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Amitav Ghosh : Introduction Amitav Ghosh Is a Prominent Indian Writer in English

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Amitav Ghosh : Introduction Amitav Ghosh Is a Prominent Indian Writer in English M.A. (English) Part-II Course - XIV Semester-IV Indian Writing in English Lesson No. 4.1 Author : Dr. Vineet Mehta Amitav Ghosh : Introduction Amitav Ghosh is a prominent Indian writer in English. He was born in Calcutta on 11 July, 1956 in an upper middle class Bengali family, and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. His father, Lieutenant Colonel Shailendra Chandra Ghosh, served in the pre-independence Indian army. Presently, Ghosh mostly resides in New York with his wife, Deborah Baker and his two children, Lila and Nayan, who work in the finance industry in the New York. Ghosh has been a fellow at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta and Centre for Development Studies in Trivandrum. In 1999, he joined the faculty at Queens College, City University of New York, as Distinguished Professor in Comparative literature. He has also been a visiting professor at the English department of Harvard University since 2005. In January 2007 he was awarded the Padma Shri, one of India’s highest honours. Ghosh has been a prolific writer and has authored critically acclaimed like The Circle of Reason (1984), The Shadow Lines (1988), In An Antique Land (1992), The Calcutta Chromosome (1995), Dancing in Cambodia (1998), The Glass Palace (2000), The Hungry Tide (2004), and the three volumes of The Ibis Trilogy— Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011) and Flood of Fire (2015). His latest book, The Great Derangement (2016) examines imaginative failure in the face of climate change. The Circle of Reason was awarded France’s Prix Médicis in 1990, and The Shadow Lines won two prestigious Indian prizes the same year, the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Ananda Puraskar. The Calcutta Chromosome won the Arthur C. Clarke award for 1997 and The Glass Palace won the International e-Book Award at the Frankfurt book fair in 2001. In January 2005, The Hungry Tide was awarded the Crossword Book Prize, a major Indian award. His novel, Sea of Poppies (2008) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, 2008 and was awarded the Crossword Book Prize and the India Plaza Golden Quill Award. Along with Margaret Atwood, he was also a joint winner of a Dan David Award for 2010. In 2011 he was awarded the International Grand Prix of the Blue Metropolis Festival in Montreal. Amitav Ghosh’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages and he has served on the Jury of the Locarno Film Festival (Switzerland) and the Venice Film Festival (2001). He has also established himself as a cultural critic in his essays. Ghosh is not only a seductive story teller but has also published anthologies of non-fictional writings including Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in M.A. (English) Part-II (Semester-IV) 31 Course-XIV Burma (1998), Imam and the Indian (2004) and Incendiary Circumstances (2006). He has also written a number of essays and journalistic essays like “The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi,” “Confessions of a Xenophile,” “Folly in the Sunderbans,” “On R. K. Narayan” and others which show his sensitive understanding of current problems, his knowledge and also express his debt to a number of people for shaping his aesthetic sensibility. Ghosh’s novels are known for their scholarly content. Political, social and environmental issues find a place in his work. He is one of the foremost Indian English writers of the post Rushdie generation. His initial novels like The Circle of Reason show the influence of Salman Rushdie but his later works reflect how he has outgrown this dominating influence. In his fictional techniques and art, Ghosh reveals the profound influence of Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, Marcel Proust, Ford Madox Ford, V.S. Naipaul and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He, in his talks and interviews, has often accepted debt to Bengal’s creative doyens like Tagore and Satyajit Ray for shaping his intellectual, philosophic and artistic world. Ghosh’s writing is preceded by meticulous research and his works reflect his knowledge and grasp of a wide range of subjects and issues. As a diasporic writer based currently in the US, travel, migration and diaspora formation remain his favourite themes. In spite of delving on transcultural spaces and focusing on showing cross-cultural connections, Ghosh‘s novels have been largely Bengal- centric or specifically Calcutta- centric. Calcutta has been the node of his routed worlds and also the center of much of the action in many of his novels. Another trademark of Ghosh’s writing is his strong emphasis on history, memory and the past. He challenges conventional ways of looking at the past events and happenings. He unearths ignored or silenced events of history and weaves a narrative around them thus revealing their mammoth importance. He challenges Western knowledge systems which had led to disciplinary boundary building, and boundary-crossing, thus, is an important feature of his work. Amitav Ghosh is considered an important postcolonial writer of the present era. His works like The Glass Palace and Sea of Poppies, present him as an important critic of the British colonial project. Ghosh excavates colonial history to show that the domination, displacement and dispossession of the eastern people was not an isolated phenomenon but was interlinked with the domination of nature. He often sides with the marginalized people and emerges as an advocate of the ‘underdogs’ in his work. He, thus, makes the subaltern speak through his writings. The Ibis trilogy is an important work of historical fiction by Amitav Ghosh. It comprises Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011), and Flood of Fire (2015). The story is set in the first half of the 19th century. It deals with the trade of opium between India and China run by the East India Company and the M.A. (English) Part-II (Semester-IV) 32 Course-XIV trafficking of coolies to Mauritius. The trilogy gets its name from the ship, Ibis, which provides a platform for the meeting of the various major characters for the first time. Ibis is in fact a schooner refurbished for human trafficking. The events leading to the First Opium War form the back ground of the trilogy. Sea of Poppies – A Critical Summary Sea of Poppies (2008) is the first part of the Ibis trilogy. In this ambitious novel Ghosh tries to fill in the gaps in the written history. Sea of Poppies was nominated for the prestigious Man Booker prize in 2008. This is a historical saga which tries to unearth, and explain the silenced tales of colonial exploitation of the colonized people. By focusing on the lives of common men and women, Ghosh in his narrative provides other ways of thinking about history, culture and identity. The writer has justified his tendency to weave alternate history into his stories: “History can say things in great detail, even though it may say them in rather dull factual detail. The novel on the other hand can make links that history cannot.”1 Sea of Poppies opens in 1838 on the eve of the opium wars. The British imperialism, and its exploitation of the colonized people, and their resources, forms the central theme of the novel. The novel narrates the turbulent history of the period, and in doing so exposes how British imperialism flourished due to its coercive pushing of the illegal opium trade. Ghosh shows how the fertile agricultural lands of the Indo-Gangetic plains were swamped by the “white-petalled flowers” (3) of the novel’s title, grown to produce opium that the British exported to addicts in an increasingly resistant China. Hungry Indian peasants, meanwhile, were driven off their land, and many were recruited to serve as plantation labourers in far-off British colonies such as Mauritius. Sea of Poppies can be studied as a tale of mass displacement, having ‘drug-trade’ and ‘coolie-trade’ as its central concerns. The novel consists of a number of tales, rather a network, skillfully interlinked by the writer. It can be interpreted as a tale of the forced migration of millions of the people from the Indian countryside to far off islands of ― ‘Mareech’ or Mauritius to work as indentured labourers in large plantations. The novel opens with Deeti having vision of a “tall-masted ship, at sail on the ocean” (3). This ship later turns out to be the Ibis. Deeti lived in a remote village near Ghazipur, a town about fifty miles east of Benares. The town, Ghazipur is the site of a British opium factory, as Amitav Ghosh reminds us “. was among the precious jewels in the Queen Victoria’s crown.”(91) Through the portrayal of the tragic lives of the rustic characters like Deeti, her crippled, ‘afeemkhor’ husband Hukum Singh, Muniya, Kabutri, Kalua and Heeru, Ghosh points out the disastrous socio eco-cultural effects of opium plantation on the rural folk. This novel is, thus, also the story of the destruction of rural economy. The three sections of the novel— M.A. (English) Part-II (Semester-IV) 33 Course-XIV land, river and sea, show the phases of peasants, journey from the Gangetic plains to the ‘kalapani’ or black waters of the sea. Deeti is in many ways representative of a strong peasant woman having a ‘never say die spirit.’ By a sudden twist of fate, Deeti’s addicted husband dies. As a Rajput woman in those days, she is forced to undergo ‘sati’ i.e. burn herself to death by sitting on her husband’s pyre. Kalua, who belongs to a lower caste, rescues her. The couple flees, pursued by Deeti’s in-laws, falls in love and boards Ibis hoping for better fate and times.
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