivity. Modern Sri Lankan writers, too, are understandably interested in globalisation and its dark necessities of history.

To be continued