This year Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow lines has turned 25. It’s the right time, says DEBRAJ MOOKERJEE, to appraise Ghosh for his contribution to the Indian writing in English tradition, and also for his personal qualities as a writer
I am an unabashed fan of Amitav Ghosh’s writing. Salman Rushdie is the one with more stand-out international recognition and awards (including the Booker of Bookers (for Midnight’s Children), but it is my considered belief that the next Nobel for literature for an Indian will go to Ghosh. My college friend Mitali Banerjee (now settled in China, a writer herself, and one who does not quite care for Ghosh any longer) first introduced me to Ghosh, and his Circle of Reason. I did not read the Circle of Reason without some effort, what with a small town boy having to come to terms with magic realism (I had, I must confess, also read Rushdie’s Shame — 1983 — by then). The year was 1986. In the library, I read a New York Times review of the book, and caught this line, “He is working on a new novel but has no plans to give up teaching.” In his late 20s, Ghosh was teaching Social Anthropology at the Delhi School (of Sociology) at the time, which was a short walk from the college where I studied. Ghosh suddenly became a palpable presence in my literary consciousness. For me personally, trying to break into a discipline that comprised mostly dead authors and alien constructs, Ghosh was a living possibility who worked next door.
I vividly recall even today my inherent desire to learn more about this as yet unnamed ‘new novel’, so fascinated was I, as a fresh student of literature (just second year honours then), with the sheer breadth and range and craft of Ghosh’s writing. little did I know then that so many years later, I would end up teaching literature in University of Delhi and be tasked, among other things, with the pleasurable responsibility of teaching Ghosh to students. And what was the text we were required to teach (until the current academic session, when the FYUP syllabus strangely knocked Ghosh off the list)IJ None other than The Shadow lines (1988), the novel Ghosh told NYT he was working on (as reported above). Today it is 25 years since The Shadow lines (a Sahitya Akademi award winning novel, and perhaps one of Ghosh’s richest) was first published. It is perhaps time to appraise Ghosh for his contribution to the Indian writing in English tradition, and also for his personal qualities as a writer.
The first crop of Indian writers in English, the RK Narayans, the Mulk Raj Anands, the Raja Raos had run their course. A new vocabulary of engagement, a pulsating vibrancy of idiom marked the emergence of the next generation, led by Rushdie, but nurtured more consistently by Ghosh. The NYT review referred to above also remarked, “Mr Ghosh writes at least as well as Mr Rushdie. When we read some of the fictional output of America and Britain these days, we despair of the future of the English language. The subcontinent, on the evidence of this and some other Indian novelists, is a preserve of unassailable syntax and elegant force.” Ghosh has consistently urged the world, over these years, to sit up and consider the force of his novelistic imagination that has remained, consistently, India/Asia-specific.
Indian writing in English is indeed a troublesome subject. On the one hand looms the shadow of Macaulay’s “imperishable Empire”, bearing down heavy on our collective conscience, symbolising the yoke this country has suffered under British rule. English, the language, has crept about our society in the shadow of that burden. Yet, on the other hand, the language has signalled our strength — in throwing out our colonial masters to begin with (a controversial argument, but not without enough adherents), and helping shape an India that is eager to nudge itself into global reckoning. That reckoning has come from recognition of the power of English in shifting white-collar jobs from Boston to Bangalore at its lowest level of signification. More flatteringly, there is the phenomenon of Indian writing in English.
Meenakshi Mukherjee, a frontline literary critic who died a few years back, argues how English writing as practised by Indians today is a far cry from Macaulay’s idea of the imperishable empire. From Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay to Nirad C Chaudhuri to Rushdie to Ghosh, the book traverses India’s literary history to trace the unique identity of Indian writing in English. The point of inflection, the moment where perhaps the colonial yielded ground to the post-colonial, when English became an Indian language, wielded with ease and unselfconscious aplomb, is, arguably 1981, when Midnight’s Children took the world by storm. But Ghosh’s The Shadow lines (a brilliantly worked out novel), or his immensely readable The Glass Palace (which has always urged me to visit Ratnagiri, which finally I shall next month!), or his delectable The Hungry Tide, and finally his magnum opus, as it were, the incredibly detailed the Ibis trilogy (two done, one to go) has kept the flag flying, with his narratives intimately snuggling up to India and its immediate neighbourhood, mining past and present, and like Alu in The Circle of Reason, cleverly working the weft and the warp of this peculiar to weave a rich tapestry of unforgettable narratives.
Ghosh, along with Rushdie no doubt, enthralled the international reading with a new imagination, perhaps even a new way of imagining. India had always served as readymade exotica for the Western imagination, ranging from Walt Waltman to André Malraux to Allen Ginsberg. The hippie cult of the 1960s had fed into its spiritual core. Exotic India played a specific role, to serve as the ‘other’ for the West, a counterpoise for its bruised conscience. India represented an alternative episteme, a knowledge system that offered relief from the cold scientific positivism of post-War Europe and America. The 1980s marked a subtle shift away from this stereotype. The foundations of the India that today is recognised as the source of new knowledge were built brick by brick through a difficult tryst with modernity. A country that many were willing to write off for so long suddenly chose to wake up, albeit much after it ought to have. That awakening marked a recognition of its social formations, its myriad diversity, its rich intellectual capital, and of course its resourcefulness as a repository of rich narratives. It is this India that people like Ghosh chose to both represent and address.
The Shadow lines illustrates this awakening better than most works of the time. In it the unnamed narrator (unnamed because Ghosh was at the time admittedly influenced by Huxley, who followed a similar practice) epitomises the emergent middle class Indian consciousness, tied to the past that was rooted to a narrow idea of nationalism (exemplified by the unnamed narrator’s fascist grandmother who actually believes between Bangladesh and India there would be a thick visible border, literally), and yet eager to embrace the cosmopolitanism (pluralism even) that was increasingly becoming possible. Criss-crossing time zones and territories, playing with memories, urging connectedness in an increasingly fragmented world, the novel is breathtakingly complex in its narrative, picking up threads from here there and everywhere as it weaves its magic around the reader’s consciousness.
The Shadow lines is both cosmopolitan and rooted at the same time. The theme of Partition is central to it. While it records the impact of divisions (within families, not only nationalities), the novel never sentimentalises the past. It is this quality of objectivity, of being there and yet being far away, that marks the special quality Ghosh brings to Indian writing in English. Post The Shadow lines, Ghosh wrote some nonfiction (In an Antique land —1992), before publishing Calcutta Chromosomes (won the Arthur C Clarke prize for science fiction, but never a favourite, to be honest). In 1998, he published the delightful nonfictional collection, Dancing in Cambodia and At large in Burma (where I first learnt how it is politically correct to continue calling the country Burma, and not what the Junta likes calling it, Myanmar!). The year 2000 marked The Glass Palace — a remarkable saga and a great story woven across time, nations, ethnicities and rich historical narratives. It remains one of my personal favourites, a great story told in a great way.
As one teaching The Shadow lines, I have consistently critiqued Ghosh’s treatment of Ila, the female protagonist, who has been brought up all over the world but is unable to find herself, except at airports across the world, where she knows the exact location of the public facilities. It is rumoured that Ghosh has locked away an alternative ending to The Shadow lines to be revealed upon his passing, which indeed does more justice to Ila. Through Pia (The Hungry Tide — 2005), a strong and forceful young woman, I believe Ghosh attempts expiation of guilt for wrongs done to Ila. The Hungry Tide marks, I believe, the end of one phase of Ghosh’s writing career.
The Ibis trilogy, beginning with Sea of Poppies (2008), takes Ghosh to another level. The dexterity and finesse with which he handles minute, and the way easily slides into the interstitial spaces that mark him as alternatively author and social anthropologist, marks him out as a writer of very special ability and wisdom. He becomes in this novel and in River of Smoke (2011), the senior citizen among authors of the recent past, shaping his craft with a skill that belongs to none else but the top draw.
While Ghosh covers a wide canvas with his narratives, he also peeps closely to observe the immediate. The Shadow lines impresses me because of its ability to mine so many different idioms and specificities while remaining largely cosmopolitan. His depiction of the ‘adda’ culture epitomised by the unnamed narrator’s uncle Tridib is typical, which again typically is disparaged by his stentorian grandmother. The representation of the English family in the novel and depictions of life in England during World War II is equally detailed and evocative. Yet, the overall embrace of the novel is so wide, so encompassing. It is this quality that makes Ghosh a great novelist. To illustrate how he enmeshes his immediate (almost intimate) experiences with larger philosophical positions, there is an essay by him in the New Yorker about his firsthand experience of the 1984 Sikh riots in Delhi. This experience sets up his vivid depiction of the riots of 1964 in Bangladesh that plays such a central role in the unfolding of the story in The Shadow lines.
Ghosh’s deep intelligence, his rich understanding of societies and cultures, his anthropological training, his capacity for incisive research, his academic interest in the etymology of things and thoughts, and his almost painfully insistent method of telling his tale set him apart as the standout writer of the present generation, not just in India, but across the entire literary firmament.
Ghosh is perhaps the typical Bengali, unlike the flashy Kashmiri that is Rushdie. Ghosh is married to a publisher/writer, and he shuttles between New York and Goa. He and his wife have two children. Ghosh, despite success, fame and wealth (he controversially picked up an Israeli literary prize for a million dollars!), remains a bhadolok at heart. Rushdie remains l’enfant terrible, and not only because he ticked off the mullahs with his incendiary writings. He’s scrappy, much married and remains in the game. Rushdie is almost Byronic, tragic yet compelling. Ghosh is reticent, wise and intelligent, though not without a sense of humour (in a recent TV interview, he actually said he thought Chetan Bhagat has talent). Rushdie, one would have to agree, went way past his prime a long, long time ago. Ghosh’s best has yet to come. And who knows, perhaps one day, even the Nobel committee might make its midnight call to the Ghosh residence — possibly in New York, or even in Goa. They would, quite appropriately, be confused about where he truly belonged. He would in either case pick up the receiver with equanimity, and reply with a simple ‘Thank You’.
The writer is Associate Professor, University of Delhi
