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Literary Review
The written world
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Readers will find in these essays, clues to, prefigurations of and echoes from Ghosh's book length narratives says MUKUL KESAVAN.
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AMITAV GHOSH'S eighth book, The Imam and the Indian follows upon four novels and three books of non-fiction. This is worth saying because readers familiar with his oeuvre will find in these 18 prose pieces written over 20 years, clues to, prefigurations of and echoes from his book-length narratives. Critics, I suspect, will be tempted to read this collection as an extended gloss on his longer work. Material from three of these pieces ("The Imam and the Indian", "An Egyptian in Baghdad" and "The Slave of MS. H.6") was later incorporated into In An Antique Land, Ghosh's wonderful, genre-confounding book: memoir, history and travelogue written up with a novelist's sense of scene and animation. Readers who know that book should, nonetheless, re-visit all three pieces, because they appear in versions that are both different from their avatar in the book, and, at least in the case of the title essay, better.
If I was to make a dhobi list of the places that this collection visits it would go like this: Egypt, Iraq, the Gulf, the United States, Kashmir, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Bosnia and Cambodia. This would be a misleading inventory because Ghosh's curiosity isn't focused on discrete countries, but rather on the connections he can make between them.
Ghosh is unique amongst Indian writers in being properly cosmopolitan. All his writing guards against the parochialism born of nationalist habit. Cosmopolitanism in his case doesn't simply mean the habit of moving fluently between India and the West. There was a time before independence, when the political boundaries of India hadn't cut Indians off from their neighbours. Maulana Azad's father, for example, moved from a life in Mecca to one in the Nakhuda Mosque in Kolkata without feeling displaced. After decolonisation our borders became fences, over which we peered deferentially westward, blind to every sight except that distant vision of the white world. Ghosh doesn't conform to this post-colonial norm. I know of no other Indian writer who has so consistently looked to his neighbours the better to understand himself.
The title piece of this collection is a fine example of his method. The young Ghosh, doing fieldwork in Egypt, gets into an argument with an intolerant village Imam. The argument degenerates into a chauvinist exchange where each argues his country's cause by invoking its ownership of western armament. Switching, in his characteristic manner, from animating a scene to reflecting upon it and drawing conclusions, Ghosh finds this resonant and rueful sentence: "So there we were, the Imam and I, delegates from two superseded civilisations vying to lay claim to the violence of the West."
Seven of the pieces in this book testify to Ghosh's intimacy with the Arab world. His interest in South-East Asia is less well represented. His writings on Burma and Cambodia, published previously as a book, aren't included here. They should be. "Dancing in Cambodia" is arguably the best short piece Ghosh has written and it's disappointing not to find it in this collection. The piece on Cambodia that this book does include, "The Global Reservation" offers a provocative explanation of the nature and function of international peacekeeping. Describing the work of the UN Peace Keeping Force in Cambodia, Ghosh shows how the UN's nation building mandate can, chillingly enough, incorporate a commitment to ethnic cleansing. He describes the way in which an American translator is used by the peacekeepers to identify "alien" Vietnamese settlers by their accents and then evict them. This nationalist purging, Ghosh argues persuasively, is inevitable because the UN is an assemblage of nation states. Except that in the contemporary world these states are unequally ordered in two tiers. The top tier consists of affluent states with porous borders while the lower tier is increasingly made up of poor, dependent states that lack the wherewithal to be sovereign and are reconciled instead to the status of a bantustan in a global reservation policed by "peacekeepers".
Two brilliant yet sombre pieces remember and reflect upon pogrom and terror in south Asia. The Sikh pogrom that followed upon the assassination of Mrs. Gandhi was a formative event for Ghosh and he returns to it in both "The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi" and "The Greatest Sorrow". Writing about the profound impact that the massacre had on his second novel, The Shadow Lines, Ghosh asks why, in the 1980s, did history seem to stumble and come to a standstill? The answer he offers is this: from the time of Hegel, perhaps earlier, the state was seen as an ethical institution, the bearer of the hope that the future would be both good and worthwhile. The State, therefore, "provides the grid on which history is mapped."
But once the State becomes complicit in genocide and terror, it becomes tainted. It is no longer fit to be the bearer of our teleologies, it can no longer conquer the "unhistorical power of time". Put simply, after 1984 it became impossible for Indians to believe in a virtuous republic and so the future ceased to be a consolation.
In this same essay Ghosh writes of how the 1984 killings forced him to confront a violent past and pushed him into writing The Shadow Lines. He tells of how he began with a memory of refugees within his parents' house in Dhaka and an angry mob outside. He had no context for that scene, that remembered experience, till he sifted through libraries and archives and found one. The violence he remembered was no local riot: it was part of a chain of violence that had been set off by the theft of a holy relic from the Hazrat Bal mosque in 1964.
Individual memory and shared history are the two elements that give Ghosh's best work its power. In a review of Naguib Mahfouz's work in this book, Ghosh argues that the claim often made for Mahfouz's work, that it was a microcosm of Egyptian life, is deluded because Mahfouz's subject is the urban salariat, narrowly defined. Even his best work doesn't strike an authentically tragic note; its "...pathos seems to spring almost entirely from a sense of violated gentility. ...it is hard to create tragedy out of the scramble for respectability." It is an important point that Ghosh makes here, because it calls into question the default assumption that the business of the novel is the chronicling of individual careers and consciousness.
Ghosh's two best novels, The Shadow Lines and The Glass Palace owe their tragic power to his success in placing vivid protagonists in charged historical contexts. This is where the powerful historical novel (and The Glass Palace is a historical novel in the grand, classical manner) holds lessons for that staple of fiction, the novel that happens in the taken-for-granted present. The petit-bourgeois or middle-class protagonist in search of success or self-definition, the Proustian hero wine-tasting his way through sensation and feeling, the narrative of sub-Joycean interiority where the world is collapsed into consciousness, all these are legitimate models for the novelist but it is a mistake to see them as definitive of the novel.
The literary cultivation of consciousness is a fictional strategy that evacuates most of the world for very little in return. If the function of the novel is to map an individual's journey from conformity to self-awareness, then other people, by definition, become the herd, the stereotypes, from which the hero in his individuality is to be distinguished. In his use of history, Ghosh shows us how we can avoid such self-congratulation by accounting for the experience of others. In a novel as irradiated by history as The Glass Palace is, the novelist begins by acknowledging the experience of others — he buffs his imagination against the grit of recorded lives. This recognition, that life is an ensemble performance where everyone has hard-won lines, is one that could usefully inform the novel of the here-and-now, in which other people tend to be extras: supporting actors, at best, supplying a central consciousness with cues.
Many of the pieces in this book attend to violence and terror and tragedy in Sri Lanka, Kashmir, Delhi, Ayodhya, Tibet and New York. Characteristically, Ghosh warns us against treating violence as literary material, against making it "... an aesthetic phenomenon without reference to goodness or truth." To create a panorama of violence, to ignore goodness in a time of evil is to make bad situations worse and "...those who deal in words should pay scrupulous attention to what they say. It is only appropriate that they should find themselves inhibited." Ghosh's scruples are rooted in an almost religious conception of the written word that he borrows from the Bosnian writer Dzevad Karahasan: "The World is written first — the holy books say, that it was created in words — and all that happens in it, happens in language first.
The Imam and the Indian: Prose Pieces, Amitav Ghosh, Ravi Dayal Publisher and Permanent Black, p.361, Rs. 495.
Mukul Kesavan teaches history and is the author of the novel Looking Through Glass.
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