39

Chapter III

Non Fiction

When we talk of spatio-temporality in literature travelogue, memoirs,

journalistic fiction come to the forefront. And it is no coincidence that Amitav

Ghosh the sociologist cum anthropologist be interested in travel writing. As a

matter of fact all his six novels are in a sense ‘travel’ oriented as he crosses time

and space borders in his search for human signification beyond facts, dates, events

and places. So is it Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma (1993). It is indeed

an account of Ghosh’s visit to Cambodia in January 1993, just before the first free

political elections of the post Pol pot era. Despite the fact that it was an official

journey (under the aegis of the United Nations) to observe and narrate in detail the

delicate transitional process from anarchism and destruction to the normalization

of politics and society, it became much more than that. As Anna Nadoti in her

afterword to the first Italian edition of the book pointed out that Ghosh was more

interested in understanding how:

young people from the third world, idealist and democratic, had

been dazzled by development and progress models that are exactly

the opposite of those desirable for their own countries, being

products of another cultural and technological universe, whose

functioning, transposed elsewhere, far from being an instrument of

development and progress, reveals itself [...] as a dream inspired by

 40

someone else’s dream, that should be broken more than cultivated

(68)

What emerged from this encounter with a ‘waste land’ was an impassioned

comment with one who could relate to history in a very personal way. This strand

was quickly deciphered by Meenakshi Mukherjee who wrote in her review (2007):

In that provocative essay in The New Yorker last year, Salman

Rushdie has said, ‘Literature has little or nothing to do with a

writer’s home address’. He might see Ghosh’s new book as a

vindication of his claim, but to me Amitav Ghosh’s home address

(not the current American one, but the permanent one in India)

anchors his perspective of looking at the world. What drives the

Karennis to go on with their hopeless fight for a homeland? Echoes

of this question resonate in different regions of India, Pakistan and

Sri Lanka. One of the characters in The Shadow Lines had

wondered: ‘Why don’t they draw thousands of little lines through

the whole subcontinent and give every piece a new name? What

would it change?’ In this book the author reflects in his own voice:

‘All boundaries are artificial: there is no such thing as a natural

nation, which has journeyed through history with its boundaries and

ethnic composition intact.’ Ghosh’ original readers in Granta, The

Observer Magazine and The New Yorker (where the essays first

appeared) may not have noticed, but for the Indian reader, the

author’s family connections in Burma, the chance meeting at the

edge of a Cambodian minefield with a Bangladeshi sergeant who

had an ancestral district with Ghosh, and the encounter with a

 41

guerrilla fighter originally called Mahinder Singh, in the forests of

eastern Burma, all provide points of intersection with our history.

(Web)

Thus what emerges is a polyphonic text that simultaneously revives voices

submerged in the debris of time, lost in amenesia which he excavates through this

revolutionary event in a specific geographic space.

Between the two longer pieces on Cambodia and Burma, Stories in Stone

completes Ghosh’s fresco of post-Khmer Rouge Cambodian society, focusing on

the epiphanic value of the ancient and magnificent temple of Angkor Wat. This

shorter piece, according to Prof. Mukherjee,

illustrates the kind of paradox that Ghosh can capture so

succinctly— how the great twelfth-century temple, instead of

Cambodia’s medieval history ‘becomes a symbol of the

modernizing nation-state’—an icon stamped on civil and military

uniforms, factory produced commodities like beer, a design on the

national flag, a logo for banks and airlines. When the French

‘discovered’ Angkor Wat it was a functioning religious shrine, but

the archaeologist restoring the temple insisted on ‘separating the

monument as far as possible from the untidy uses of its present day

inhabitants’. The stone needed to be sanitised from local contact to

be truly monumental. (Web.)

Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma is an imaginative rendering of

the complex responses of a sensitive writer. It is a pure travelogue. It presents the

real picture of two South Asian countries Cambodia and Burma in their post-

colonial period. It apparently defies conventional literary classification of a

 42

travelogue. It is divided into three chapters— chapter one titled ‘Dancing in

Cambodia’, chapter two titled ‘Stories in Stones’ and chapter three titled ‘At Large

in Burma’. The first impression the book gives is rather misleading. It seems

Ghosh is describing his travels through the two countries after they achieved

independence from the colonial rulers. But when one comes to know the fact the

writer’s responses make an interesting reading.

The travelogue Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma reveals the

author’s perceptions about the socio-political situations in both Cambodia and

Burma (Myanmar), the two countries which practised the politics of extreme

isolation in the recent past. Ghosh seldom misses the historical perspective in his

writings and this is also in evidence in the travelogue. He visited Cambodia in

1993. It was now a land torn apart by the despotic Pol Pot of the village where he

was born. He came to know of Pol Pot’s background, the impact of his brutal

regime and the significance of dance in Cambodia which was now reduced to

destitution. He appreciated the tenacity with which the people held on to one of the

principal elements of their culture. But even after throwing off the yokes of slavery

these countries were confronted with the problems of political instability, ethnic

issues, regional problems and economic crisis. D.K. Pabby (1999) remarks:

In sooth these countries are still grappling with the problematic of

evolution of their distinct national identities, and the writer appears

to hold a mirror to the other nation-states in the region and the

continent. (275)

Ghosh visited Burma twice in 1995. In At Large in Burma he brings alive

the contemporary events of what is now known as Myanmar. He recounts the

events from the death of the great leader Aung San in 1947 to his daughter’s efforts
 43

for the restoration of democracy there. He interviewed the Nobel Peace Laureate

and travelled to the Jungle camps of the Karenni resurgent, depicting a rare word

picture of their life in an eminently readable account. Shubha Tiwari (2008) says:

Amitav Ghosh has tried to comprehend Cambodia and Burma and

their respective recent pasts of extreme isolation. Both the countries

have been colonized earlier; both had traumatic dictatorial regimes.

And both countries practised politics of complete isolation or iron

curtain in recent past. (67-68)

The novel gives impetus to decolonization in its own way. It seeks to

establish that the colonizer or the dictator cannot kill a people. In spite of struggles

and bloodshed, civilization and culture had survived. It states that a nation lives in

art and culture, not in governments. On the one hand it deals with King Sisobath’s

regime and culture in Cambodia, on the other it throws light on the importance of

the temple of Angkorwat. It also registers the tyrannical tactics adopted by Pol Pot

(Saloth Sar) who belonged to Khmer tribe living in the hilly area of remote Komp

Thong Province in north-eastern Cambodia. When Pol Pot came to power in 1975,

he got two million people butchered to impose his own political vision on people.

Ghosh hints at the problems that arose out of France’s colonization of Cambodia.

On the whole we come across the episodes - King Sisobath’s journey to France, the

colonizer’s country, glory of the temple of Angkorwat, Pol Pot’s rise to Power, his

cruelties imposed on people, his decline but best of all - the survival of the art of

music and dance through political upheavals.

It is worth noticing that Cambodia made international headlines in April,

1998 after the Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot had died of heart attack at the age of

72. He grew up in a well-to-do family of farmers. He had been a student of radio

 44

electronics in Paris. His political career began in 1950. He joined the underground

Communist Party and became its secretary general in 1962. After ascending the

throne in 1975, he introduced several changes in the country. He set about

transforming the country into his vision of an agrarian Utopia. He ordered

emptying the cities, abolishing private property and religion and, setting up rural

collectives. He attempted to impose ruthlessly his vision of a perfect society. In the

execution of his plans, two million Cambodians lost their lives. His famous

statements were: the Revolution does not recognize families. During his regime he

bestowed no favours on the members of his family, not even his elder brother,

Chea Samy’s husband. Bill Clinton, the then President of the U.S.A. spoke over

this dictator’s death: “...a time to remember his murderous reign of terror and to

pursue justice against other Khmer Rough leaders who share the guilt.” (The

Hindustan Times, 18 April 1998, 14) There are grounds to believe those weeks

before Pol Pot’s death, the U.S.A. had sought Chinese help to put Pol Pot on trial.

It was reported in The Hindu, (April 12, 1998, p.6.).

The uproar on the death of the deposed tyrant became an international issue

leading to a number of pertinent queries about his motives, politics and social

engineering. The factors which were responsible for the execution of Pol Pot’s

policies of isolation have been highlighted in this book which may be treated as an

important political document. Novy Kapadia (1999) observes: “With an astute eye

for detail and in fluent prose, the author blends fact and observation to create an

important work of history, sociology and politics.” (238)

In the travelogue, Amitav Ghosh has sought to reconstruct the brutal social

experiments carried out Pol Pot, and the troubles imposed on the ordinary people.

Implicitly the writer exposes the politics of extreme isolation practised in the
 45

recent past in the two countries, Cambodia and Burma. As an alert and conscious

observer of socio-political scenario during the regime of isolation, Amitav Ghosh

afforded to have a conversation with the associates of Pol Pot. This is perhaps a

major device employed by the writer authentically to describe the cruelties

penetrated by the despotic ruler.

The main targets of Khmer Rouge’s undisguisedly racist nationalism are

Vietnam and Cambodia’s own Vietnamese minority. Amitav presents the sorry

sight with help of dialogues. One of the Khmer Rough defectors told the United

Nations officials in 1992 that Pol Pot was an unashamed racist who ordered killing

of the Vietnamese at par. Ghosh describes the reactions of the defector:

As far as the Vietnamese are concerned, whenever we meet them,

we must kill them whether they are militaries or civilians, because

they are not ordinary civilians but soldiers disguised as civilians.

We must kill them whether they are men, women or children, there

is no distinction, they are enemies. (DC1)

Ghosh is out rightly opposed to any kind of terror or violence anywhere in

the world. He seeks to expose the tendency of the cruel Pol Pot and his ally Khieu

Samphan who held that terror is essential to the exercise of power. Khieu

Samphan, the head of the state, played an active role in planning ‘the mass purges

of the period’. They were brutal leaders who considered terror and cruelty as a

‘morally cleansing weapon’. Ghosh too agrees that this terror was an essential part

not merely of their terrifying tactics but also of the moral order on which they had

built their action.

A close observation of the events and episodes described in the novel

would reveal the fact that Pol Pot’s hero was Robespierre whose motto was :
 46

“Terror is an emanation of virtue”. However, Pol Pot’s vision of social Utopia was

shaped by his surroundings - his life with hill tribes in remote north-eastern

Cambodia. As we come to know the original Khmers were self dependent in their

communal living. Though two - third population of Cambodia was formed of

Buddhists yet they were untainted by Buddhism. They attached no importance to

money. Pol Pot focused his attention on middle-class people whenever he thought

of his social engineering. It is here that Ghosh notices the uprooting of the middle-

classes. The process of social engineering and the uprooting of the middle-classes

was an important aspect of the Khmer Rouge revolution. Ghosh describes it as the

memory of his friend Molyka, who was “a mid- level civil servant, “poised

attractive woman in her early thirties, painfully soft-spoken, in the Khmer way”

(7).

Now coming to the erstwhile history of Cambodia we find that the first

chapter of this thought- provoking and disturbing book opens with the description

of the sea journey of a King named Sisobath, a journey from Cambodia to the land

of the colonizers i.e. France. Cambodia had been colonized by France. The king

sets out on the journey along with his entourage of a number of fellow-travellers—

princes, courtiers, officials and, most importantly a troupe of nearly a hundred

classical dancers and musicians from a royal palace at Phnom Penh. The journey

starts on 10 May, 1906 at two in the afternoon. Aboard a French liner called

Amiral Kersaint, they undertake the journey as the fulfillment of a lifelong dream

and desire to visit France. Ghosh describes the child like joy of the king and his

group: “The king, who had been crowned two years before, had spoken of his

desire to visit France, and for him, the voyage was the fulfilment of a lifelong

dream.” (1)
 47

Ghosh maintains that some of the visitors take this journey as a cherished

opportunity to leave their own land to stage the first performance of Cambodian

classical dance in Europe. It is to be held at the Exposition Coloniale in Marseille,

an immense fairy-land of an exhibition. The theme of the performance is based on

that of France’s colonial possessions. Ghosh touchingly writes about the life and

background of the royal dancers:

It was said that the dancers entered the palace as children and spent

their lives in seclusion ever afterwards; that their lives revolved

entirely around the royal family; that several were the king’s

mistresses and had even borne him children; that some of them had

never stepped out of the palace grounds until this trip to France. (3)

The historical events as recorded further in the novel reveal that King

Sisobath’s eldest daughter, Princess Soumphady was the head and supervisor of

the girl - folk and dancers in the palace at Phnom Penh. The royal manners and

style of dress of the princess attracted and influenced highly the Marseillais crowd.

As a formal courtesy, the princess too admired the dresses and hats of the French

women but showed no interest in wearing them herself. The remaining story of

King Sisobath and Princess Soumphady’s journey to France undertaken in 1906, is

told by Chea Samy, a sister-in-law of Pol Pot and a teacher at the School of Fine

Arts in Phnom Penh in 1993. Side by side Molyka too describes the Pol Pot’s

political tendencies to Amitav Ghosh.

Ghosh is informed that after the death of King Sisobath in 1927, his son

Monivong ascended the throne. His mistress Luk Khum Meak was his most

favourite queen. During the regime of King Sisobath , Princess Soumphady used to

be the head and supervisor of the girl folk in the palace of Phnom Penh. Now
 48

Monivong’s queen Luk Khum Meak was entrusted with the responsibility of

looking after the girls and dancers. The queen employed her relatives in the palace.

One of her young relatives married Chea Samy. Chea Samy’s husband was the

elder brother of Saloth Sar (Pol Pot) who was at that time only six. Pol Pot was the

future terror god of Cambodia. However, Chea Samy appreciates the behaviour of

Saloth Sar (Pol Pot) when he was a child and lived with her in the early years of

her married life. She says: “He was a very good boy, she said at last, emphatically.

In all the years he lived with me, he never gave me any trouble.” (13)

The mid-level civil servant Molyka’s family was a part of the social group

which was hardest hit by the Khmer Rouge revolution. When she was thirteen, she

was evacuated with her whole family to a labour camp in the province of

Kompong Thom. Separated from other members of her family, she was sent to

work in a fishing village on “Cambodia’s immense fresh water lake, the Tonle

Sap.” (9) She continued to work as a servant and nurse maid for a family of fisher-

folk and returned to Phnom Penh in 1979 when the Vietnamese overran the Khmer

Rouge. Ten out of Molyka’s family of fourteen had been killed. Ghosh takes up

this particular example to generalize the misery of the urban middle-class people

and writes:

City people by definition, they are herded into rural work camps;

the institutions and forms of knowledge that sustained them were

abolished - the judicial system was dismantled, the practice of

formal medicine was discontinued, schools and colleges were shut

down, banks and credits were done away with, indeed the very

institution of money, and even the exchange of goods and services,

was banned. (10)

 49

Ghosh makes queries about Pol Pot’s plans and is informed that Pol Pot

targeted the middle - class because he realized that it is the middle class that

moulds public opinion and shapes the societal mind. He wanted to eliminate those

who could prove fatal to the execution of his plans. Ghosh states: “Cambodia’s

was not a civil war in the same sense as Somalia’s or the former Yugoslavia’s,

fought over the fetishism of all difference : it was experiment in the reinvention of

society.” (10) Ghosh feels sad to hear that the majority of the middle-class people

were tortured by the despotic ruler for no fault on their part. He maintains:

No regime in history had ever before made so systematic an attack

on the middle -class. Yet if the experiment was proof of any thing at

all, it was ultimately of the indestructibility of the middle - class, of

its extraordinary tenacity and resilience; its capacity to preserve its

form of knowledge and expression through the most extreme kinds

of adversity. (13)

Ghosh observes that it was a well - planned, systematic and sustained attack

on the middle class. To convey his impressions in an emphatic manner, he

converses with those people who mention their family history. Chea Samy tells

him that she and her husband, like everyone else, were compelled to go to serve a

village of old people. The Khmer Rouge loyalists alongwith new converts were

made to work in rice fields. Ghosh describes the miserable plight of Chea Samy:

Chea Samy was working in a communal kitchen at the time,

cooking and washing dishes late that year, some party workers stuck

a poster on the walls of the kitchen: they said it was the picture of

their leader, Pol Pot. She knew who it was the moment she set the

eyes on the picture.

 50

That was how she discovered that the leader of the terrifying

inscrutable ‘Organization’ Angkar that ruled their lives, was none

other than little Saloth Sar (Pol Pot). (14)

The Vietnamese broke Cambodia in 1979 rendering it like shattered state.

However, it was in the post - revolution period that the Ministry of Culture

endeavoured to trace the trained classical dancers and surviving teachers who

could revive combodia’s ancient culture. One of the surviving dancers described

the plight of the dancers:

I was like a smoker who gives up smoking..... I would dream of

dance when I was alone or at night. You could get through the day

because of the hard work. It was the nights that were really difficult;

we would lie awake wondering who was going to be called out next.

That Was When I would Dance, in my head. (17)

Amitav describes his reactions to the trying circumstances under which

Chea Samy had lived. She had entered the palace to join the girl folk. Now after

long, this widowed lady is required to contribute to the revival of Cambodia’s art

and culture. Ghosh writes:

Like everyone around her, Chea Samy too had started all over again

- at the age of sixty, with her health shattered by the years of famine

and hard labour. Working with quiet, dogged persistence, she and a

handful of other dancers and musicians slowly brought together a

ragged, half-starved bunch of orphans and castaways, and with the

discipline of their long, rigorous years of training, they began to

resurrect the art that Princess Soumphady and Luk Khum Meak had

passed on to them in that long- ago world, when King Sisobath

 51

reigned. Out of the ruins around them, they began to create the

means of denying Pol Pot his victory. (18)

Ghosh adopts flash-back style to highlight various problems which

Cambodia was confronted with. He describes the grim spectacle of Cambodia’s

colonization by France, and the rise of Pol Pot. He also brings to lime light the

activities of the Khamer Rouge tribes who tried Guerrilla war strategies and

attacked Vietnamese. He gives an account of the movements and activities of

Norodom Sihanouk, Minister Thiounn and his grandson Thiounn Mumm, Pol Pot

and his brother Loth Sieri, King Sisovath, Son Sann, Hun Sen, Khieu Samphan and

Rodin who represent various social or political groups. With the help of this group

of characters we can understand the complexity of social, cultural, political and

economic problems. However, socio-cultural traditions of music and dance proved

to be the turning points in the national politics. D.K. Pabby interprets Ghosh’s

treatment of these issues and says:

In spite of all the political turmoil and chaotic-anarchic situations,

one thing that kept the spirit of the ‘nation’ alive in Cambodia is its

rich cultural heritage of music and dance. This becomes evident

from the vivid description of the cultural festival that was held in

Phnom Penh in 1988 amidst the destruction of social, economic,

cultural and political fabric of the country. (227)

Ghosh’s description of the festival day is interesting and delightful. Some

foreigners were also present in Phnom Penh. The response of the local people to

the dance performance was very excellent. In spite of the critical situation the

country was facing, the number of audiences was more than expectation. Ghosh

writes:
 52

But people flocked to the theatre the day the festival began. Onesta

Carpene, a Catholic relief worker from Italy was one of the handful

of foreigners than living in Phnom Penh. She was astonished at the

response: the city was in a shamble; there was debris everywhere,

spilling out of the houses on to the pavement, the streets were

jammed with pillaged cars, there was no money and very little

food— ‘I could not believe that in a situation like that people would

be thinking of music and dance.’ (52)

Ghosh maintains that the adverse circumstances could not create any

obstacle in the way of the visitors. He writes:

But still they came pouring in, and the theatre was filled far beyond

its capacity... when the first musicians came on stage, she (a relief

worker) heard sobs all around her. Then, when the dancers

appeared, in their shabby, hastily-made costumes, suddenly,

everyone was crying, old people, young people, soldiers, children –

‘you could have sailed out of there is a boat’... They could not stop

crying; people wept through the entire length of the performance. It

was a kind of rebirth: a moment when the grief of survival became

indistinguishable from the joy of living. (63)

One can observe that in several touching passages, Ghosh seeks to explain

the power of womanhood. He also gives the message of the worth of the old people

who are ‘living reservoirs of the past’. They are living tradition. We may call them

with honour, the solid foundation of the structure of a grand cultural building, on

which we stand and jump, and more so try to look at the sky. In hard times, they
 53

provide us fortitude and strength. Shubha Tiwari interprets Ghosh’s views on the

historical events discussed in the novel and says:

The social and political history of Cambodia from 1906 to 1993 has

been narrated with an added human dimension. Both the dates are

important. In 1906 Cambodian performers went to Europe for

showing their native skills. These native skills will, in future, give

them strength to live and dream. 1993 is the year when finally under

the auspices of the UN’s Transitional Authority of Cambodia,

country-wide elections were held. (77)

The second chapter titled ‘Stories in Stones’ seeks to highlight the

importance of an old temple ‘Angkor Wat’ which is said to belong to twelfth

century cultural design. It represents the cultural life of the said century. It also

reveals the ethos of the country. It is ‘A Monument to the Power of the Story’.

Many stories are carved on the elegant structure. It is said to be the largest single

religious edifice in the world. It is a symbol of the romance of lost civilization and

ancient glory. Ghosh describes it figuratively:

This is true in a perfectly literal sense : with every step a visitor

takes in this immense twelfth-century Cambodia temple he finds

himself moving counters in a gigantic abacus of story telling. [...]

The setting is Mt. Meru, the sacred mountain of ancient Indian

myth, whose seven carefully graded tiers provide the blue print for

the temple’s form. The cast is the entire pantheon of gods, deities,

sages and prophets with which that cosmos is peopled. (54)

Diving deep into the past glory of the temple of Angkor Wat, Ghosh says

that people from remote places used to visit it but now their curiosity seems to
 54

have finished since in religious context it has lost its earlier charm for them. He

also observes that the temple now serves as a symbol of modernity to the

Cambodians. However, it is an important cultural remain for them. Ghosh finds it

now only as a symbol of modernity and writes:

Angkor Wat is, for example, undisputedly a temple, yet it never

figures in anything to do with religion, or indeed in any context that

might be called ‘traditional’ or old-fashioned. Its likeness appears

instead on certain factory- produced commodities, like beer; it is

stamped on uniforms, civil and military; it figures on the logos of

large corporations, like banks; indeed, the erstwhile Kampuchea

Airlines even succeeded in transforming this most earth - bound of

structures into a symbol of flight, by lending it a pair of wings. (56)

Exploring the theme of resurgence in this chapter, the novelist shows that in

the course of time, the architectural wonder became a unifying symbol for the

Cambodians including politicians of different ideologies such as Prince Sihanouk,

Son Sann and Pol Pot. However, this five towered image of Angkor Wat is not a

symbol of religious unity, though Buddhism is the dominant religion of the

majority of the Cambodians. Novy Kapadia remarks:

... Angkor Wat is not as the Golden Temple at Amritsar is to the

Sikhs or the mosques at Mecca and Madina are to the Muslims, or

St. Peters Church at the Vetican to the Roman Catholics, a Symbol

of spiritual faith and renewal. (286)

Ghosh is also an anthropologist. He came to know of the legend of the

sudden discovery of Angkor Wat by the nineteenth century French explorer Henri

Mohout. Several myths are inscribed upon the temple. This too is one of them. The
 55

writer also approached the Indian archeologists to find out the fact about the myth.

He comments on its background story.

The story is a familiar one for in this century many other parts of

the world have seen their present being technologically and

symbolically superseded by the relics of their past. But in Cambodia

the process went further than elsewhere. For an entire generation of

Cambodians, including politicians as different in ideology as Prince

Sihanouk, Son Sann and Pol Pot. Angkor Wat became a symbol of

the modernizing nation-state. It became the opposite of itself: an

icon that represented a break with the past— a token of the

country’s belonging, not within the medieval, but rather the

contemporary world. Thus the beer, banks, airlines and of course,

flays. (60)

A close study of the travelogue reveals that Ghosh has sought to establish

the importance of the temple of Angkor Wat as a national pride to the Cambodians.

They think that the temple is a mark of identification of the Cambodian culture. It

has survived the ravages of time brought out by French colonialism and

dominance. It is a bridge between the ancient and the modem culture.

Ghosh makes use of history and politics in his novels. It seems to be a

familiar territory to him. He has sought to merge the past into the present besides

blending together history, politics, anthropology, philology, sociology and religion.

He make no escape from the present. He seems to believe that the study of the past

is a preparation for facing the present day problems. K.C. Belliappa (1996) writes:

“... an excursion into the past is no escape from the present, but a coming to grips

with the present realities of living.” (65)

 56

Ghosh lays stress on the significance of a work of art which aims at

keeping the emotional integrity of a nation intact. He uses music, dance and

sculpture as symbols of the resurgence of Cambodia. By these identities, the world

takes notice of this small nation ravaged for centuries by imperialism and later in

1970’s by American fighter planes and troops as a result of Vietnam war. He

endeavours to show that the images of Angkor Wat “appear to be omnipresent”.

(56) He also seeks to establish the importance of harmony, goodwill and

understanding. Novy Kapadia remarks:

Ghosh uses the technique of juxtaposing the medieval and modern

worlds of the twelfth and twentieth centuries in two different

civilizations of India and Egypt, with their diverse cultures of

Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Hinduism. Through this clever

fictional discourse, Ghosh illustrates the need for human

understanding and religious tolerance, which he considers as

imperative in a world full of strife due to religious obscurantism and

fanaticism. (287)

The novel is a sensitive insight into postcolonial experience and politics of

isolation and violence. The second chapter is only of eleven pages but it reveals an

important political message. The writer skillfully knits myths, legends and local

stories to show the paradox about the temple of Angkor Wat. He uses the narrative

technique of a story told by a monk to recall the glory of the renowned temple.

The third and the last section of the novel is “At Large in Burma”. The title

seems to imply a struggle for freedom in Burma. In it Ghosh has made an attempt

to explore the history of his ‘roots’. He heard the story of other countries,
 57

particularly of the places where his parents and relatives had lived and which they

visited before the birth of the Republic of India in 1947. He writes thus:

To me, the most intriguing of these stories were those that my

family carried out of Burma. I suspect that this was partly because

Burma had become a kind of lost world in the early 60s. When I

was old enough to listen to my relatives’ stories. It was in 1962 that

General Ne Win, the man who would be Burma’s longtime dictator,

seized power in a coup. Almost immediately, he slammed the

shutters and switched off the lights: Burma became the dark house

of the neighbourhood, huddled behind an impenetrable, overgrown

fence. It was to remain shuttered for almost three decades. (65)

Ghosh employs the linear narrative technique to portray the fight for

democracy in Burma. He alludes to the clash between two social forces—the

forces of orthodoxy and status quo, represented by State Law and Order

Restoration Council and, the forces of change seeking democracy. The latter was

led by Nobel Peace-prize-winner, Aung San Kyi and her followers. She launched

peaceful non-resistance movements to achieve and restore democracy and civil

liberties. However, there were house arrests and mass arrests. Suu Kyi’s

predicament of house arrest created stir in the political activities. Ghosh deals with

it as postmodern dilemma, and writes:

In the postmodern world, politics is everywhere a matter of

symbols, and the truth is that Suu Kyi is her own greatest political

asset. It is only because Burma’s 1988 democracy movement had a

symbol, personified in Suu Kyi, that the world remembers it and

continues to exert pressure on the current regime (military junta).

 58

Otherwise, the world would almost certainly have forgotten

Burma’s slain and dispersed democrats just as quickly as it has

forgotten many others like them in the past. (83)

Ghosh observes political activities and tactics from close quarters. He finds

duplicacy in word and deed on the part of the political leaders and rulers. They

dictate rules for upholding the values of democracy, advocate freedom of speech

and liberty but practically they are supporters of dictatorial attitude. Actually

speaking, Ghosh learnt much about Burma through the tales told by his elders

when he was a child, more so by his aunt, and uncle known as ‘Prince’. He too

describes the story in the manner he was told:

Like many Indians, I grew up on stories of other countries : places

my parents and relatives had lived in or visited before the birth of

the Republic of India in 1947. To me the most intriguing of these

stories were those that my family carried out of Burma. (65)

In an artistic manner Ghosh tries to expose that the blemishes of Burma

have rendered her, after fifty years, one of the ten least developed nations of the

world. According to a report, the country has misused civil liberties. With the

assassination of Aung San on 19 July, 1947, there has been a marked decline in her

civil values. It was held that Aung San was a renowned and established leader of

the country who boldly championed the cause of independence for the country.

Another famous human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize winning person Suu

Kyi underwent a long house arrest in Rangoon. Besides this, since it attained

political independence in 1948, it witnessed civil wars, communist uprisings,

military coups and frequent clashes among minority groups. Though Buddhists

form two-third of the country’s population yet during colonial rule, the British
 59

rulers favoured minority groups over the ethnic Burmans. Surprisingly, the British

Burma Army was formed largely of the units such as a Karen Rifles and the

Kachin Rifles. The result of this policy was civil war. Ghosh gives a vivid account

of the civil strife and political situation:

It takes a military dictator to believe that symbols are inert and can

be manipulated at will. Forty years after his assassination, Aung San

had his revenge. In a strange, secular reincarnation, his daughter,

Suu Kyi came back to haunt those who had sought to make use of

his death. In 1988, when Burma’s decades of discontent culminated

in an anti-military uprising, Aung San Suu Kyi emerged from

obscurity as one of the country’s most powerful voices, the

personification of Burma’s democratic resistance to military rule.

(74)

Ghosh has dealt with several political motives as well as other crucial

aspects of contemporary politics. He has also tried to raise the position and role of

minorities in a decolonized, newly-independent country. As the writer has referred

to, the Karen army had been fighting against dire odds for fifty years:

Many regarded the war against SLORC as a direct continuation of

the war against the Japanese. Some Karenni families had been at

war for three generations, and many of their fighters had spent their

entire lives in refugee camps. (92)

However, the writer avoids making any comments on the contemporary

political situation. Neither does he glorify nor condemn the efforts made by the

ethnic minority against the ruling Burmans. He only demands of the reader to think
 60

over the question: how ethnic minorities can be accommodated in a multi-cultural

democracy?

Suu Kyi’s non-confrontist struggle signifies peaceful resistance to the rule

of the Military Junta. In her public meetings at her residence in the University

Avenue, there are questions from the public on the issues ranging from food and

health to politics and literature, Burma’s military rulers have been able to hold on

so long to power inspite of Suu Kyi’s mass appeal and mass base. Burma’s

‘observer status at the ASEAN’ seems to be an endorsement of the military regime.

But Suu Kyi’s approach is Gandhian. Equipped with much needed moral strength

to weigh things objectively, she says:

I don’t quite understand why one talks about constructive

engagement as being such a problem. Each government has its own

policy, and we accept that this is the policy of the ASEAN nations. I

sometimes think that this problem is made out to be much bigger

than it really is.... Just because (these governments) have decided on

a policy of constructive engagement, there is no need for us to think

of them as our enemies. I don’t think this is a case of us and them.

(112)

Ghosh finds Suu Kyi a staunch follower of Gandhiji and his policies of

truth and non-violence. She is an optimist. She is a leader committed whole-

heartedly to the ideals of peace. She wants to achieve her goal by adopting fair and

noble means, however, delayed these may be. She declares: “I have always told

you... that we will win. ... that we will establish a democracy in Burma and I stand

by that. But as to when, I cannot predict. I’ve always said that to you.” (113-114)
 61

Ghosh highlights the marginalization of an Indian migrant in the Burmese

civil war. Ko Sonny, whose real name was Mahinder Singh was the commander of

a regiment with Karenni insurgents. As regards his family, it had been settled in

Burma for three generations. He was an enthusiastic idealist. When he was a

student of physics in the University of Rangoon, he stood and struggled for the

cause of Karenni and other minority students and went to jail on this account.

Evidently Ghosh proves Ko Sonny as a fighter for a social cause though

misfortunes chase him everywhere. Novy Kapadia observes: “The human cost of

insurgency is cleverly shown by Amitav Ghosh in this gripping narrative. Ghosh

shows that all boundaries are artificial.” (293)

Dancing in Cambodia may be considered, in a sense, as a “choral work” in

which past and present merge together from a variety of focal points. At Large in

Burma is dominated, apart from the section dedicated to the nationalist struggle of

Karenni ethnic minority, by two charismatic figures, able to express the paradigm

of post-colonial Burma: the hero of the independence war and the hero of the

“second struggle for national independence” (Ghosh 76)

In the context of India’s nuclear explosion test on 11th May, 1998 followed

by the Pakistani tests, many were the critical responses that explored the reason

d’etre and the consequences of the traumatic event. Like a concerned Indian

journalist Ghosh too made a trip to the site in order to understand the motivation

behind and the consequences thereafter. The visit Ghosh made to the location of

test was three months after and the outcome essay Countdown (1998) comprises

the information he collected and the interviews he took with the people of

Pokharan. What emerges is a very impassioned, humanistic account touched with

irony and satire. In a true to his ethos vein, Ghosh traverses many generic
 62

boundaries, experimenting with form and structure and it becomes difficult to pin

him down as a anthropologist or a journalist. This dilemma is evident in all his

writings, whether fiction or non-fiction. As he himself comments in another

context:

I would like to think of the notes that follow as an impressionistic

contribution to a yet uninvented discipline—the ethnography of

international peacekeeping. Or, in other words, an anthropology of

the future. (Ghosh, 2006)

The spatio-temporal crossovers and dislocations can be seen clearly in the

way the essay is structured. Dwelling primarily on the analysis of the destruction in

and around Pokharan Ghosh retraces it back to the nuclear explosion of 1974 and

in positing a comparison he explores the advocacy of the nuclear programme and

contrasts it with the expectation of the people in general. He comments on the pain

and despair of the then Defence Minister, George Fernandes, who was against the

very act of nuclearization. In an extension to this Ghosh makes a detailed survey of

India’s critical borders in Kashmir and Siachen and gathers the responses of the

army personnel there about the explosion. He also tries to assess the Pakistani

point of view and the resultant relations between the two countries-India and

Pakistan. What then distils forth is a very clear statement of the fact that the bomb

culture is a disaster in terms of its economic repercussions, and humanistic

consequences. What Amartya Sen was to say in 2001 in ‘India and Bomb’ was

already predicted by Ghosh.

As Ghosh explicitly puts it: “The only people who benefit from these tests

are the politicians... They bring no benefits to anyone else in the country.” Ram

Vilas Paswan too had said the same:

 63

And this in a country where ordinary citizens don’t have food to eat.

Where villages are being washed away by flood. Where prices are

touching the skies. Of the country’s six hundred thousand villages,

one-third don’t have arrangements for safe drinking water. Fifty per

cent of our people live below the poverty line. For the price of a

single battle tank we could open one hundred primary schools. But

what we do instead is that every year we spend thirty-five thousand

crores of rupees on armaments.” (quoted in Ghosh, 1999:20)

Even the villagers of Pokharan were devastated.

We had never heard of cancer before in this area. But people began

to get cancer after the test. There were strange skin diseases. People

used to scratch themselves all the time. There were sores on their

skin... (Ghosh, 1999: 8)

During his visit to Pokharan Ghosh spoke to Manohar Joshi, a thirty-six-

year-old man who had grown up in Pokharan and had been twelve in 1974, when

Indira Gandhi’s government had first tested a nuclear device in the region. Since

that time many of his friends had contracted cancer and other physical problems.

Near Pokharan is the old palace of Bikaner. While touring it and musing upon past

glories, Ghosh recognises that “this was what the nuclearists wanted: to sign

treaties, to be pictured with the world’s powerful, to hang portraits on their walls,

to become ancestors. On the bomb they had pinned their hopes of bringing it all

back” (13). Such grand schemes of raising the nation’s international profile came

from K. Subrahmanyam, who was among those in India who looked at how the

Soviet Union and the United States had avoided using their weapons and who had

concluded that they were purely symbols. But Ghosh describes Subrahmanyam’s
 64

followers as a new sect: “the bomb-cult/’ he writes, “represents the uprising of

those who find themselves being pushed back from this table [of national and

international power]: it is the rebellion of the rebelled-against, the insurrection of

an elite” (18). As Shubha Tiwari elaborates upon Ghosh’s mindset that these tricks

are nothing but post colonialism of the perverted order. The fifty years of

unfulfilled promises, the frustration of Hot being able to realise potential, the

growing corruption—all these find a temporary atonement in such exercises. We

can take a cricket match as a fine analogy. Defeat Pakistan and all the ills of this

country vanish into a momentary euphoria. But nuclear testing is no cricket match.

It is a very costly and more dangerous ploy to build our lost self-respect and

nationalistic mood. Whereas the Prime Minister, Shri Atal Behari was rejoining in

his so-called achievement by throwing flowers into the pit of the crater and

distributing sweets the rupee fell to a historic low, the stock market plunged to an

all-time low and prices soared.

In his meeting with George Fernandes Ghosh is further disillusioned.

Ghosh describes him as having been the country’s most prominent campaigner

against human rights violations by the army. He later surprisingly helped the BJP

come to power, despite their opposition to the secularism enshrined in India’s

constitution. Fernandes was the one who had approved the tests of 11 May. This

fact, coupled with Ghosh’s meeting with several other former idealists, forced him

to ask the question: “How had matters come to such a pass that reasonable people

could argue that the country needed to risk annihilation in order to repair the

damage sustained by its self-esteem?” (30) The question has been asked by many

in India and elsewhere who know that weapons that are invented are typically, in

the course of nations, used. In Fernandes’ view, the crisis was due to the colonial
 65

mentality that India still embraced, and the replacement of true political parties

with the rise of “castes and groups gathered around individuals . . . powerful

sectional and regional interests [that] have prevented the formation of stable

governments over the last few years” (46). Ghosh recognised that he was dealing

with an intelligent man, but he wondered how he could cooperate in such a

venture.

Ghosh silently probes the despair that is evident in Fernandes’s

speeches. This despair in Fernandes’s voice is possibly rooted in the

corruption rampant within the leadership of the country. It is

ironical to find that even the Defence Minister is despaired at the

personal aggrandisement of the leadership and its consequent

fallout. Is it out of despair or a search for self-esteem or failures in

other fronts that led the leadership to the nuclear tests? Does

Fernandes’s decision involves his own personal vanity to be

somebody at the table of power, or is it the issue of confrontation

with China and Pakistan, or is it vying with the European powers

that have prompted such a turnabout in his views. Ghosh ironically

sums up “Evidently the cult of the bomb, like all millenarian

movements, was as much a product of despair as of hope.” (Ghosh

1999. 159)

In Pakistan he discovers that the people there share their views with their

Indian counterparts. He says:

‘I wanted to hear them for myself. What I heard instead was for the

most part a strange mixture of psycholozing, grandiose fantasy and

cynicism, allied with the deliberate conjuring up of illusory threats

 66

and imaginary fears. The truth is that India’s nuclear program is

status driven, not threat driven [...]. In Pakistan’s case too the

motivation behind the nuclear program [...] is parity with India.

That the leaders of these two countries should be willing to run the

risk of nuclear accidents, war and economic breakdown in order to

indulge these confused ambitions is itself a sign that some essential

element in the social compart has broken down: that there is no

longer any commensurability between the desires of the rulers and

the well being of the ruled. The pursuit of nuclear weapons in sub-

continent is the moral equivalent of civil war: the targets the rulers

have in mind for these weapons are, in the end, none other than their

own people.’ (106)

As Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the leader of the Jam-aat-e-Islami, the principal

religious party in Pakistan, tells Ghosh, “When a nation feels that it is likely to be

defeated it can do anything to spare itself the shame” (55). Ghosh meets with Asma

Jahangir, Pakistan’s leading human rights lawyer, and is greatly impressed. “So far

as I am concerned,” he writes, “Asma Jahangir ranks with Burma’s Aung San Suu

Kyi as a figure of moral authority and an embodiment of courage” (58}. She was

most distressed by the influence of the Taliban in Pakistan and she speaks in stark

and graphic terms of her confrontations with them in the courts. “I think,” she tells

him, “anyone who proposes orthodox Islam in Pakistan is actually strengthening

the hands of the [BJP]. . . in the sense that fanaticism here brings fanaticism in

India” (69). Both she and Qazi Hussain Ahmed, though opposed on some issues,

indicted the ruling classes in Pakistan as looking out for their own interests rather

than those of the nation. She also makes an interesting observation of national self-
 67

conceptions: “India wants to push a perception of South Asian identity,” (72) she

tells Ghosh. “Pakistan [on the other hand] wants a South Asian identity and yet

does not want it. It wants to leave the door open to an identity as a Middle Eastern

country” (77).

On his return from Pakistan, Ghosh visits the Wagah border post and

comments on the ritual of lowering the flags at sundown. He describes it as a series

of complicated drill manoeuvres, strutting preening and stamping their feet like

anxious roosters . . . sublimely comic” (85}, a “precisely performed staging of a

parodic enmity, produced by unseen regimes... as though we were in one of those

cartoon-film situations where a train filled with looney-tune characters is heading

towards a precipice .- a chasm that is clearly visible to the audience and concealed

only from the protagonists” (87-88).

Ghosh rightly ends Countdown by trying to foretell the doom that is

awaiting us, if we go on pursuing the aggressive nuclear policies. With Kanti

Bajpai and Gautam Bhatia, Ghosh assesses the immense damage that can happen

as an aftermath of the blast in New Delhi, Bombay Lahore or Karachi; with almost

an apocalyptic vision he concludes: “The pursuit of nuclear weapons in the

subcontinent is the moral equivalent of civil war: the targets the rulers have in

mind for these weapons are, in the end, none other than their own people” (106).

The Imam and the Indian: Prose Pieces is a collection of eighteen prose

pieces of various lengths and on a wide variety of subjects, previously published in

journals. The earliest was written in 1985, and the most recent was published in

2002. Ghosh suggests that “the first five narratives. . . were all written in short and

intensely focused periods of concentration” (vii). Thus, the piece that gives this

collection its overall title, “The Imam and the Indian,” was published in Granta in
 68

1986. Tibetan Dinner” came out in 1988, also in Granta. Granta published the

next essay, “Four Corners” in 1988 set at the intersection of four western American

states New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah.

The next one, “An Egyptian in Baghdad” appeared in Granta in 1990. It

was written in the wake of a deeply disturbing visit to Egypt, shortly before the

Gulf War. “The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi” was published in The New Yorker in 1995,

“written in the period between The Calcutta Chromosome and The Glass Palace”

(vii). The next three pieces began as book reviews “but metamorphosed into

something less easily defined” (viii): “The Human Comedy in Cairo: a Review of

the Work of Naguib Mahfouz” appeared in The New Republic in 1990. The next

two pieces in the collection “are based on chapters of the thesis for which [he] was

awarded a D.Phil (PhD) in Social Anthropology by Oxford University in 1982”

(viii). “The Relations of Envy”, published in Ethnology in 1984, is an

anthropological study of “the evil eye”. “Categories of Labour and the Orientation

of the Fellah Economy” appeared in an anthology entitled The Diversity of the

Muslim Community, edited by Ahmed al-Shahi in 1987. “The Slave of MS. H.6”

appeared in Subaltern Studies, Vol. 7, in 1992. The next five essays began as

lectures. The journal Public Culture was subsequently published in “The Diaspora

in Indian Culture” in 1990.

“The Global Reservation” was a Plenary Address at the Annual Meeting of

the Society for Cultural Anthropology in 1993, and was subsequently published in

Cultural Anthropology the following year. “The Fundamentalist Challenge” was

published in the Wilson Quarterly in 1995. “The March of the Novel Through

History” was published in Kunapipi and in The Kenyon Review in 1998, and it won

a Pushcart Prize the following year. The translation of one of Tagore’s stories,
 69

Kshudito Pashan, was published in Desh in 1998. “The Greatest Sorrow: Times of

Joy Recalled in Wretchedness” was the Neelan Thiruchelvam Memorial; Lecture

for 2001. Civil Lines published “The Hunger of Stones” in 1995. Excerpts from

“The Ghat of the Only World” were published in The Nation in 2002. This was

written in memory of a close friend, the poet Agha Shahid Ali, who died on 8

December 2002.

The first and second essay signalled the writing of his The Shadow Lines

and In An Antique Land. In “Tibetan Dinner” he recalls his visit to a restaurant in

Delhi as a student and it is here that he first talks of displacement. “Everyone who

went there got drunk. You couldn’t help doing so - it was hard to be in the

presence of so terrible a displacement. (16)

Though he is a student when he apparently projects this interpretation on

the life of the serving woman at the Delhi restaurant, his inclusion of the story in

this collection of essays tells us a good deal, perhaps, about what becomes a

recurring theme in Ghosh’s various writings: the “fate” of the migrant in today’s

world - the migrant intellectual like himself, but even more heartfelt, the fate of the

migrant worker in many cultures. “When I next caught the monk’s eye,” he

continues:

. . . 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. It cannot be easy to

celebrate the commodification of one’s own suffering

“Four Corners” takes up the desert region of the US, a popular tourist

destination famous for its scenic beauty and Native American history. Ghosh plays

on this latter theme, and overlays one of his insistent themes: the notion of borders.
 70

Tourists, after all, call this “four corners” because they are told that four states

meet in this lunar landscape - though the demarcation is completely invisible and,

thus, is as good a reminder for Ghosh as any that all borders, finally, are arbitrary.

“ [The tourists] will be back early next morning: the cars and RVs [recreational

vehicles] start arriving soon after dawn, their occupants eager to absorb what they

can of the magic of the spectacle of two straight lines intersecting” (23). The

intersection of space and time fascinates Ghosh again and again in his books. Thus,

here, spatially: the four corners, imagined borders between these states;

temporally: between Navajos and US colonisers.

An Egyptian in Baghdad describes his return to a village where he had lived

for ten years referred to as Nashawy in his later writings on Egypt – He

rediscovered that many of friends had been trapped on the shores of the Red Sea.

He notes that “this piece was to become the basis of the epilogue of In An Antique

Land” (viii), so it makes an interesting study of how a writer works, how he moves

from an early “draft” of sections of a novel, to the finished work. At the end of the

essay, he records that:

. . .there were more than a dozen of us in the room now. We were

crowded around the television set, watching carefully, minutely,

looking at every face we could see. But there was nothing to be seen

except crowds: Nabeel had vanished into the pages of the epic

exodus. (45)

But in the “novel” he writes: “Nabeel had vanished into the anonymity of

History” (In An Antique Land: 353). The “epic exodus” is sharpened into the more

strikingly thematic notion of history’s anonymous subalterns, the many individuals

whose lives are simply not recorded by the powerful. “The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi”
 71

provides a powerful account of the riots following Indira Gandhi’s assassination.

“The targets,” writes Ghosh,

. . . were primarily young Sikhs. They were dragged out, beaten up

and then burnt alive Fires were everywhere; it was the day’s motif.

Throughout the city, Sikh houses were being looted and then set on

fire, often with their occupants still inside ... Over the next few

days, some twenty-five hundred people died in Delhi alone.

Thousands more died in other cities. ... Entire neighbourhoods were

gutted; tens of thousands of people were left homeless. (51-52)

Ghosh records that the one memory that stands out most clearly from that

time was the moment when it seemed inevitable that he would be attacked because

he was in a group of Hindus protecting their Sikh neighbours. He has many wisely

observant things to say in this essay about multi-ethnic, multi-religious societies

like India, but he finally turns his attention to the responsibilities of those who

record such events. What he says is important to note, beyond the spectacle of the

violence, is “the risks that perfectly ordinary people are willing to take for one

another” (61). The importance of these riots on Ghosh’s own decisions as a writer

is seen especially in his move from The Circle of Reason to The Shadow Lines

which will be discussed in the next chapter.

Again “The Human Comedy in Cairo” tells us how Ghosh is fascinated by

“countries like Egypt and India - old civilisations, trying hard to undo their

supersession in the q^ modern world” (64). As we have seen, this is partially the

theme of Countdown, and is surely at the heart of In An Antique Land. Regarding

Mahfouz’s winning the Nobel Prize, Ghosh writes that:

 72

... for a prize of such power, the ordinary standards of judgement

that apply to books are held in suspension. What matters is that the

writer’s work be adequately canonical, which is to say, massive,

serious, and somehow a part of ‘world literature.’ If Mahfouz won

on these counts, his was the victory of the decathlete, achieved by a

slow accumulation of points rather than by a spectacular show of

brilliance in a single event. (65).

According to him “The Baburnama is the autobiography of India’s first

Mughal emperor. . . and it is one of the true marvels of the medieval world. . . . the

first and until recent times the only true autobiography in Islamic literature” (90).

In “Fellah Economy” Ghosh describes the social relationships at the heart of a

community of fellahin, and remarks that:

The structure of labour in this community is a means of both

resisting and appropriating some of the forms of relationship which

have come to be synonymous with ‘modernity,’ and that finally, the

system as a whole constitutes a commentary on the very nature of

social relations. (136)

The article was Ghosh’s way of “working out why in this instance, verbs

denoting certain calibrations of social relationship superseded verbs that referred to

technical acts - an order of precedence that was directly contrary to [his]

expectations” (ix). Readers who persevere with these scholarly pieces will discern

that, “despite the difference in form and diction, they share with [his] fiction

certain characteristic subjects and concerns: most notably [his] interest in patterns

of work in various societies. It was during [his] stay in Egypt that [he] learnt that

even the most mundane forms of labour can embody an entire metaphysic - a
 73

discovery that was to have a profound influence on [his] novels The Circle of

Reason and The Glass Palace” (x).

In “The Diaspora in India Culture” Ghosh writes that “the modern Indian

diaspora. . . now represents an important force in world culture [and] is

increasingly a factor within the culture of the Indian subcontinent. ... To my mind

there are no finer writers writing in the English language today than VS. Naipaul,

Salman Rushdie, and A. K. Ramanujan” (243). These are comments that should be

kept in mind when we consider Ghosh’s placement as an Indian Writing in

English, in chapter six. He marvels at “the State’s sensitivity to the writing of the

diaspora” (244) and provocatively asserts that “the links between India and her

diaspora are lived within the imagination” (247). The role of the migrant

intellectual in the imagining of the nation (and the writer as imagined by the

nation) clearly vexes him. On the one hand, “the institutional relationships between

[modern India and its diasporic population], when they exist at all, are all mediated

through Britain” (245). On the other hand, “the opinions of the diaspora are so

significant to India: it is that part of itself which is both hostage and representative

in the world outside - it is the mirror in which modern India seeks to know itself.”

(250)

The Imam and the Indian is not a unified work, since it consists of essays

written over a couple of decades, but it offers a fascinating overview of the many

topics that emerges in the fiction that was being written – as if by Ghosh’s other

hand – while he worked on these prose pieces.

 74

Works Cited

Ain, Sandip. “The Cult of the Bomb: Amitav Ghosh’s Countdown.” Amitav

Ghosh: Critical Essays. Bibhash Choudhury ed. New Delhi: PHI Learning,

2009. Print.

Belliappa, K.C. “Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land: An Excursion into Time

Past and Time Present.” The Postmodern Indian English Novel. Viney Irpal

(ed) Delhi: Allied 1996. Print.

Ghosh, Amitav. Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma. New Delhi: Ravi

Dayal. 1998. (All quotation from this edition) Print.

---. Countdown. New Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1998. Print.

---. The Imam and the India: Prose Pieces. Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 2002. Print.

Hawley, John C. Amitav Ghosh. New Delhi: Foundation Books, 2005. Print.

Kapadia, Novy. “The Politics of Isolation and Resurgence in Dancing in

Cambodia, At Large in Burma.” The Novels of Amitav Ghosh. R. K.

Dhawan (ed.) New Delhi: Prestige, 1999. Print.

Mukherjee, Meenakshi. “Review of Dancing in Cambodia.”

http://www.indiastar.com/mukherjee.html. 4 June 2007. Web.

Nadotti, Anna, ed. Dancing in Cambodia at Large in Burma. Italy: Durante, 1999.

Pabby, D.K. “Traumatic Evolution of Nations: A Study of Dancing in Cambodia,

At Large in Burma.” The Novels of Amitav Ghosh. R.K. Dhawan (ed.) New

Delhi: Prestige, 1999. Print

 75

Sen, Amartya. “India and the Bomb.” 15 Aug 2001. Front Line, The Hindu Vol.

17, Issue 19, 16-29 Sept. 2000, 19 August 2007. Web.

Tiwari, Shubha. Amitav Ghosh: A Critical Study. New Delhi: Atlantic, 2008. Print.