When renowned writer Amitav Ghosh comes to South Africa next week to participate in the Shared Histories Festival in Johannesburg, he will have travelled many miles. Crossing borders is something that comes easily to Ghosh. And he is a writer who crosses many different types of borders.
First, there is the border of geography. The trajectory of his first novel, Circle of Reason (1986), immediately exemplifies this, set as it is in East Pakistan, the Gulf States and Algeria. Similarly, his second, The Shadow Lines (1988), takes the reader from Calcutta to Dhaka, with the story also linked to London. In an Antique Land (1992) spans the seas stretching from the Western Mediterranean to the Malabar Coast, and shows the relationship between Egypt and India. The Calcutta Chromosome (1996) connects New York with India, while the The Glass Palace (2000) takes us across to Burma, India, Malaysia, Bangladesh and Singapore. Ghosh is writing against great movements of peoples across countries and continents. Such mobility and migration are certainly features of our contemporary world, but have also been taking place for centuries.
If Ghosh is the wanderer, the peripatetic writer par excellence, crossing different types of borders and remap-ping the world, this is not surprising. The sweep across national and regional borders and boundaries, across separate geographical spaces is, of course, close to the bone for Ghosh. Born in 1956 in Calcutta, Ghosh grew up in East Pakistan, which later became Bangladesh. Ghosh’s father was part of the diplomatic corps and through this he was also able to sojourn in Sri Lanka and Iran.
The Shadow Lines is set against the background of the partition of India and Pakistan, and is part of his own family’s experience. The Glass Palace deals with the family saga of Indians who migrated to Burma and of the Japanese invasion of Burma in 1942. Again, his own family lived through some of these experiences or they were stories handed down from generation to generation in his family. In an Antique Land displays elements of a personal memoir related to his stay in Egypt, while The Calcutta Chromosome begins in New York, where Ghosh now lives.
Such movement and crossing of the boundaries of physical space inevitably means that you are crossing boundaries of history as well. Although the movement and migration were determined by the history of the British empire and colonialism, we often tend to confine geography and history to separate entities. Ghosh aims to achieve precisely the opposite. He deftly demolishes the walls between the two.
By moving across physical borders, Ghosh steps over imposed historical borders, showing the interconnectedness of histories (shared histories) in these geo-political spaces. Accordingly, The Glass Palace explores the relationship between India and Burma during the colonial period under the British (who had one eye on the Burmese rubber and teak trade), the invasion of Burma, the subsequent banishment of the King of Burma to India, and the rest of its troubled history since the imposition of military rule. With Aung San Suu Kyi, who features in the novel, still under house arrest by the Myanmar regime, the novel has compelling contemporary relevance.
It is indeed apt that the word “epic” is often used to describe Ghosh’s writing. While Ghosh dreams up the most incredible, unusual plots, they are always grounded in geography and in history.
Ghosh occasionally crosses his own artistic boundaries. His recent novel, The Hungry Tide (2004), is set on an archipelago in the Bay of Bengal, which is an apposite locale for his juxtaposing of human and natural worlds. He evokes this bhatir desh or “tide country” that comes into existence at ebb-tide, for “it is only in falling that the water gives birth to the forest”. The Irawaddy dolphins around these islands intuitively understand this and have adapted to the movement of the tides, returning only at ebb tide. This is also the hapless place of natural catastrophes and disasters, such as we are witnessing at this very moment in this region, making both human, animal and plant life united in their vulnerability.
Inevitably, Ghosh also resists genre and disciplinary compartments, questioning their hold over the creative imagination. His novels are a mixture of history, anthropology, ethnography and much else, rendered in a variety of genres, styles and voices. This, too, is not surprising. After completing his degree at the University of Delhi, Ghosh went on to postgraduate studies in social anthropology at Oxford. His doctoral thesis investigated the history of weaving and the cloth trade between England and India in the 19th century. This becomes grist for his novel The Circle of Reason, which tells the story of a weaver from Calcutta who goes to work in the Gulf. His fieldwork in Egypt provided the basis of his novel, In an Antique Land, described on the cover of the edition published by Vintage as “history in the guise of a traveller’s tale”.
In an interview, Ghosh speaks of the novel as a “metaform that transcends the boundaries that circumscribe other kinds of writing”. Indeed, the novel is a flexible form that can be stretched and pulled in different directions and Ghosh does incorporate “history, natural history, rhetoric, politics, beliefs, religion, family, love and sexuality”. Ghosh crosses over from realism to fantasy with ease, from the palpable and immediate tale-telling of ordinary folk to the recounting of remote legends of a bygone era. What a critic has said of creative work in general — “You can’t carve up the world of the imagination” — is certainly true of Ghosh, the intrepid weaver of stories within stories.
Ghosh obviously does a great deal of research for the type of novel he produces (The Hungry Tide took him four years to research). Interestingly, he may also use the very theme of research as one of his motifs, as he does in his novel, The Calcutta Chromosome. (AS Byatt also uses research as a controlling element in her novel Possession, and this strategy gives both novels an intriguing Sherlock Holmes feel.) The Calcutta Chromosome shows the thin divide (shadow line) between fact and fiction, fiction and research, research and history-making; indeed, through his very imaginative and creative approach, Ghosh shows the tenuousness of research that is often claimed to be “true”, “authentic” and “valid” — and on which empires of various sorts are founded or, as Ghosh suggests in The Hungry Tide, an “alibi for a life” is claimed.
What then, is the effect of all these border crossings? What are some of the effects of Ghosh’s imaginative scope and how does his writing speak to us in South Africa today, or anywhere else for that matter?
A quick glance at the places depicted in Ghosh’s novels shows that they are concentrated mainly in the East. What Ghosh is clearly doing is upsetting the old dichotomies between periphery and centre, where the colonies were the periphery and the colonial powers the metropolis or centre. Ghosh is moving the centre as Ngugi wa Thiongo (1993) has urged, by foregrounding other spaces. Yet, as all Ghosh’s stories show, these worlds are connected too, in flows, circuits and networks — of trade, conquest, migration and much else — that Ghosh shows to be an intricate web of history. With globalisation, of course, the centre-periphery divide is continually reconfigured.
We live in a world that is scripted by history, yes, but Ghosh is always asking: whose history and who is writing that history? In doing this, he is questioning the knowledge systems, cultural domination and economic monopoly of the Western world.
In an Antique Land, for example, explores the trade routes of earlier centuries from the Malabar Coast to India and the Middle East through the life story of a 12th-century South Indian slave who lived along the ancient Nile and who worked hard for his Jewish merchant-master. In the same novel, Ghosh (or rather the Ghosh persona) describes a wedding reception he attended, where he is an oddity because he is the only Indian they have ever met. He is confronted with a barrage of questions on life in India from a group of fellaheen interlocutors. As Ghosh reflects on these questions, he begins to muse on how people imagine that they belong to a “historical civilisation”, when for him it is precisely the absoluteness of time and the discreteness of epochs that he has trouble in imagining. Ghosh shows how the present is entangled with the past, how it is composed of multiple temporalities, jostling with one another. Imagine living in a place where there are several time zones all at once!
Then, with writing across a region, as he does of south-east Asia, Ghosh upsets the narrow and parochial expressions of nation and nationalism, seeing them as contradicting history/histories. In South Africa, we have been preoccupied since the first democratic elections with “nation-building”. This is understandable, given our need to create a new South Africanism beyond our apartheid past. This is why we invoke the dream of a “rainbow nation”.
Although national and ethnic identity has gained so much currency here and elsewhere, we need to recognise at the same time that notions of nation and nation state are problematic categories; we need to see their traps and pitfalls. Mahatma Gandhi, half a century ago, argued against the impulse towards a superficial claiming of nationhood. He stated that India was not a nation, but a civilisation, which had, over the centuries, benefited from the contributions of different races and religions and was distinguished by its plurality, diversity and tolerance.
Because of the rich historical and spatial stretch of the novels, Ghosh is able to invoke rich cultural contexts. His depiction of border crossing, though movement and migration from one location to another, shows that culture is not static, but is translated across locations and that it changes in the process. In the face of increasing ethnocentrity and ethnic chauvinism, we are challenged rather to stress our overlapping and shared histories and cultures. When so much blood continues to be spilt across the globe on border clashes (so many are forcibly prevented from crossing borders), on tribal, national, religious and racial wars, Ghosh’s message is timely.
With all his border crossings, it is not surprising that Ghosh has been described as one of those writers of “the in-between”, yet his politics is anything but “in-between”. When his novel The Glass Palace was submitted, without his knowledge, for consideration for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Ghosh withdrew it immediately. His letter to the Commonwealth Foundation stated his views clearly and concisely: “The issue of how the past is to be remembered lies at the heart of The Glass Palace and I feel that I would be betraying the spirit of my book if I were to allow it to be incorporated within that particular memorialisation of Empire that passes under the rubric of ‘the Commonwealth’.”
This is a clear and unequivocal stand — no shadow lines here.
Amitav Ghosh is keynote speaker at the conference Eyes across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean. He will discuss his works at the Origins Centre, Wits University at 6pm on August 23 as part of the Shared Histories Festival.
Devarakshanam [Betty] Govinden, a writer and researcher, is an associate of the school of education and development, University of KwaZulu-Natal. She completed her doctoral studies in literature at the former University of Natal, Durban