Amitav Ghosh on what it means to be a writer today in a globalising world, where the boundaries of nation states are apparently melting away. Subash Jeyan
(Published in The Hindu Literary Review on September 3, 2006.)
“I am not here for a book release or to promote a book,” he says smiling, almost apologetically. “I am just here to do a book reading.” From The Hungry Tide in fact. He seems to enjoy the interaction in these reading sessions. “Twenty years back, when I started writing, you never had any direct contact with your audience. But now, that sense of your impact upon the readers, that has changed completely. And that has been the most rewarding aspect of my writing career,” he says. Excerpts from an interview:
What’s your take on the ‘issues’ surrounding writing in English? The debate that Vikram Chandra, for instance, had with some academics over the issue of the ‘anxiety of authenticity’?
I really liked Vikram’s piece, I thought he made a lot of sense. But I think my point of view is substantially different from other people’s because the way the whole situation works in Bengal is very different from the way it works elsewhere. In Delhi or Mumbai, there is a huge divide between the English language writers and the Hindi writer or the Marathi writer. They basically inhabit two separate worlds. That’s not true in Kolkata at all. All the major Bengali writers are all close friends of mine. I know them, I read their work, I feel myself to be deeply influenced by their work. And that shows up in my work. In that sense my work is very deeply engaged with Kolkata and Bengal.
I don’t feel that division so powerfully at all. It’s not an anxiety for me really and I don’t think it is a productive anxiety for those who have it….
How has globalisation changed the scenario in India, especially your experience of being a writer using English?
I think IT has had an enormously liberating impact in the last 20 years. I think it has incorporated an entirely new class of people into the upper middle-class. They are not people who grew up going to clubs or top boarding schools. They are lower middle-class people who studied hard, worked hard, who made their way up to that class through the route of using their minds.
You can see that when you go to any major university and meet the young people there. I am not saying it is a complete meritocracy because obviously the peasant child cannot make his way up. But certainly the upper peasantry, the rural landed people, they are very much represented within this group and it is a sea change in Indian life.
Basically the IT people are people who grew up in a world of ideas. That’s the enormous difference between them and the old Indian elite… and it’s resulted in a level of empowerment which is staggering.
As a writer I see the difference. It’s a completely different experience to be a writer now from what it was 20 years ago. To return to the question of the language one writes in, this is the real difference that I notice. It’s not so much a difference in the writer as a difference in the reader. When I started writing, I had a great sort of envy for Bengali or Hindi writers for the way in which they were loved by their audience you know. And I used to think this is a door which will forever be closed to me…to feel that love in my audience, to feel that I’ve touched some essential part of their being. But that’s changed today. I think that’s what as a writer you live for.
So you really enjoy these reading sessions?
Writing is such a lonely thing. A writer’s life is so schizophrenic. When I am writing a book, for two or three years I hardly ever see anyone except my family. Morning to night I am just living in my own world, you know. Then suddenly you have this period when you have finished the book and you are going out and meeting people and it’s completely schizophrenic because you just aren’t used to it but it’s also very rewarding because unlike a film director, a theatre director or an actor, or a dancer, a writer never really has that kind of face-to-face interaction. And when I do have that interaction I find it very exciting but I also find it very draining. For no reason other than that I am not used to it.
You have said that you prefer fiction because it is a kind of meta form. Could you elaborate on that because the novel particularly is perceived to be a form which privileges very particular ways of seeing the world and the self…
I think it became very bourgeois from the late 19th century onwards. But, on the other hand, one of my great hero as a writer is Hermann Melville and if you read Moby Dick, it is a novel about men at work. It is anything but a bourgeois book. It is completely subversive of any kind of bourgeois order. I just reread it and I think it is a magnificent work. It so powerfully identifies this kind of madness in American life. In Moby Dick, at every moment revolt is simmering and you have the figure of this tyrannical, obsessed captain, who is essentially the capitalist who is out to destroy nature. It’s absolutely a metaphor for contemporary America in so many ways. I think he perceived the nature of his civilisation in a way that very few people have.
In some sense, you could say the written language itself is bourgeois so anyone who deals with the written language in that form too is necessarily bourgeois but apart from that, his engagements, his explorations, his themes are anything but that. So I would say that the foundational forms of fiction are not necessarily bourgeois by any means.
Similarly, another great hero of mine is Balzac and again you have exactly the same kind of engagement — with the working class, the prostitutes…and similarly with the capitalists, the artists, the sculptors. You see this is exactly what I love about the novel. It allows you that range, those different forms of exploration.
The essay that you wrote post 9/11 was in a sense disappointing for the stances it took. This is not to deny the human tragedy of 9/11, but i think there is an imbalance in the way human tragedy gets perceived and gets written about, an imbalance in the denial of not-so-spectacular but equally tragic events elsewhere…
I think what is really happening in the world is that there is an upheaval so profoundly at work that in a way one can’t just talk about it in terms of the effect, in terms of, as it were, emotion because there is something much bigger than that at stake. I think one of the things that is really being challenged at the moment is the nation state as a form.
People who talk about Islamic fundamentalism often don’t understand that the reason why such ideas became so powerful in the 1950s and 60s is not just because of their scriptural content but also because they contained a very powerful critique of the nation state. If you look at the work of Sayeed Qutb, what he actually says is that the nation state is a form of idolatry because it is worshipping itself. In its own way it is an interesting and powerful critique and what you really see today is a melting away of the nation state at many different levels. In the West, though they have nation states, they have sort of merged into each other into a sort of Imperium, especially the Anglo states, America, England, Australia. On the other hand you see the emergence of a certain kind of trans-nationalism amongst, say terrorist groups, which are sort of linked up now.
It’s only when you’ve been in places where the nation state doesn’t exist that you begin to see the advantages of the nation state. Especially the time I spent in Burma was very instructive to me because you see large swathes of the countryside where the nation state has ceased to exist. And you know what’s taken its place? Not freedom and liberty you know. What takes its place are warlords. And I see today that there is really a desperate struggle between forms of political order and essentially what is warlordism. While I admire forms of resistance to the Anglo Imperium that has been imposed upon the world, I think it is very important for us to keep in mind what the alternatives are.
What are we working towards? What I would want for the world is a world of secular and equal nation states. And I see that under absolute attack from two sides; from the empire on the one hand and from religious fundamentalism. To me the imperialistic ideal is absolutely loathsome. But, similarly, the ideal of religious extremism is simply not what I would want to live under.
You see Mohammed Atta, I found out later, was from the village next to the village I lived in in Egypt. I saw the lives of those kids you know…I saw those lives being radicalised by fundamentalist Islam, I saw it literally from the beginning… and it’s because I have seen it so closely, I can’t just see one side of it.
And I think we have been very lucky here in India that somehow in some strange way our nation state has more or less survived and more or less made something possible. You look at America now and you see how much policing has advanced and how much religious orthodoxy has come to influence people’s lives; you see that on the one hand, you see Saudi Arabia on the other hand and it seems to me what really needs to be preserved is the model of secular democracy such as ours.
And how does it all affect the writer today?
I think in some strange way, we were ahead of the world in some things. The model of the novel in the West has been one of a monolingual community, but ours has never been a monolingual community. When I wrote The Circle of Reason which is about workers going to West Asia, everyone said, “What sort of a thing is this to write about?” In some ways, IWE was anticipating an experience which is not located within the single nation state or a single place and I think that continues today….
For me, having travelled abroad, one of the most instructive things about India is the realisation that India is really not a place located within India as it were; for two hundred years now, it’s also been an experience of the world, you know; it’s been an experience of Mauritius, or Malaysia, or Burma. And this is what interests me most now; the ways in which India came to be, as it were, dispersed.
Tales I tell myself 