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Literary Review
CRITICISM
The transit lounge of culture
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The essays in the Companion ... are more academic ... than literary. Nevertheless, they are all unfailingly insightful, rewarding, even stylish and witty.
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I HAVE always thought that if there is one contemporary Indian novel in English that deserves a growing readership, it's The Calcutta Chromosome. I am delighted, then, to find not one but two essays on it in Amitav Ghosh: A Critical Companion. One of them, "The Question of Subaltern Agency", is by Tabish Khair, the editor of this casebook, who remarks that "The Calcutta Chromosome is `clever' (and entertaining) in far more serious ways than the terms `clever' and `entertaining' suggest in popular discourse." Thrown in as a bonus (and what a rich bonus it is) is a wonderful new essay by Ghosh on Satyajit Ray. Ghosh reveals things about Ray we didn't previously know. Such as the time when Ray was filming an overhead shot and a heavy piece of machinery fell on a studio-hand, injuring him gravely. "Ray," Ghosh informs us, "never used an overhead shot again." It is his favourite Ray story because it shows Ray's compassion, that the humanism in his films was not faked. He confesses that his particular Ray favourite is "Paras Pathar", "a neglected masterpiece that deserves a place of honour in the canon of surrealist cinema."
He realises, suddenly, how much Ray has shaped the imaginary universe of his childhood and youth: His interest in science fiction, ghost stories, the fantastical and — when it came to a film like "Agantuk" — even his interest in anthropology because the main character, if you remember, was an anthropologist! He mourns never having met Ray (though he had many telephonic conversations; in one Ray had even said he had "greatly enjoyed" The Circle of Reason) specially since Ray died just when he had finally got around to writing a letter, asking to meet. The contents of the letter, which Ghosh allows us to glimpse in part, is very moving, very beautiful. He ends the essay describing Kolkata the day Ray died: "The whole city was sunk in an inexpressible sadness...the city was orphaned: its king was gone and there was none to take his place. I wandered the streets for hours that night...To this day Ray's work is one of the main anchors that moors me — often despite myself — to the imaginative landscape of Bengal: indeed, to the essential terrain of my own work."
The Ray essay, Khair notes in his Preface, "enables us to understand Ghosh's conception of his art — of the narrative arts in general." The narrative arts, he claims, `shape the world as they relate it'. The essays in the Companion — originally conference papers and articles in journals — are more academic (as befitting a critical anthology) than literary. Nevertheless, they are all unfailingly insightful, rewarding, even stylish and witty. Take, for instance, the way Leela Gandhi's essay "A Choice of Histories" begins: "One might imagine this as a scene from some amateurish late-post colonial, faux- science-fiction, short film: it's December 1992 in Delhi (Delhi University, to be precise). A youthful Amitav Ghosh is sitting, drinking tea, on a ruined culvert along the road which separates (physically, politically, existentially) St. Stephens College from Hindu College. He is in good humour, celebrating reviews of his newly published book, In An Antique Land, with various bearded and khadi-clad friends." Gandhi then informs us that the German philosopher Hegel suddenly materialises beside Ghosh on the culvert. "More tea is ordered, but the German leaves his brew mostly untouched." Ghosh and Hegel then begin a debate which Ghosh wins, of course...and "gives him a copy of Antique Land, and arranges (through contacts in Railways) for his reservation-against-cancellation on the next convenient time-warp back to Berlin."
The tone of the essay then turns academic but by then you are hooked. In the long essay that opens the casebook, "Travelling in the West: The Writings of Amitav Ghosh", Robert Dixon writes, "The characters in Ghosh's novels do not occupy discreet cultures, but `dwell in travel' in cultural spaces that flow across borders — the `shadow lines' drawn around modern nation states." Dixon draws our attention to anthropologist James Clifford's article, "The Transit Lounge of Culture" which frames Ghosh's work in the context of recent developments in the discipline of anthropology, which studies the "borderlands between cultures...such Diaspora cultures...are produced by ongoing histories of migrations and transnational cultural flows." Once we begin to focus on these inter-cultural processes, Clifford argues, the notion of separate, discreet cultures evaporates; "we become aware that all cultures have long histories of border crossings, diasporas and migrations."
In the essay that follows, "Historicizing Scientific Reason in The Circle of Reason", Clair Chambers focuses on "Ghosh's interrogation of the cultural creation of `knowledge' in India, specifically upon his representation of the discourse of science in The Circle of Reason". Padmini Mongia in "Medieval Travel in Postcolonial Times" explores the question: "whether there is such a thing as a postcolonial travel writing: if so, what does it look like, and finally, whether Ghosh's In An Antique Land could be regarded in this perspective." Jon Mee confesses to being an admirer of The Shadow Lines in "The Burthen of the Mystery" but is intrigued by "a single phrase on the final page of the novel, that is, the narrator's comment about `a final redemptive mystery'."
Des Kothay, is an icebreaker that one Bengali invariably uses when he meets another, says Anjali Gera in a footnote to her "Amitav Ghosh Tells Old Wives Tales". It means "where is your country?" "The Shadow Lines", she writes, "attempts to explore the disjunctures between multiple constructions of the nation in the Indian imaginary." In "The Discoverer Discovered: The Calcutta Chromosome", John Theme argues that Ghosh is not just another post-Rushdie Indian novelist "for whom globalisation is an everyday fact of existence." His essay also "endeavours to discuss Ghosh's work in relation to the Subaltern Studies project and to argue that The Calcutta Chromosome exposes the limitation of post-colonial theory."
In the last essay, "The Road from Mandalay: Reflections on The Glass Palace", Rukmini Bhaya Nair offers this sharp, insightful remark: "The existential angst of modernist fiction is replaced in the post colonial novel by a phenomenon one might call `exit-ential anxiety'. Diaspora takes the place of doubt and homelessness becomes the principle trope, typifying a historical condition as well as a state of mind...Any writer who seeks to present the soul of man under colonialism, as Amitiva Ghosh does in his latest, The Glass Palace, is therefore condemned to record this exit-ential dilemma..." The Companion, which ends with an extensive, up to date bibliography, is a major contribution to the growing body of scholarship on Amitav Ghosh.
PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
Amitav Ghosh: A Critical Companion, edited by Tabish Khair, Permanent Black, Rs.495.
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