'Writing is like music'

Meeting Amitav Ghosh is like reading his books - an intensely emotional experience. What immediately strikes one on meeting him is his immense humanity. A social anthropologist by training and a creative writer by profession, he sees history as anthropology in retrospect. He is the author of critically acclaimed books as Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land and The Calcutta Chromosome. His latest book, The Glass Palace, his most ambitious project to date, to be published in July, takes an inverted view of our national myth of the colonial experience in India from 1880 to 1942. During his visit to Varanasi in December 1999, he took time out to discuss at length some of the major issues in contemporary literature and academics with BANIBRATA MAHANTA, SOMDEV BANIK and NAMRATA RATHORE, students from the Department of English, Banaras Hindu University.

Excerpts from the interview:

WHAT is this post-colonial experience? As a writer what are the main issues, the main concerns of this experience?

You know, I think that post-colonial is a term that critics use. I do not think writers use it. I remember that when I first heard this term, I was a bit annoyed. I did not begin to write by thinking of myself as being a post-colonial. Nor did I think there was such a thing as a post-colony. I grew up in India which was a place - not a pre-something or a post-something. It was just somewhere where I grew up.

At the same time, I must say that even though a lot of the baggage of post colonial theory does not appeal to me, I do think it has done something important. When I was in college, the only writers who were available to you were really kind of, you know, upper class English writers, and we were always told that this stuff was really good.

Post-colonial theory has really made a place for writers like me and critics like you. So, even though you may disagree with the idea of the post-colonial, you have to accept that it has significantly reconfigured the map of literature. And that is a major thing.

When you write, do you have all these theories about the post- colonial at the back of your mind?

Absolutely not. I do not think any writer does.

And then again, when your books are interpreted according to these literary theories, and meanings and motives are read into them, what effect does that have? Does it affect you?

To tell you the truth, I never read the critics. I know this may sound very strange to you, but I decided a long time ago that if I was going to get involved in reading things that were written about my works, it would completely change my engagement with my work. So basically, I do not know what is written about my work.

Is writing just a creative process for you, or do you write with some aim in mind?

More than that. It is my livelihood. Of course it is a creative process, but I have always made my living by writing. And when you are a writer and you are not just writing on an impulse and it is the only thing you do, you no longer know exactly what your relationship with writing is.

To come back to the post-colonial, what do you think are its main concerns? How important/essential is experiencing for the creative process? Coming to India for a short while (or living abroad) and then writing about it ... is it possible?

It is a very interesting issue; the relationship between experience and literature. You know, when I was young, I used to feel that experience was the stuff of literature - that experience was literature. But that is not the case. It is really not the case at all. To experience is one thing. To translate these experiences into the written word is a completely different thing altogether. So I would say that the literary text and its relationship with experience is always a very problematic relationship.

Now this question you ask, about people coming here for a short time ... Paul Scott came here for three weeks and he wrote 2,000 pages on India. And if you take John Irving, he stayed here for less than three weeks, in a hotel in Mumbai, and he wrote a book on India. You know, there seems to be something absurd about this. At the same time, you cannot say that what Paul Scott has written is not interesting, or entertaining, or amusing. So, even though we may feel a certain discomfort with it, it would be very totalitarian for us to say that the only person who can write about, say Varanasi, is someone who has lived here for 15 years. Because 15 years do not qualify you to write about a place - 20 years do not, 25 years do not. In principle it is not possible to make such a delimitation around experience.

Finally, experience is what you make of it. That is what writing is really all about, you know - what is in your mind. More than what you experience, it is what your mind makes of the stimulii around you. In that sense, I would say that you should be very careful when you are dealing with experiences. One of the really problematic things about contemporary literature is the idea that experience authenticates. The idea that books produced by someone from a marginal group is automatically worthwhile - there is some value to this idea, because I think a part of writing is about testimony - bearing witness - and in that sense, a person from a marginal group bears witness. Something very interesting and important about that. But you know, if you are thinking of locating authenticity in experience rather than in the text, there is a possibility you will always find mimicries of experience.

Have you heard of the Holocaust survivors? The Holocaust is one of the major themes of contemporary literature. Many American and European writers write about the Holocaust. But you will also see how there are a lot of people who write these books claiming to be Holocaust survivors. And later they are exposed as not being so.

There was this particular case in Australia of a woman writer who won all the major prizes. Later, it was discovered that she had no connection with the Holocaust. Then all her prizes were taken back. So, what are the prizes for? Are the prizes for the work, or are they for the life? There is always a temptation to say that you have the better experience, the more model experience, so your writing is better. But that is not the case, you know. Writing, in the end, no matter who you are, no matter where you are from, is about what is on your mind.

This leads us to another question. Do you think regional writers have a better chance of changing or remoulding society than Indian writers writing in English? Mahashweta Devi for example?

Mahashwetadi is a very dear friend of mine and she is a person I really admire. But once again, your question raises the issue of the relation between writer and society. When I was your age, I was active on the Left, and my feeling was that a writer must have some political commitment. But I have begun to see that it is really not all that simple. You say a writer should change society. Why should you trust a writer to change society? Some of the most terrible things that we have seen in society have come from the imagination of writers. The person who is associated with Gorkhaland is a novelist, he has written many books. Veer Savarkar was a writer. You should forgive my saying this, but it is very naive to imagine that all writers will help change society in ways that you like, or in the ways that Mahashwetadi does. In Serbia for instance, some of the most murderous people were writers.

So, you should not imagine that a person, because he is a writer, is necessarily well disposed towards society. That is not necessarily the case. Writers lead very peculiar lives. They spend whole days with a piece of paper and a pencil. In the end you should not trust the writer to produce anything other than the text he produces. I would also add that for me personally, I believe that the most important thing I can do for society is to do what I do well.

If you ask me what the most important problem that faces India today is, I would say that people do not really try to do what they do really well. Or to achieve some kind of excellence in what they are doing, or pour their heart, their mind, the entirety of their whole existence into what they are doing. The people who do it in India are very few. And most of them are musicians.

What do you feel should be an academician's role in today's society?

A teacher who really dedicates himself to teaching, to his relationship with students. I think this is really a very remarkable thing. I taught for many years, so I know the kind of effort it takes, and I think the teacher who does that is already contributing to society. The decay of universities is not because of the terrible things happening outside, it is mainly because there are not enough teachers dedicated to teaching. Teachers have an enormous amount to contribute. And here I would like to say that there is a particular kind of committed teacher who has to be regarded with some suspicion. I realised in the course of my career that it is the committed teacher who says to you that these are the ways in which I am changing society. Often these claims are related to their immediate political connections and ambitions. I think someone who is teaching, say Sanskrit literature, and really takes the trouble to know what they are doing, and who can discover an excitement in what they are teaching is much more valuable.

We have a feeling that Indian writers writing in English are catering to a western audience (Ruth Prawer Jhabwala actually confessed as much), that they are packaging, marketing and selling India.

I know what you are saying. Some young people who have seen very little of India have suddenly decided that this is the bandwagon. But it also depends on what you think of India. If you, for example, want to go out there and write a book which is selling India, how could I reasonably object? What is wrong with selling India? That is what the Government does. And in this particular case, it is not actually causing any harm to anyone. I mean, if you are selling our vision of a place, well, that is what writing is about. If you have a vision of your own society - whether good or bad - and you decide to write about it, why should you allow yourself to think of it in terms of selling or not selling? This is what writers do. If you are clever enough, if you have the brains and the intelligence to produce a text which is a vision of your society, then that is what you should be doing. That is what writers have always done, that is what writers do.

But what are these writers dishing out to the western audience? Is it the truth? The correct interpretation of reality?

Writing does not happen by going into society and taking a poll to discover what is happening in that society. It is an individual's vision of that society.

So writing is not something that you feel, and want to put across? Is it just a way of making money?

No, if you feel for it, if you have a vision of it, if it speaks to you, then that is when you are writing. Are there people who sit down at the table and say, okay, what are the ways through which I can make money? Let me go and write a book. I think such people are relatively few in number.

And who do you write for? Who is your target audience?

My target audience when I was starting out used to be my group of friends in Delhi. I had a small group of friends in Delhi, many of them writers.

The Stephanian School?

I suppose some of them were from St. Stephen's. Some of my close friends were from St. Stephen's. But the rest were not. I had a small group of friends and I would read to them as I wrote. So, I had a clear sense of who I was writing for. But now, as the years go by, that question has receded in my mind. One of the most interesting things that I have done over the past few years is that I have been writing for The New Yorker. The people who read it do not know anything about India. Literally nothing. They do not know where Calcutta is, they do not know where Delhi is, they do not know where Bombay is. And in some strange way, it has been a very challenging thing for me to write for them. Often when you are writing for your own sort of social circumstance, you begin to write in a kind of shorthand. You know that your readers know the references, you know the references. You start writing in a kind of shared shorthand. In this instance, what was really challenging for me was to discover exactly what was interesting, what was universal, what was communicable. The challenge was to write with a universal human interest.

And who is the target reader for something like Dancing In Cambodia, At Large In Burma?

It does not work like that. I did not have a target reader. I wrote it for Granta magazine and I did not have a target reader because, who is really interested in Cambodia? Do you know anyone who is? I do not. And you know that is exactly the challenge. When you are writing about something like that, to make it a compelling narrative, to discover in it what is universal, what speaks to people, what are the ways in which you can hold someone's interest in something that actually does not interest them at all - it is an incredible challenge.

But when you were writing Dancing In Cambodia, didn't you aim at something more than just engaging the readers' interest, like the necessity of having a history of humanitarian values?

Certainly, the question of human morality, the question of morality - the morality of history, the morality of society, these are the fundamental questions of literature. There is no escaping them. Today or tomorrow we have to come back to these, to come to terms with them.

Do you agree with the view that post-colonialism is doing for America what Orientalism did for Europe?

Can you explain this?

In the sense that it is a Western agenda? The raw materials may be here, but the theorising, the packaging - all this is for the Western academic market, particularly America.

I understand the resistance you feel for post-colonial theory, and I feel the same. Everytime I come up against some post- colonial theorist, I feel like I am some creature in a laboratory and they are doing some elaborate tests on me. And it just infuriates me. That is why I understand intuitively what you are saying. But you know, you have to be fair. It is true that a lot of post-colonial theory is being done in America, but it is being done largely by Indians. It is also being done in India. A lot of the people who do this stuff do it in India. And it is also true you know, that you are doing courses on post-colonial theory. And those courses, I will bet you, are a lot more interesting than doing courses on Matthew Arnold and Thomas Hardy. So sometimes you are also the consumer of the theory. And if you feel there is something wrong with the theory, you have to say so. You have to find the grounds to say so. And if you feel that there is a better way for studying Indian writing, you have to lay out the theoretical basis of how that is. To criticise is not enough. You have to show us what is more interesting, what is theoretically the better perspective. And unfortunately, whenever I come up against the post-colonial theorist, I feel exactly as you do, but they ask me this then: what should we be studying? And I have nothing else to say; there is nothing I can say.

There is something I realised a long time ago, which is that for an Indian to write in English is fundamentally a very anomalous thing. And it is bound to create extremely ambiguous feelings in your own mind. It creates ambiguous feelings in my mind when I sit down and start to write in English, because, often, I hear my sentences in Bengali, and then I write them in English. What we are doing is thus fundamentally a very anomalous thing and it is not even clear to me that there is a justification for what we are doing. We are doing it anyway because that is what history has given us, that is what we are left with. But we must accept that it creates very contradictory urges inside us. In fact, I have never been to a conference where somebody has not got up and screamed at me - literally started screaming at the top of their voices - you are doing this, you are doing that. And you know, I actually welcome it, because a lot of the things they say, I want to say to myself. But what do you do? You have only so many capabilities and time is really short - you have so much to do and you have to do it.

What advice do you have for aspiring writers?

The first thing, you have to understand is that writing is like music. Which is to say that you cannot expect writing to be a distant ambition. It is something you have to do on a day-to-day basis. You have to do it every single day. You have to get up in the morning and set aside time everyday to do it. And that the way writing will come to you. That is the only way. Unless you do your riyaaz, you are not going to get there in the end. You have to have that riyaaz - you just have to do it.

Next would be this - try and clear your mind. Think of your mind as a pool where a lot of rain and rocks have fallen. You have to sit down and make an effort to clear your mind, to see clearly what you want to write about - to see it really clearly in the interiority of your mind. See it clearly and then start writing about it, because what is interesting about writing is your discovery of the story that you are trying to tell. But you can only do that after you sort of clear the way - clear away the stuff that is on top. It is a very difficult discipline, to do that in your mind. I do not think it matters what language you do it in - but if you are doing it, if you want to do it well, that is the way you have got to do it.

Your journey (in writing) from Circle Of Reason through Shadow Lines to Antique Land - does it also embody a search at the personal level? Something you are trying to achieve, go towards, find out?

I am a great believer in quest narratives. I think it is the best, the fundamental narrative. All the great narratives of literature are quest narratives - the Odyssey, the Ramayana. So I like the quest - the very idea itself - and writing about it. But unlike the people who are on a quest and know what they are searching for, I do not think I necessarily do.

Of course, what is the point of the quest when you already know where you have to go?

It is always the journey, not the getting there.

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