Set in the late 1830s, Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy revolves around the trade of opium between India and China run by the East India Company and the trafficking of indentured servants to Mauritius. This literary journey, which started in 2008, traversed through a saga of cultures, dichotomies, histories and languages to establish a remarkable historical insight into British colonialism in India. The author takes ANANYA BORGOHAIN through the journey of creating this extraordinary work
Few writers have such a profound grip over language and sensitivity towards the art of storytelling as Amitav Ghosh does. The Man Booker International Prize nominee and Padma Shri awardee, Ghosh recently launched the final instalment of the Ibis trilogy, Flood of Fire. Born in Calcutta, he studied in The Doon School after which he graduated in History from St Stephen’s College, Delhi University, and pursued his Masters in Sociology from the Delhi School of Economics. Subsequently, he went on to pursue his PhD and DPhil in Anthropology from Oxford. He has also been a journalist for a short while and wrote his first novel, A Circle of Reason (though In an Antique land was published first), at a small rooftop room in Defence Colony paying a rent of Rs600 but didn’t like the draft and tore it up. later upon his friends’ encouragement, he did send a half-written manuscript to a literary agent/friend in london, which got approved and his joy knew no bounds. He was paid £2500 for the same and bought a motor bike with the money. And ever since, there has been no looking back.
He chuckles at the mention of “post-colonial literature” and disagrees that his writings cater to that genre. Incidentally, he is still acknowledged as a pioneering voice in mapping Indian post-colonial fiction. In an earlier interview, he also joked how he was not proud of his PhD thesis whereas somebody had even done a PhD on his PhD! Nevertheless, his grasp over anthropology, history and geography is unparalleled. His themes are thought-provoking, his characters stay with the readers, his historical research is perfect to an extreme and his flair for writing is inimitable.
In an interaction, Ghosh speaks about his writing style, how he looks at his literary legacy, and the other pursuits which entice him:
It’s exactly that; I think you have put it very well. I have the experience of having lived in multiple places. It’s not just me, my father’s family is originally from East Bengal, what is now Bangladesh, but they left Bangladesh in the 1850s to move to Bihar. So this history of displacement goes back a very long way and there are many reasons for it. In the case of my father’s family, the ancestral village was on the banks of one of the great rivers of Bangladesh, the Padma. One day the river changed course and the village disappeared. They lost their home and had to leave. In a sense you could say that my engagement with displacement begins with an ecological phenomenon, so you could say that we were ecological refugees.
I have vivid memories of these places. You might remember in The Shadow lines, besides India, there are strong references to Bangladesh as well as to Sri lanka.
From these very experiences of living in various places. Usually, I do think that you need to spend a significant amount of time at a place you are writing about. Without that, I think it would be very difficult to imagine it.
I look at myself as just myself! There have actually been various phases in my life. I have been a historian, journalist, a literary critic, I have been lots and lots of different things, but in my head they are not different entities. They are all a part of my way of thinking, of my imaginative world.
No, I don’t look at my work as “post-colonial”.
I think the element most pertinent for me is to have a powerful sense of a character. I think every novel depends on its characters to move forward. When I have a powerful sense of a character, I know that the book can now move forward. The place or geographical position also arises out of the characters. For instance, when I was writing about the dangerous lives of the settlers in one of the most intriguing places on earth in The Hungry Tide, Sundarbans automatically became the place I would write about.
At first, I write by hand. In fact, I write with a pencil on blank paper. Then I write with a fountain pen on ruled paper. And then I begin to type my drafts.
Oh yes, that’s true too.
Not really. In an Antique land’s case was much different from the Ibis trilogy. It revolved around a time which was crucial but somehow was not seen as prominent. While reading historical archives, I realised the role of the marginalised players in the opium war or trade in the imperial era. It was still not possible to figure what had actually transpired until I began to recreate these players’ mundane lives filled with violence, sentiments, humdrum and adventure alike.
No, I wouldn’t say so. As far as Oxford is concerned, you know, I think when I was in Delhi University in 1973-1978, that was intellectually and academically one of the most exciting periods of my life. I felt it was the time when I was exposed to all sorts of ideas and influences, and when I learned a lot. Sure, it was wonderful to be at Oxford too; it was exciting and I met lots of different people and multifarious experiences became available. But Delhi University was in fact much more of a formative influence for me than Oxford was.
Yes, it’s very puzzling to me too. They are a very important part of our history, of Asian history in fact. The opium war itself didn’t have a direct impact on India really except that it was a part of a trade cycle. It kept in motion a trade cycle that was of enormous importance to the Indian economy. It was in order to continue to export Indian opium to China that the British undertook this war. So in that sense it was because of this war that this trade cycle continued. In China, however, they have still not forgotten this part of history and I have heard that fortunately now in India too in the recent school level textbooks, there is an extensive mention of the opium wars. It’s a welcome development.
I have always been very interested in language. In fact, the aspect of anthropology that interested me was linguistics. So I was always drawn towards language and language learning. I think in India, going back to Panini, language has been the central focus of Indian scholarship till even the millennia. So I think it’s normal for us to be interested in language because India’s linguistic pattern in unlike any other country.
Here almost everybody speaks several languages. I also grew up speaking several languages. My father, for instance, spoke Bhojpuri with his siblings because they grew up in Bihar. So Bhojpuri was an important aspect of my childhood too. I can speak Bengali, Bhojpuri, Hindi, English, French and Arabic.
I think that applies to my male characters too though. I think in general, in my books, my characters create their destinies in their own ways. Truthfully, it isn’t a question of my making them do anything. Characters, if they have some reality, they make themselves. They create their own momentum and trajectories.
Yes, certainly, in the process of writing a book, certain characters establish their own imprint on the book. In fact, that happens all the time.
This is an interesting question. You know, this period was a time of incredible violence. The violence in a slave ship was unimaginable. Even in an ordinary ship, not necessarily a slave ship, life was also incredibly violent for everybody. I don’t think one can necessarily measure it on a scale as to who was more violent between the Indians and the colonial rulers, but certainly, the Indians were also violent. It was a situation of extraordinary violence. People were raped, flogged and beaten; they led very difficult lives. These were not the middle-class lives of today, you know. But then violence surely is very prominent in Indian lives today as well.
Not that I know of. These ships were wooden ships. So they didn’t really have a long life. Very few wooden ships have survived actually.
You have to recreate the past from the documents and other study material that is available to you. Fortunately for me, the world that I have described in these books, there’s a very rich visual archive with so many paintings and other visual depictions, most of them are made in China. Finding them is not easy but I was able to do so. I have spent a few weeks in libraries while writing the books. For instance, I spent a few weeks at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich and the National Archives in Mauritius. I spent many weeks living in Mauritius and Guangzhou too.
There isn’t any research material on the topic available in Kolkata or India at large. Besides that, like we have already discussed, I learned to sail and tried to explore the various facets of languages.
Many issues concern me. Most of all in India, we are facing many environmental crises. They existed anyway but they are now being compounded by climate change. So I do think that we are at a very critical moment.
Well, who can tell! I don’t think I can predict this right now.
No, we don’t exchange notes. But I do have many hobbies. I am keenly interested in gardening, so I spend a lot of time thinking about crops. I am very much involved in growing my own foods. I also cook, I love to play badminton. Both my children work in companies. My son is a financial analyst and my daughter is a risk analyst for security issues.
Yes, I am enamoured by Ray, but I have not seen much of Hindi cinema.
ananyapioneer@gmail.com