‘Everyone lives in a story’: Amitav Ghosh’s myriad lives

Everyone lives in a story…because stories are all there are to live in…”

Amitav Ghosh is known to be a compulsive journal keeper. One can see where the immaculate and sometimes quirky detailing comes from in his writing. It stems from his solid old habit as an anthropology student at Oxford, given that journal-keeping is a classic methodology in Anthropology. His days as a research scholar doing field work in Lataifa, Egypt, produced copiously written journals with material that was over and above the scope of a clipped PhD dissertation. The leftovers were enough to yield In an Antique Land, described as “history in the guise of traveller’s tale”, also importantly a critique of anthropology as a euro-centric discipline in elite Western Universities. By the end of his PhD, he had discovered a deep-seated disenchantment with the Western notion of putting “other” cultures under scrutiny. Anthropology was duly discarded for the vocation of story-telling. Because over and above the mandated theorising of the discipline, he almost always salvaged a few stories.

The problematic nature of “knowledge and knowing”, the power dynamics in the play of knowledge was to capture him as a novelist in his maiden The Circle of Reason, which is partly a magic realist take on the pseudoscience of phrenology and its many absurd derivations as colonial knowledge. Likewise The Shadow Lines is as much a play on memory as means of knowing, as a family saga riven by Partition and the many journeys it impels. The Calcutta Chromosome, the quasi sci-fi with echoes of the currently fashionable post-truth, erected around the grand narrative of 19th Century malaria research, interpolates silence as knowledge of a mystical, gnostic cult against the ascending Victorian science represented by the likes of Ronald Ross. The Hungry Tide, which could be the most lyrical of his books, looks askance at translation as a problematic interlocutor in the process of knowing.

If there is the meticulousness of an empirical journal at the heart of Ghosh’s method, there is, also, a deeply seductive imagination. Just a look at his way with words, partly stemming out of his youthful obsession with lexicography reveals a fecund, expansive mind: How else does one explain his astounding range, through those intangible things called words, of memsaabs throwing around tirades in charming Hobson Jobson, creating a picture of sexy helplessness (Oh Mr Reid! Mr Reid! You have made a jellybee of your poor Mrs Burnhum), the effeminate Baboo Nob Kissin with his Babu English, Deeti’s Bhojpuri, traders concurring in hybrid Cantonese and street Bengali, among the many idiolects he recreates. The rigour of his practice most certainly derives from his deep-rooted childhood hours given to reading 19th Century classics. But the characters, Dickensian in range, are certainly owing to his refined empathy.

He had a rather privileged upbringing, partly itinerant, owing to his father’s army career, but mostly spent in elite schools. It was easy to become insular. Yet it is the masses, the rather “unimportant” subalterns, the lowest of the low in hierarchy, scum of the earth, the sidelined labourers dying like flies in the carcannas, to the indentured labourers transported on slave ships, sometimes tipped off into the sea for the dearth of a decent burial, the chhokra boys like Rajkumar (The Glass Palace) eating soup in greasy pots and inadvertently witnessing the storming of the Burmese Palace, Deeti, the Bhojpuri speaking farmer in her synthetic saree, Tridib, the black sheep of what is an affluent Brahmo family of Calcutta, the unnamed eight-year-old in The Shadow Lines attempting to find a bridge between a domineering grandmother who is a firm stickler to austerity, who knows it for a fact that “wasted time stinks” and tries her best to salvage the wide eyed from the “inauspicious orbit” of his spoilt uncle, he traverses an astounding range.

The naysayers mired in language politics criticising Jnanpith Committee for choosing an English language author for the award have failed to see this engagement. Similarly, English as an Indian language continues to evolve, taking more varied experiences into its ambit.

Today, Ghosh is academia’s blue-eyed boy, a cursory look at his packed schedule across Ivy League (details available on his website) will attest to that. His umbilical cord with research remains intact, his latest writing reflecting the sensitivity to climate change remains influenced by advances in academia, just like his earlier writing was informed by the corpus of Subaltern Studies historians. He has walked a career long tightrope between fiction and criticism. Despite the Ibis trilogy narrative sometimes buckling under the weight of too much information, he does not sound like a stilted academician. Telling stories is his first love.

The author is a teacher