History, Narrative, and Testimony in Amitav Ghosh's Fiction

1 Diasporic Predicaments An Interview with Amitav Ghosh CHITRA SANKARAN CS: Your two recent novels The Glass Palace and The Hungry Tide have been seen as concerned with larger historical or global movements. They are often perceived as compelling explorations of some of the central problems and dilemmas surrounding both colonialism and globalization, concerned with ways individual predicaments and larger “Histories” get entangled. Would you agree? Did you write to expose these? AG: I wrote it because it was the only way that I could write it, I suppose. In some ways I don’t feel that these issues are distinct from the people. I mean the lives of, say, Dolly or Rajkumar and the rest of them in “the dias- pora,” where they are so bound up with the events that are happening aroundthem.Historyitselfis...inanovel...notveryinteresting, except in as much as it forms the background of an individual’s predicaments. So, for example, the character of Arjun is one that was very compelling to me from the start of the book and remains compelling to this day because the peculiar circumstance he finds himself in, the way in which he’s formed, the way in which his history is enmeshed with the history of the families around him...allofthose make him what he is, really. CS: Actually, Arjun is a fascinating character because when he starts off, he’s not at all self-analytical; he takes things at face value. But then he pro- gresses to a point when he is actually, for the first time, asking questions that seem inevitable to his predicament at that point in time. I think that’s a very good example of the way in which individual predicaments and history enmesh...entangle, because in Arjun’s story you have the predicament of 1 © 2012 State University of New York Press, Albany 2 CHITRA SANKARAN the Indian soldiers under the British Raj, in a manner of speaking. And that seems to me to be such an important question that has really never been asked seriously. What led you to ask that question in such a serious way in that novel? AG: A number of reasons, you know. One of the reasons is that in some very important way, Arjun is like some of the people I went to school and college with, who were very bright, but also very un-self-conscious, you know . our brightness was often completely without self-awareness, in the sense of reflecting upon our place in the world, and I think that’s something to do with a kind of colonial conditioning really. I’ll just give you one example...thismorning I went down to have breakfast. Here I am in a country [Singapore] which says everywhere that drug smugglers have the punish- ment of death. And this café was named after Ellenborough . you know Lord Ellenborough, who was an aggressive promoter of drug smuggling into China in the days of the opium trade. And you suddenly see there is a peculiar disconnect; an absolute lack of any kind of awareness or any kind of consciousness of how to make your place in the world, really. I think that is around us all the time—this kind of inability almost, to cope with our cir- cumstances, our past. I suppose the seeds of Arjun’s character were planted for me by many different people, including my father, who was in the Second World War. Usually, when he told his stories it was all about “we were soldiers,” but once or twice he would let slip things that suddenly made you realize what he had had to deal with. He was in Kohima, for example, during the war and he got into a fight with a South African who called him “nigger” or something. And you suddenly realize this was something that they were constantly coping with, this racial denigration. It’s something which has incredible poignancy. I spent a lot of time talking with Colonel Dhillon who was in the INA, who was one of the first people to join the INA. And he came from a family which had, for three generations, been in the British-Indian Army. He came from one of the traditional British-Indian Army families and I was talking to him about what made him rebel. If the British had been as successful as they had always been in the past, they would not have asked themselves these questions. It was defeat on the field of battle which made them stop and ask. But I think it’s a very, very, interesting dramatic predicament. And for me that was what interested me, it was the human and the dramatic. It’s not that I have a position on it as such, it’s the human and the dramatic aspect of it which gripped me. And you know another person who faced that predicament was Mangal Pandey. I haven’t seen the film but I think it’s very interesting that Amir Khan and Ketan Mehta have explored that predicament, because that is essentially the predicament of contemporary India as well. To this day we are constantly being manipulated by colonial powers and ex- © 2012 State University of New York Press, Albany Diasporic Predicaments 3 colonial powers. As people who have been colonized for three hundred years, to feel our way into any kind of responsible presence in the world is a very difficult thing, and a historical self-awareness is one of the most important aspects of it CS: One can see the kind of unease you have with these kinds of colonial power structures that seem to be a continuing presence. It is common knowledge that in 2001 you withdrew The Glass Palace from the Common- wealth Writers’ Prize and in your open letter to the prize’s organizers you expressed unease with the term “commonwealth”—a term that you felt ori- ents contemporary writers around old colonial power structures. Is this because you feel that these colonial power structures are old and hence need to be dismissed or do you fear and worry that they still have a lot of credibil- ity and clout in the modern world, and hence that you need to guard against them, be vigilant so people don’t slip into their old passive ways? AG: See one thing that has been very clear to me is that since the end of the Cold War there has been a real and massive revival in imperialist ideology, and it has reached an apex with the Iraq War. Immediately after the Second World War, people realized the extent of the disaster that colonialism had brought upon the world. Because really, the First and the Second World Wars in that sense were imperial wars; they were fought over imperialism, imperial policies and so on. Fifty years after the Second World War, people have come to forget and there’s a kind of whitewashing of colonialism. I’m very aware of it, living in America, where really this ideology has an almost childish grip upon people. Almost childishly, Americans embrace this idea of a new empire. I’ve been warning about this since 1997. I wrote small articles in The Nation warning that this thing is coming about and really with the Iraq War you saw it coming into full fruition. I must say here, I really value Arundhati’s interventions on this as well, because she has been some- one who has really taken on this issue where most people are fighting shy of it. I must say that I’m really shocked by the way that so many prominent Indian intellectuals have actually just shut their mouths on this. None of them have responded to Niall Ferguson’s book.1 In private they’ll tell you what they think of it. But none of them have publicly come out. It’s strange! These are the intellectuals who should be tackling this stuff at a historical level in their writings. But they haven’t. In that sense, I would say “I” in a small way, and Arundhati in a much bigger way, have really been among the few who’ve been trying to find some way of critiquing this sort of revival of imperialism. I was telling Homi, Partha Chatterji, and others, “why don’t you respond?” but it’s as if they’re above the fray. Because it’s not just this “New Empire” book, it’s a whole slew of stuff coming out of Britain right now. They’re trying to repaint themselves into some kind of crusader role. British intellectuals have been absolutely at the heart of this attack upon © 2012 State University of New York Press, Albany 4 CHITRA SANKARAN Iraq. So yes, I am very, very, aware of this revival of imperial ideology and so on. Today we really see the fruits of this. In 2001, when I rejected this Com- monwealth Prize, it wasn’t still so clear, even though one could see the rudi- ments of it. At that time, really, what was much more on my mind, in a very basic sense, was really just this issue of self-consciousness and truthfulness. I think writing as we do in English, we have to be very, very careful of the historical burden that English places upon us, because, within English, there is a constant tendency to whitewash the past, in language in the first instance. So, for example, the occupation of Burma is never called the occupation or the brutalization of Burma.

Load more