An Intervíew wíth Amítav Ghosh

Author(s): Amítav Ghosh and Frederick Luis Aldama

Source: World Literature Today , Spring, 2002, Vol. 76, No. 2 (Spring, 2002), pp. 84-90
Published by: Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40157268

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 An interview with
Amitav Ghosh
FREDERIC K LUIS ALDAMA

84 • WORLD LITERATURE TODAY • SPRING 2002

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In 1986 Amitav Ghosh published Circle ofltlasofijand ** v£s timifspace, and storytelling style to chart the vast
staked his claim as a major voice in postdfionial letters. spectrum of human experience and its various path-
Here he introduced his readers not just to the pica- ways of survival and self-preservation.
resque adventures of the potato-shape-headed protago- Today, Ghosh lives with his family in Brooklyn,
nist, Alu, but to a hybrid storytelling style that mystify- where he writes essays for New Republic, Kenyon Review,
ingly wraps the time of history and space of everyday and other journals, teaches creative writing at Queens
reality (Goa, Africa, Calcutta) in and around subjective College, and crafts his novels.
experiences. Ghosh won France's prestigious Prix
Medici Etranger for Circle, then penned the beautifully Frederick Luis Aldama I read your essay "March of
wrought, multiply plotted Shadow Lines (1988), in which the Novel Through History," where you relate your ex-
he transformed gut feeling - he lived in Delhi at the perience as a young boy surrounded by your grandfa-
time when Indira Gandhi was assassinated and Sikhs ther's library of books. How do you recall your child-
were slaughtered - into a story of a Bengali family hood and your early sense of becoming a writer?
ripped apart during the India /Pakistan partition. Here
Amitav Ghosh It was strange actually. You know, my
Ghosh writes outside the box, mixing a gritty realism
parents moved around a lot. I mean our home was in
with a surrealist flair to map the brutal consequences of
Calcutta in some way, but we also moved around a lot.
cultural and political structures that restrict identity
And I think in compensation what I did was I just read.
and the imagination. As he simultaneously moves his
I read a lot, and I lived very much within my own head
readers througri twelfth-century Egyptian deserts and a
and very much within my own imagination. You know,
contemporary Britain in In an Antique Land (1994), the
it's hard to account for one's childhood really. Being a
double-helix narrative effect crisscrosses borders (gen-
child in India is something very special. And I'm sure
res and knowledge systems) to open up new cartogra-
this is true of many, many other places, but you're al-
phies of postcolonial identity and imaginings.
ways surrounded by people. Every aspect of life spills
In 1996 Ghosh made several best-seller lists and
over. I remember my childhood being mainly just being
picked up the Arthur C. Clarke Award for his Borge-
either in books or just watching a lot of grown-ups
sian science-fiction thriller, The Calcutta Chromosome, a
around me - you know, cousins and uncles and aunts.
novel that takes readers through labyrinths of time and
But then at the age of eleven I was sent away to a
place to unravel a mystery of purloined identity. In
boarding school, and that was a completely different
Ghosh's most ambitious novel to date, The Glass Palace
experience. It was in northern India. Of course, board-
(2000), he employs his trademark helical, quasi-histori-
ing school is just such a bizarre environment. And there
cal/cultural voice to sink the reader deeply into the re-
you are, five hundred boys, and you're all stuck in this
created cultural memory of twentieth-century Burma.
same school; if you think about it, it's really just the
Here a diverse cast of characters - royal, working-
most bizarre form of education you can imagine, and
class, and bourgeois Indians, Bengalis, and Burmese -
yet it was a very good education, you know? Vikram
struggle to come to terms with new ways of living and
Seth, the writer, was in the same school.
identifying in a world violently shaken by grand histor-
ical drama like that of the British and Japanese inva- FLA These boarding schools can be strict. Did they al-
sions. low for the creative possibility to grow?
Ghosh's novels blur boundaries between genres - AG I have to say they certainly did. They certainly did.
fiction and archival fieldwork - to complicate post- I wrote and read a lot when I was in school. In board-
colonial identity. To this end, he also sidesteps invent- ing school, though, the jock was still the king. But there
ing postcolonial characters cut from a victim-cookie- was a place for us who were readers and writers.
cutter mold, exploring the complex shading between
FLA You went on to study history at the University of
the good and bad; he breathes life even into figures
Delhi. Was there a moment when you decided you
whom other writers might discard as abominable. In
were going to become a professional writer and not
The Glass Palace, for example, he delves deeply into the
study history?
complex psychology of those characters who, like their
factual counterparts such as Ghosh's own father, foughtAG That was something I knew about myself fairly
for the British army to violently suppress their own and early in my life. But by the time I finished my B.A.,
neighboring South Asian peoples. Ghosh's fiction mesh-when I was about eighteen or nineteen, I knew that I

WORLD LITERATURE TODAY • SPRING 2002 • 85

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 HI jr m§ if fif
didn't want to go on in the academic wdrfeflit alf W *^ We liffefih Indirffintil about 1993. And the
knew that I wanted to make my living b^Afjfting. In job in New York, so we moved to New Yor
India in those days there was no such thing as a literary publisher, so she could only get work there
career as such, especially for someone who was writing writer, and I can work anywhere. So it was
in English as I was. So, I did what seemed to be the clos- really.
est approximation of literature then. I joined a newspa- FLA In your latest novel, The Glass Palace, and also in
per, where I worked while studying for an M.A. in an- your earlier novels you warp time and space; you also
thropology. I was juggling those two things. Even at that mix fiction and fact and write within a variety of cre-
age I knew that I wanted to earn my living by writing. I ative generic modes.
had no doubt about that. But exactly what kind of writ-
AG Well, essentially, I haven't written in so many gen-
ing it would be, I didn't know.
res. I mean, I've written novels, and I've written nonfic-
FLA At a certain point you went to England? tion - my reportage. And frankly, I don't even think of
AG I did unexpectedly well in my M.A., and I got a them as different genres in some way. I know that the
scholarship to study at Oxford and moved to England. institutional structure of our world presses us to think of
Suddenly there were lots fiction and nonfiction as

of new opportunities. I being absolutely sepa-

rate. And in some sense
was, what, twenty-one or
twenty-two or something. they are. I mean with
I'd spent the last seven nonfiction there is a do-

years living in Delhi, and main of fact to which you

it was just wonderful to have to refer and by
be in a new place, and it which you are necessari-
was wonderfully liberat- ly constrained. But I
ing. I mean a new place, a think the techniques one
new country, where you brings to bear upon non-
were just seeing different fiction, certainly the tech-

things. Oxford was intel- niques that I've brought

to bear on nonfiction, es-
lectually, I must say, very
sterile. But you met hun- sentially come from my
fiction. You know what I
dreds of interesting peo-
mean? In the end it's
ple, and so it was really
delightful. It was really about people's lives; it's
fun, though I have to say about people's history;
that I wasn't there that it's about people's des-
tinies. When I write non-
long. Altogether I spent
three years at Oxford. fiction, I'm really writing
about characters and
And of that, for almost a
year and a half I was people, and when I'm
writing fiction, I'm doing
away in Egypt and North
Africa. So I wasn't there the same thing. So that
that much. shift isn't as great as it
might appear to be.
FLA What was the
At one point in my
stream of events that led
life I was doing anthro-
you to the United States?
pology. But I realized very early on that anthropology
AG It was chance in a way, you know? In 1988 I had anwas not of interest to me in the end because it was about
invitation to teach at the University of Virginia, so I abstractions, the way you make people into abstractions
went there and taught. While I was teaching there, I metand make them into, as it were, statistical irregularities.
my wife. Then I went back to India and we got married.And in the end my real interest is in the predicament of

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individuals. And in this I don't think thereiffi« mudr lictratmlmary soft of career. But it's out of print in Eng-
difference between fiction and nonfictiorll^^ land. It's out of print in America. So it's a curious thing,
you know? I mean, I'm one of the very few Indian writ-
FLA In your first novels, Circle of Reason and then Shad-
ers in English whose reputation and career has always
ow Lines, you use different storytelling voices - a magi-
been sustained by India. And I have a much, much big-
cal then a gritty realism. Did your shift in storytelling
ger audience in India than I have anywhere else. I think
voice make your initial push into the publishing world
difficult? it is true that the Western publisher looks to the non-
Western writer to write in a way which to some degree
AG No, not really. Actually, my first novel was sold they also want to be able to dictate the terms of. It's cer-
when it was only half-written. The publisher really tainly true, I think, that they expect that the woman
loved it and took to it; it really wasn't that difficult. I Asian author write somewhat in the mode of Isabel
have to say that, contrary to what one may imagine, Allende, because that's something they know there's a
publishers want Indians - and I'm sure they want the market for.
South Africans and Latin Americans as well - to write
FLA The playful tone and characterization in your first
in a kind of fantastical mode. I mean not that my book
novel, Circle of Reason, struck me as strongly influenced
was very fantastical. It wasn't. I didn't even think of it as
by Salman Rushdie's writing. What do you make of
magical realist.
your place within a South Asian diaspora canon that so-
I really discovered that this was an issue when I
lidified after Midnight's Children won the Booker Prize in
wrote my second book [Shadow Lines], which was much
1981?
more in a realist mode to deal with real events and real
AG You have to remember that when Midnight's Chil-
characters. Shadow Lines is very restrained in its tone, be-
cause it was a response to some very ghastly events that dren appeared, it was a certain moment when really we
could look away from traditional modes of narration
were happening in India at the time. Though it's regard-
and toward something else. It was a global moment
ed in India as a modern classic and is taught in schools,
when everybody was doing that. I think the important
there was much more reluctance among Western pub-
issue in the end must be that a writer has to be able to
lishers with this novel. That was really a lesson to me in
say what he wants to say in the way that he wants to
a way, you know? AncT I suddenly realized that the or-
say it. That really is the key issue. For me personally,
dinary view one has is that magical realism is something
however, I must say that Garcia Marquez was much
that comes out of the non-European world, if you like.
more important to my writing.
There's a peculiar ambiguity there, and I think it's partly
an ambiguity of commerce, because when there was the FLA In The Glass Palace you use the form of the nine-
great Latin American boom, Western publishers did teenth-century dynastic European novel to tell the story
of Burma's history. Why the impulse to use this literary
really well out of it, and they were seeking to reproduce
that. I remember my French publisher said to me quiteform to tell this story?
explicitly, "You know, we don't want any more interi- AG Some people have commented on that. To me, if
eurisme."
anything, the book is written in a form that is mimicking
So when I talk about it, I think there is something a memoir. The book was started as a family memoir, a
deeply demeaning about that. I mean, the vision is that
project in chronicling a family history. In a formal sense,
if you're from the Third World, you don't really have that
an is where the integrity of the book hinges and where
interior state; we're all over the top, acting wildly andthe
so long interpolations about history come in. It clearly
assumes a narrative voice which is outside the text as
on. And that's not the case. I mean, it's certainly not the
case about myself, and it's not the case about my such; it is told in a tone of recall because there are very
friends. self-conscious anachronisms. Inasmuch as there is a for-
mal model for it, I think it's much more the contempo-
FLA By the time you wrote In an Antique Land, did you
rary memoir than the nineteenth-century novel.
feel that you'd been able to open the publisher's eyes to
a different way for an Indian to write? FLA In The Glass Palace there is the activist character

Uma. Can you speak a little bit about her?

AG Yes and no. Certainly within India Shadow Lines has
had consistent success. It must be in its thirtieth print- AG You know, in every book you come across charac-
ters who just go in their own direction. In Uma's case it
ing; its sales have just continually risen, and it's had an

WORLD LITERATURE TODAY * SPRING 2002 • 87

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really was like that. I speak not only abouf Dm^ls a iip by their bootstraps and who were very, very clever
very particular person, but also to the gefoSftroack- and who figured out how to handle the world. And they
ground of that sort of activist woman in India. There's a made their fortunes. Part of it was just mimicry, part of
very strong genealogy and history, dating back to the it was just getting along, part of it was sycophancy, part
late nineteenth century, in which Indian women played of it was this ruthlessness and cunning. I find those
a very important part in the national movement. In par- things weirdly interesting.
ticular, there was one woman called Madame Pikaigi FLA Is there a sense of hopefulness when Uma and Raj-
Kama, who moved from India to Britain. She's men-
kumar finally come together, a sense that their different
tioned several times in The Glass Palace. She became very ways of seeing the world blur and bleed into one anoth-
involved in the nationalist cause and in opposing impe- er?
rialism. So, there were these many models. I've really
AG That's very well put. Yes, I hadn't thought of it like
become completely fascinated by the part that Indian
that. It's strange how a book works. You can't always
emigres in the U.S. played at the turn of the century in
account for it, you know? One night I woke up, and this
generating a certain anti-imperialism and certain ways
final scene - this is when I was just halfway through
of resisting colonialism. Often their mentors in this were
the book - suddenly I saw this scene, and I knew the
the Irish. It's an extraordinary fact, I think, that Indians
next morning I would have to get up and write it. And
marched in the St. Patrick's Day parade in New York,
that's what I did. This was way before the book was fin-
you know? So there was a general ethos of anticolonial-
ished, but I knew that this scene would be the end of the
ism at that period in certain enclaves of American soci-
book.
ety. That is why Uma travels to New York to acquire her
activist spirit. FLA Is that how you write - spontaneously? Do you
have a writing routine?
FLA Interestingly, Uma ultimately reconciles with her
opposite, the capitalist entrepreneur Rajkumar. AG Yes. Yes, absolutely. I try to keep to some kind of
schedule, and I try to work so that I know that I'll be at
AG Yes. To me, Rajkumar is someone I deeply sympa-
my desk for a certain number of hours a day. So, it's not
thize with in many ways. In the phenomenon of diaspo-
common for me to interrupt my usual narrative flow by
ra, in the phenomenon, of colonialism, one might re-
suddenly one day writing the end of the book. But I just
spond by saying, "OK, I'm going to resist collectively.
saw the scene. It happens from time to time. You see
I'm going to make common cause with other people
something, and you know that this is it. And then you
from my nation," or whatever. But there's another re-
just have to get it done.
sponse, which is to say, "Everyone's my enemy except
my own family. I have to look out for myself. I have to FLA So how do you manage to balance writing with

look out for me and mine, and everything else around teaching and having a family life?

me is my enemy. And it doesn't matter what I do to AG Well, writing prose takes a long time and takes a lot
them. I've got to get ahead, I've got to provide for me of work. For this book I just literally switched off the
and mine." I think the latter is perhaps a more common phone. I turned off my e-mail. My children have always
response than the nationalist response, in a way. Essen- been very cooperative in my writing, you know? And
tially, what you do is you make your family your nation, my wife works, so I've in some sense always been there
your domain of autonomy. That's where you locate your at home with them. But they've always been very un-
individuality, your sovereignty. And I think in some derstanding, and they know that I work in my room,
ways Rajkumar is like that. He's completely ruthless. and they can't disturb me during that time. But I find
He's completely amoral in some ways outside his fami- that that experience in itself enriches my work. To be
ly. And yet he's a loving father as well. able to see things through the eyes of children. I mean it
bleeds into your own life, as it were. Once my work is
FLA Rajkumar is a product of a new, turn-of-the-twenti-
over, then I have time for them.
eth-century era. Although he's illiterate, he lives in a
world that allows him to use his street smarts and capi- FLA Clearly, travel and ethnographic research (of sorts)
talist spirit to lift himself up by his bootstraps. enrich your writing.

AG That's right. You saw so many of those figures in AG The Glass Palace was like an odyssey, you know? It
that period, you know - people who pulled themselves took months and months of very organized travel, be-

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cause I realized at some point that my book wasTabout on, to talk about Third World novels as being essentially
much more than just individual charactersMt was also about nation and nation building. I think that's just a
about the history of the Indian diaspora in Southeast load of rubbish. Many of my books, if not all of my
Asia, which is an epic history, a very extraordinary his- books, have really been centered on families. To me, the
tory. I realized that the only way I could learn about this family is the central unit, because it's not about the na-
was really by talking to people. So, I traveled to Malay- tion, you know? Families can actually span nations. The
sia, literally going from compound to compound, find- Glass Palace actually ranges between what are now many
ing people who lived through this time, talking to them different nations, so it's absolutely not about a nation or
about the past. I traveled in Burma. I traveled in India. I one nation or whatever. The fact that it has been struc-
traveled in Thailand. I traveled on the Burmese /Thai tured around the family is absolutely essential to its nar-
border. I spent time with the insurgents who are fight- ration. It is explicitly not about a nation, as it were. And
ing the Burmese Army. I went into the jungle with them. I think it is not just me. I think the reason why you see
I was shot at by the Burmese Army, which was quite an so many Indian books essentially centered on the family
experience. is precisely because the nation is not, as it were, the cen-
So it really was a very rewarding odyssey, because tral imaginative unit. So I think Jameson and Bhabha
usually when a writer sits down to write a book, the ma- and all the others are completely wrong about this. That
terial that goes into the book comes almost entirely out is a very lopsided and ultimately not an alert reading.
of his own head. But I'm the kind of writer, I think - I think this way of writing about the contemporary
and I find this increasingly to be the case - who is in- world goes back to Proust, you know? With Proust,
terested more and more by life and the world. And again, it's essentially the family that pulls in the threads
that's where my imagination engages with real life, with of nationhood and politics and individuality. That's very
the lives people lead. So with this book especially, I was much an available tradition within modernism. I mean,
meeting the sorts of people I would never have met be- the family certainly is absolutely critical to my narration.
fore: insurgents who have lived in the jungle for fifty And so that's why I said to you, this book has the form
years; plantation workers who served as slave labor for of the family memoir, because I do think that it gives
the Japanese and are nearing the end of their lives. you a narrative form that can transcend the national. It's
At some point in writing this book, I felt that I'd evident that a book like this can't be written within the

been entrusted with the story, a story that was beyond borders of the national. How can it be written within the

me and greater than me. I really felt that I was trying to borders? I see especially in American writing today the
represent an enormous multiplicity of experience and of nation as being absolutely fundamental to the imagina-
history. For me, at some point it became very important tive life of writers, you know? I mean, half the books
that this book encapsulate in it the ways in which people you open that are by American writers are American -
cope with defeat, because this has really been our histo- an American romance, or American Beauty - or it's
ry for a long, long time: the absolute fact of defeat and about a generation, which is really just a subset of "na-
the absolute fact of trying to articulate defeat to yourself tion," because that generation is imagined nationally.
and trying to build a culture around the centrality of de- But it's not at all the case with writers from my part of
feat. This is not just a fact for us; it's a fact for the indige- the world.

nous peoples in the Americas, in Australia, and wherev- FLA You portray characters who struggle with their
er you go. But around defeat there's love, there's
identity, between being Indian nationals and as Indians
laughter, there's happiness, you know? There are chil- serving foreign rulers. Can you speak to such characters
dren. There are relationships. There's betrayal. There's like Arjun in The Glass Palace? Is there an element of au-
faithfulness. This is what life is, and I want my book to tobiography here?
be true to that.
AG My father was in the British-Indian Army, and he
FLA In your novels generally, there's a strong connec- stayed loyal to the British-Indian Army until the end.
tion between an individual's experience of defeat and Arjun, as you know, does not. In a way, Arjun recog-
happiness and his place within the national historical nizes that he doesn't believe in the collective promise.
record. Is the family a mirror of nation?
For him, it's his personal sense of betrayal that makes
AG I think one of the reasons for that kind of analysis is him do what he does. You see, what he discovers in the
that it's become fashionable now, since Jameson and so course of this narrative is that he had imagined himself

WORLD LITERATURE TODAY • SPRING 2002 * 89

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to be something that he was not. He hadjeen himself in different ordering of time. Shadow Lines deals with time
a certain way, and then he comes to realizlWiat what he in a completely different way. My idea was to collapse
saw himself as was a lie. It's not nationalism for him. space in the way that Ford Madox Ford collapses time.
In In an Antique Land the structure is really that of a dou-
For his friend Hardayal, it is nationalism. It is the prom-
ise of truth and duty and freedom, et cetera. Arjun ex-ble helix, where you have a moment in the twelfth cen-
tury and a moment in the twentieth century being
plicitly does not believe in any of this. For him, it's en-
pulled together solely by a single narrative that has no
tirely the idea that he has been formed and shaped by
the manipulative hand in such a way that he himselfinteractions.
has This book is very straightforwardly linear,
ceased to understand who he is or what he is. It's the just as I wanted to write it. With The Glass Palace I really
unbearable pain of this that makes him do what he does.
felt that the story is so important and so powerful that
it's one of those instances where, as John Gardner says,
FLA In your novels generally, your plots seem to move
''the writer has to get out of the way." That's his main
in a regressive-progressive manner. What's your sense
of the temporal motion at work in your novels?
job, almoste. ESS

AG Time interests me very much. I think it's the central

University of Colorado, Boulder
element in narrative. All narratives are really the unfold-
ing of events in time. Yet within that broad parameter
Frederick Luis Aldama is Assistant Professor of English at the
there are so many things you can do with it. I think my
University of Colorado in Boulder, where he teaches U.S. multi-
interest ki time really comes from two sources. One ethnic
was and British postcolonial literature, film, and theory. He is
Ford Madox Ford's book The Good Soldier, which was a author of the forthcoming Dancing with Ghosts: A Critical Bi-
the
ography ofArturo Islas and Hybridity and Mimesis: Magicorealism
very powerful early influence. The other was Proust's
and the Postethnic Novel and Film. He has published a number of
Remembrance of Things Past, which had a powerful influ-
articles, interviews, and review essays in such journals as Poets
ence on my thinking about narrative. In each of my & Writers, Cross Cultural Poetics, LIT: Literature Interpretation
books you'll see that time as a problem is approached
Theory, Callaloo, Latin American Research Review, Modern Fiction
very differently. In Circle of Reason each part followsStudies,
a and Modern Drama.

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