The Hungry Tide

ISBN: 0007141777

Type: Novel

Publisher: HarperCollins

In between the sea and the plains of Bengal, on the easternmost coast of India, lies an immense archipelago of islands. Some of these islands are vast and some no larger than sandbars; some have lasted through recorded history while others have just washed into being. These are the Sundarbans - the beautiful lands. Here there are no borders to divide fresh water from salt, river from sea, even land from water. The tides reach more than two hundred miles inland, and every day thousands of acres of mangrove forest disappear only to re-emerge hours later. For hundreds of years, only the truly dispossessed and the hopeless dreamers of the world have braved the man eaters and the crocodiles who rule there, to eke a precarious existence from the unyielding mud.

The settlers of the Sundarbans believe that anyone who dares venture into the vast watery labyrinth without a pure heart, will never return. It is the arrival of Piyali Roy, of Indian parentage but stubbornly American, and Kanai Dutt, a sophisticated Delhi businessman, that disturbs the delicate balance of settlement life and sets in motion a fateful cataclysm. Kanai has come to visit his widowed aunt and to review some writings left behind by her husband, a political radical who died mysteriously in the aftermath of a local uprising. He meets Piya on the train from Calcutta and learns she has come to the Sundarbans in search of a rare species of river dolphin. When she hires Fokir, an illiterate, yet proud local fisherman to guide her through the mazelike backwaters, Kanai becomes her translator. From this moment, the tide begins to turn.

Amitav Ghosh has discovered yet another new territory, summoning a singular place from its history, language and myth and bringing it to life. Yet the achievement of The Hungry Tide is in its exploration of a far darker and more unknowable jungle, the human heart. It is a novel that asks at every turn: what danger resides there, and what delusion? What man can take the true measure of another?

The Hungry Tide is a whirlwind work of the imagination, every bit as epic in scope and ambition as his beloved and bestselling work, The Glass Palace.

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The Imam and the Indian

ISBN: 8175300477

Type: Essay Collection

Publisher: Ravi Dayal Publishers

There are about seven-eight essays that hinge around Amitav Ghosh's experiences in Egypt as researcher in early 80s. The title essay "The Imam and the Indian" brings out the pathos of two "superceded civilizations" - one of ancient Egypt and other of India - "vying with each other to lay claim to the violence of the West." In "The Relations of Envy in an Egyptian Village," Ghosh, like an astute anthropologist, works out the relation of Evil Eye practices with conditions of production in rural economy of Egypt. In another essay, "Categories of Labour and the Orientation of the Fellah Economy," the notion of labour as mere performance of a technically necessary technical function is dispensed with. Ghosh investigates into the history and metaphysics of labour as it manifests itself in various forms in rural set-up. These essays are more or less corollaries to the writer's travelogue entitled In An Antique Land (1992) - an account of Egypt, which is reckoned most authentic even by the Egyptians themselves. Its in these essays that Amitav Ghosh approximates Clifford Geertz ideal of 'author as anthropologist.'

Amitav Ghosh is not a professional academic critic, yet at times he is simply impelled to write about writers that overwhelm him. The essay on Agha Shahid Ali's poetry, "The Ghat of the Only World," is lyrical and analytical at the same time; it is obituary and critique at one go. Another highlight of Amitav's critical methodology is the simultaneous presence of various timeframes and cultural contexts that he employs to understand the implications of a work of art in the larger civic context. Ghosh has the flexibility to invoke Cervantes to understand Babar's Babur-nama. He has the range to discuss writers as different as Michael Ondaatje, Agha Shahid Ali, Shyam Sevadorai in the larger context of civil strife and ethnic violence all across the subcontinent. Spice-encounter at the beginning of the colonial period becomes a cultural correlative of Oil-Encounter in 70s. But despite all his anthropological, academic and activist predilections, it is ultimately Amitav Ghosh, the writer of fine literary sensibili who excels. A rural landscape is described thus: "a maze of low mud huts huddled together like confectionery on a tray." The singing of the bride is likened to the "the bloom of pomegranate." "An Egyptian in Baghdad" is more a tragic short story of Egyptian migrants to Iraq who send money towards the building of their pucka houses back home but never come back to occupy them. "The Slave of MS.H6" has the trappings of an anthropological detective fiction. The essays which deal with the ethnography of the UN peacekeeping force in Combodia, the non-institutional character of Indian diaspora, the fundamentalist challenge in the Post-Cold War period are equally remarkable for their analytical rigour and poetical vigour. The self-critical, perceptive title essay relates an incident from his time doing fieldwork in Egypt. He argues with an intolerant village imam over the relative merits of cremating the dead, as Indian Hindus do, and the Egyptian Muslim practice of burying them. The imam calls the Hindu custom "primitive" and argues that the "advanced" West doesn't burn dead bodies.

Ghosh, soon incensed, lashes out, saying that even Western countries burn their dead: "They have special electric furnaces meant just for that." Both sides are stung. The imam accuses Ghosh of lying, with the logic that the West cannot be so ignorant, as they "have guns, tanks and bombs". Ghosh retorts that India not only has those heavy armaments but also nuclear weapons: a response that shocks Ghosh himself. "So there we were," Ghosh concludes, "the imam and I, delegates from two superseded civilizations vying to lay claim to the violence of the West." This subtle, all encompassing worldview is vintage Ghosh. His historian's eye takes in the breadth of peoples' experiences, and his anthropologist's mind makes connections between their religions, wars, cultures and ways of life. Above all, he describes these complex connections with simple profundity - with the skill of the novelist that he is. Ghosh can be jocular, too, without being trite. His essay "Four Corners" about a road trip in the US illustrates his keen observational powers and ability to relate the commonplace to history. America's recreational vehicles (RVs), are, in his words, "if not quite palaces, then certainly midtown condos on wheels". He notices their curious names, Native American words like Winnebago and Itasca. "The names of the dispossessed tribes of the Americas hold a peculiar allure for marketing executives of automobile companies. Pontiac, Cherokee - so many tribes are commemorated in modes of transport," Ghosh observes. And then, as always, the summing up: "It is not a mere matter of fashion that so many of the cars that flash past on the highways carry those names, breathing them into the air like the inscriptions on prayer wheels. This tradition of naming has a long provenance: Did not Kit Carson himself, the scourge of the Navajo, name his favorite horse Apache?" Why doesn't Ghosh come off as a know-it-all? With disarming frankness, he acknowledges that he doesn't have all the answers, or even explanations, for the fascinating quirks of culture he describes. In a short essay about a New York fundraising party for Tibet, for instance, Ghosh confesses that as an undergraduate, he and his friends would get drunk when they went to eat Tibetan food at a Tibetan refugee camp in Delhi. "You couldn?t help doing so - it was hard to be in the presence of so terrible a displacement." As Ghosh muses thus in the trendy Manhattan restaurant, he catches the eye of the sole monk at the gathering and finds that "... his smile seemed a little guilty: the hospitality of a poor nation must have seemed dispensable compared to the charity of a rich one." Or perhaps he was merely bewildered, Ghosh continues. "It cannot be easy to celebrate the commodification of one's own suffering." Despite the mysterious omission of Ghosh's marvelous essays on Cambodia The Imam and the Indian is one collection that should be on the bookshelves of all who call themselves readers. The 18 essays in The Imam and the Indian were written over a 16-year time span - from 1986 to 2002. Which partly explains the eclecticism of this collection. A translation of Tagore's "Kshudhita Pashan", two essays on the social anthropology of an Egyptian village, an elegy to the Kashmiri poet, Agha Shahid Ali, a travel piece on the Four Corners, some incidental pieces like "A Tibetan Dinner" and "The Ghosts of Mrs Gandhi" - the diversity of genres, subjects, dictions would seem much too heterogenous for compilation in a single volume. But for Amitav Ghosh, "connections are of greater importance than disjunctions" in the imaginative sphere.One of these "connections", very obviously, is the fact that the pieces were written in the gaps between the novels and hence trace the evolution of the author's interest and ideas that later were transmuted into fiction. Those familiar with Ghosh's fictional career will run into many familiar themes, motifs and characters here. But more notable is Ghosh's fixation with "encounters" between cultures and the modes of thought they embody. It could result, at times, in scepticism - the Imam's suspicion of the doctor al-Hindi, who comes from the land where cows are worshipped and the dead are burnt. Or, it could give rise to conflict like the one between the Navajos and the early settlers in North America. In most cases, the humans caught up in the clash of cultures are unaware of its historical import. Look at Babur's near dislike for the kingdom that he won in the battle of Panipat and which was to earn him a place in history. In the modern world, however, such encounters are almost always violent and throw up a detritus in the form of an uprooted populace. Like the Tibetan monk Ghosh encounters at a New York charity dinner for the Tibetan cause. Some, like Nabeel, are lost to friends and relations forever. Others, like the Sylheti UN peace-keeper entrusted with clearing the Khmer Rouge's mines in Cambodia, learn to cope as best as they can and soon become inured to the brutality around them. And most touchingly, Agha Shahid Ali, a resident of "the country without a pos-office" - Kashmir - who must die of cancer in Northampton, denied the right to go back to his homeland in his last days.

What comes in the way of peaceful coexistence between two peoples? And what happens to the people caught in the midst of war or civil violence? Are their any alternative patterns of relations between different cultures - one that does not lead to strife? In the present global scenario, the artist cannot but state which side of the political fence he is on. Thus art itself is a political stratagem. As Ghosh writes in The Shadow Lines, "Every word I write...is the product of a struggle with silence." And memories of violence, experienced or heard of, a weapon of defiance that helps to destroy the "thickening crust of awareness that is both a sign and a reminder of our unwitting complicity in the evolution of violence". Which is why all fundamentalist regimes consider the destruction of literature and art - a way of ordering memory and human values - an article of faith. As every Kashmiri would say with Shahid: "Your history gets in the way of my memory/ I am everything you lost. Your perfect enemy."

The Glass Palace

ISBN: 8175300310

Type: Novel

Publisher: Ravi Dayal Publishers

There was only one person in the food-stall who knew exactly what that sound was that was rolling in across the plain, along the silver curve of the Irrawaddy, to the western wall of Mandalay's fort. His name was Rajkumar and he was an Indian, a boy of eleven - not an authority to be relied upon.

The noise was unfamiliar and unsettling, a distant booming followed by low, stuttering growls. At times it was like the snapping of dry twigs, sudden and unexpected. And then, abruptly, it would change to a deep rumble, shaking the food-stall and rattling its steaming pot of soup. The stall had only two benches, and they were both packed with people, sitting pressed up against each other. It was cold, the start of central Burma's brief but chilly winter, and the sun had not risen high enough yet to burn off the damp mist that had drifted in at dawn from the river. When the first booms reached the stall there was a silence, followed by a flurry of questions and whispered answers. People looked around in bewilderment: What is it? Ba le? What can it be? And then Rajkumar's sharp, excited voice cut through the buzz of speculation. "English cannon," he said in his fluent but heavily accented Burmese. "They're shooting somewhere up the river. Heading in this direction."

Frowns appeared on some customers' faces as they noted that it was the serving-boy who had spoken and that he was a kalaa from across the sea - an Indian, with teeth as white as his eyes and skin the color of polished hardwood. He was standing in the center of the stall, holding a pile of chipped ceramic bowls. He was grinning a little sheepishly, as though embarrassed to parade his precocious knowingness.

His name meant Prince, but he was anything but princely in appearance, with his oil-splashed vest, his untidily knotted longyi and his bare feet with their thick slippers of callused skin. When people asked how old he was he said fifteen, or sometimes eighteen or nineteen, for it gave him a sense of strength and power to be able to exaggerate so wildly, to pass himself off as grown and strong, in body and judgment, when he was, in fact, not much more than a child. But he could have said he was twenty and people would still have believed him, for he was a big, burly boy, taller and broader in the shoulder than many men. And because he was very dark it was hard to tell that his chin was as smooth as the palms of his hands, innocent of all but the faintest trace of fuzz.

It was chance alone that was responsible for Rajkumar's presence in Mandalay that November morning. His boat - the sampan on which he worked as a helper and errand-boy - had been found to need repairs after sailing up the Irrawaddy from the Bay of Bengal. The boatowner had taken fright on being told that the work might take as long as a month, possibly even longer. He couldn't afford to feed his crew that long, he'd decided: some of them would have to find other jobs. Rajkumar was told to walk to the city, a couple of miles inland. At a bazaar, opposite the west wall of the fort, he was to ask for a woman called Ma Cho. She was half-Indian and she ran a small food-stall; she might have some work for him.

And so it happened that at the age of eleven, walking into the city of Mandalay, Rajkumar saw, for the first time, a straight road. By the sides of the road there were bamboo-walled shacks and palm-thatched shanties, pats of dung and piles of refuse. But the straight course of the road's journey was unsmudged by the clutter that flanked it: it was like a causeway cutting across a choppy sea. Its lines led the eye right through the city, past the bright red walls of the fort to the distant pagodas of Mandalay Hill, shining like a string of white bells upon the slope.

For his age, Rajkumar was well travelled. The boat he worked on was a coastal craft that generally kept to open waters, plying the long length of shore that joined Burma to Bengal. Rajkumar had been to Chittagong and Bassein and any number of towns and villages in between. But in all his travels he had never come across thoroughfares like those in Mandalay. He was accustomed to lanes and alleys that curled endlessly around themselves so that you could never see beyond the next curve. Here was something new: a road that followed a straight, unvarying course, bringing the horizon right into the middle of habitation.

When the fort's full immensity revealed itself, Rajkumar came to a halt in the middle of the road. The citadel was a miracle to behold, with its mile-long walls and its immense moat. The crenellated ramparts were almost three storeys high, but of a soaring lightness, red in color, and topped by ornamented gateways with seven-tiered roofs. Long straight roads radiated outwards from the walls, forming a neat geometrical grid. So intriguing was the ordered pattern of these streets that Rajkumar wandered far afield, exploring. It was almost dark by the time he remembered why he'd been sent to the city. He made his way back to the fort's western wall and asked for Ma Cho.

"Ma Cho?"

"She has a stall where she sells food - baya-gyaw and other things. She's half Indian."

"Ah, Ma Cho." It made sense that this ragged-looking Indian boy was looking for Ma Cho: she often had Indian strays working at her stall. "There she is, the thin one."

Ma Cho was small and harried-looking, with spirals of wiry hair hanging over her forehead, like a fringed awning. She was in her mid-thirties, more Burmese than Indian in appearance. She was busy frying vegetables, squinting at the smoking oil from the shelter of an upthrust arm. She glared at Rajkumar suspiciously. "What do you want?"

He had just begun to explain about the boat and the repairs and wanting a job for a few weeks when she interrupted him. She began to shout at the top of her voice, with her eyes closed: "What do you think - I have jobs under my armpits, to pluck out and hand to you? Last week a boy ran away with two of my pots. Who's to tell me you won't do the same?" And so on.

Rajkumar understood that this outburst was not aimed directly at him: that it had more to do with the dust, the splattering oil, and the price of vegetables than with his own presence or with anything he had said. He lowered his eyes and stood there stoically, kicking the dust until she was done.

She paused, panting, and looked him over. "Who are your parents?" she said at last, wiping her streaming forehead on the sleeve of her sweat-stained aingyi.

"I don't have any. They died."

In a review in The New York Times, Pankaj Mishra describes Ghosh as one of few postcolonial writers "to have expressed in his work a developing awareness of the aspirations, defeats and disappointments of colonized peoples as they figure out their place in the world." The novel is set primarily in Burma and India and catalogs the evolving history of those regions before and during the fraught years of the second world war and India's independence struggle.

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ISBN: 25

Type: Novel

Publisher: Ravi Dayal Publishers

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Dancing in Cambodia and At Large in Burma

ISBN: 23

Type: Collec. Essay

Publisher: Ravi Dayal Publishers

Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma (1998) is made up of three parts: the two longish travel-essays of the book's title and a shorter Cambodian piece, "Stories in Stones". Ghosh's capacity to find patterns in apparently unconnected events is at its best in "Dancing in Cambodia", which links the 1906 visit of Cambodia's King Sisowath, his entourage, and a troupe of Cambodian classical dancers, to France, with the recent history of the country decimated by the Khmer Rouge Revolution. Ghosh interviews a number of figures who provide living testimony to the interconnectedness of these two narratives. They include a famous dancer, Chea Samy, who has first-hand knowledge of King Sisowath and his daughter Princess Soumphady as a result of having been taken to the royal palace in 1925, at the age of six, to be trained in classical dance under the supervision of the Princess. She is also - and the matter-of-fact manner in which Ghosh records this makes the revelation all the more chilling - Pol Pot's sister-in-law. Palace revolution and the French connection are motifs that run throughout the essay.

Pol Pot was himself taken into the palace at the age of six. Pol Pot appears to have been radicalized during his time as a student in Paris. He particularly admired Robespierre, basing the ideological purity of his genocidal regime on the French revolutionary's belief in the virtue of Terror. Similarly, the grandson of King Sisowath's Palace Minister, Thiounn, becomes a central figure to a generation of Cambodian students in Paris and one of his prote'ge's is Pol Pot. For the most part Ghosh documents these connections neutrally, but lest they be missed, he does comment at one point that coups usually begin in the courtyards of the palace. King Sisowath and Pol Pot may seem polar opposites, but with their common experience of palace life and their enthusiasm for certain, albeit different, aspects of French culture, they emerge as curiously twinned.

In the period of reconstruction after Pol Pot's fall, the return to normalityis associated with an art form that has palace associations: Cambodian classical dance. The text represents dancing as far more than a traditional Cambodian performance art; it becomes a trope for the indestructibility of the middle-class culture threatened with extinction during the Pol Pot era. The essay ends with an "epiphany" in Phnom Penh in 1988, a moment when grief and joy commingle, as classical music and dance are performed once again for the first time. On this occasion, then, the humanist conclusion is not so much championing subaltern survival, but the resilience of an educated class threatened with extinction by a Western-inspired regime, which has declared war on the intelligentsia. "Stories in Stones" considers the iconic significance of Angkor Wat, reputedly the largest religious edifice in the world, as a symbol of Cambodian identity. The essay wryly reflects that its omnipresence as a talismanic object pervades virtually every area of the nation's life - except religion.

Ghosh's illustrationof the proliferation of images of the Wat in a range of commercial contexts is not, however, simply evidence of the extent to which tradition and modernity overlap; it is a striking instance of a modern appropriation of an older tradition, which he sees as eroding the humanist possibilities of earlier belief-systems. "At Large in Burma" provides insights into an Asian country that has been particularly isolated from the outside world in recent years, again doing so through the medium of individual stories. Here the central figure is the leader of the country's democratic movement and winner of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, Aung San Suu Kyi, whom Ghosh first met while a student in Oxford in 1980 and whom he now interviews during two visits in 1995 and 1996. At one point he mentions having been brought up to believe that the public and the private should be kept separate, with the corollary that it is wrong to reduce political movements to their leaders, but he finds Aung San Suu Kyi the personification of Burmas democratic resistance.

So, in addition to providing a window on one of the world's more closed societies, the essay becomes another instance of Ghosh's characteristic historiographic method of illuminating national and communal issues through personal stories, though, as in "Dancing in Cambodia", it departs from his earlier focus on subaltern experience. "At Large in Burma" also contains a section in which Ghosh travels to the Thai border in an attempt to understand the independence struggle of one of Burma's many minorities, the Kanenni. Naipaulian ironies emerge when tourists visit refugee camps to see the Kanneni's long-necked giraffe woman, oblivious of their history of oppression and displacement and unaware that they are commodified versions of the rural simplicity they supposedly represent.

Ghosh's own perspective is, of course, much more complicated and again centrally concerned with the impact of modernity. His main interest lies in trying to assess what freedom means to the Kanneni and whether the utative nations around Burma's borders would be better off as separate states. His consideration of this issue revisits the central motif of The Shadow Lines and he once again comments on the arbitrariness of borders drawn by colonial officials and the inevitable artificiality of nations. His conclusion in the case of the Kanneni, and the sixteen or so other potential nation states around multi-ethnic Burma's borders, is that they would not benefit from being separate countries.

So, like so much of Ghosh's work, this part of the essay presents a self-contained micro-history of a group, which can also be read as a metonym for a larger global debate. It holds a mirror up to late twentieth-century cultural theory on the nation state, which both reflects and reverses commonly held assumptions when it suggests that in the case of the Kanneni the historical borders are probably best left unaltered.

The Calcutta Chromosome

ISBN: 8175300051

Type: A Novel

Publisher: Ravi Dayal Publishers

This novel has been described as "a kind of mystery thriller" (India Today). It brings together three searches: the first is that of an Egyptian clerk, Antar, working alone in a New York apartment in the early years of the twenty-first century to trace the adventures of L. Murugan, who disappeared in Calcutta in 1995; the second pertains to Murugan's obsession with the missing links in the history of malaria research; the third search is that of Urmila Roy, a journalist in Calcutta in 1995 who is researching the works of Phulboni, a writer who produced a strange cycle of "Lakhan stories" that he wrote in the 1930s but suppressed thereafter.

In An Antique Land

ISBN: 0679727833

Type: Biography

Publisher: Ravi Dayal Publishers

The cover proclaims IAAL "History in the guise of a traveller's tale," and the multi-generic book moves back and forth between Ghosh's experience living in small villages and towns in the Nile Delta and his reconstruction of a Jewish trader and his slave's lives in the eleventh century from documents from the Cairo Geniza. In the 1980s Amitav Ghosh moved into a converted chicken coop. It was on the roof of a house in Lataifa, a tiny village in Egypt. During the day he poured over medieval letters sent to India from Cairo by Arab merchants. In the evenings he shut out the bellowing of his fat landlord by turning up the volume of his transistor radio and wrote stories based on what he had seen in the village. The story of Khamees the Rat, the notorious impotent (already twice married); of Zaghloul the weaver determined to travel to India on a donkey; of one-eyed Mohammad, so obsessed with a girl that he spent nights kneeling outside her window to listen to the sound of her breathing; of Amm 'Taha, part-time witch, always ready to cast a spell for a little extra money; and, of course, the story of Amitav Ghosh himself, known in the village as the Indian doctor, the uncircumcised, cow-worshipping kaffir who would not convert to Islam. This book is the story of Amitav Ghosh's decade of intimacy with the village community. Mixing conversation and research, imagination and scholarship, it is also a charged, eccentric history of the special relationship between two countires, Egypt and India, through nearly ten centuries of parochialism and sympathy, bigotry and affection.

The Shadow Lines

ISBN: 8175300434

Type: A Novel

Publisher: Ravi Dayal Publishers

His second novel focuses on the narrator's family in Calcutta and Dhaka and their connection with an English family in London. A boy conjures up a picture of London so vivid in his imagination that he recognizes it when he visits years later and learns that real places can be invented inside your head. From Dhaka to London, this novel contains a wealth of characters and colour.

The Circle of Reason

ISBN: 8175300396

Type: A Novel

Publisher: Roli Books

A saga of flight and pursuit, this novel chronicles the adventures of Alu, a young master weaver who is wrongly suspected of being a terrorist. Chased from Bengal to Bombay and on through the Persian Gulf to North Africa by a bird-watching police inspector, Alu encounters along the way a cast of characters as various and as colorful as the epithets with which the author adorns them. The reader is drawn into their lives by incidents tender and outrageousand all compellingly told. Ghosh is as natural a weaver of words as Alu is of cloth, deftly interlacing humor and wisdom to produce a narrative tapestry of surpassing beauty.