When your favorite writer is conferred the highest literary award of the land, you become jubilant, ecstatic and happy. That’s what I had experienced when Amitav Ghosh – that prolific writer of an extraordinary caliber – was given the Jnanpith award. I had purchased my copy of his novel, The Shadow Lines (Sahitya Akademi Award 1989) at the Calcutta Book Fair in 1996. The same year when we – me and my parents – decided to visit the United Kingdom for the first time and also the year when I was scheduled to appear for the final part of my Masters Examination in English Literature at the Calcutta University. Bad luck was in store for me. I had suddenly fallen ill and the result – I failed to appear and sit for the examination! But let bygones be bygones.
Coming back to my earlier point of contention, Amitav Ghosh as a writer deserves every inch of the literary awards that he’s been conferred with. He was born in Calcutta in 1956, and studied in Delhi, Oxford and Egypt. He worked for the Indian Express newspaper in New Delhi and earned his doctorate at Oxford before he wrote his first novel, The Circle of Reason, which won the Prix Medicis Etranger Award. Besides his The Shadow Lines, Ghosh’s other books include In An Antique Land, The Calcutta Chromosome (Arthur C. Clarke Award), Dancing In Cambodia and Other Essays, Countdown, The Glass Palace (Grand Prize for Fiction at the Frankfurt International E-Book awards), The Imam and The Indian, The Hungry Tide (Best Work in English Fiction, Hutch Crossword Book Awards) and a lot more. His Ibis trilogy – Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and Flood of Fire – recounts the adventurous journeys around the trade of opium, keeping the central figure of the ship in the background.
Amitav Ghosh was also the winner of the 1999 Pushcart Prize – a leading literary award for an essay that was published in the Kenyon Review. He was awarded the Grinzane Cavour Prize in Turin, Italy in 2007.
I am yet to read his first book, The Circle of Reason. But recently, I sat down to re-read his work, The Shadow Lines. The dexterity in the use of language, the skill with which the plot’s been evolved and the unusual way in which his characters in the book, have been named – very few have surnames – make this book unique in his entire oeuvre. By a strange coincidence, the narrator’s ladylove in the book is Ila – my own mother’s name. Another character in the book is called Robi - the name by which my father was called in the household. My own father, who passed away in 2005, was given the name Robi, because he, like Tagore himself, was born also on 9th May ( 25th of the month of Baisakh in the Bengali calendar). Hence The Shadow Lines is a book, with a special, more than usual import for me. In the second page of the book, when the writer talks about the narrator’s grandmother, Mayadebi, he writes:
“For her time was like a toothbrush: it went mouldy if it wasn’t used. I asked her once what happened to wasted time. She tossed her small silvery head, screwed up her long nose and said: It begins to stink.”
It is this very expertise in the craft of writing fiction that mesmerizes Amitav Ghosh’s followers. Sea of Poppies, the first book in his Ibis trilogy, opens with a description:
“The vision of a tall-masted ship, at sail on the ocean, came to Deeti on an otherwise ordinary day, but she knew instantly that apparition was a sign of destiny for she had never seen such a vessel before, not even in a dream: how could she have, living as she did in northern Bihar, four hundred miles from the coast?”
Readers would have thought that, like so many other novels, this description sets the characters into perspective right from the first sentence. Far from it. Such a long sentence only sets the tone of that which follows…
A scholar of literature recently remarked that in historical fiction, most often times, the apparently real may not always be the truth. And the writer himself had informed his gathered audience at a literary meet that it’s an established fact that most renowned historians around the world, had begun their career by reading historical fiction. The childhood, and later adulthood, obsession slowly grows up into a passion and later onwards, into a full-fledged profession.
When compared with other writers writing in the same genre around the world of the likes of Hilary Mantel and Ken Follett – to name just a drop in the ocean – the works of Amitav Ghosh have an Indianness which is recognizable, praiseworthy and enjoyable at the same time. But the writer has explored other terrains as well with his skill in writing and the license of diction. The Nutmeg’s Curse and The Great Derangement where he talks about environmental hazards that are inevitable on the world, can be traced back to his studies and practices on social anthropology.
The Hungry Tide is set in the Sunderbans while The Glass Palace in modern-day Myanmar. The Calcutta Chromosome has the storyline where Ronald Ross experiments for the malaria parasite. Amitav Ghosh recently held a nation-wide tour around the release of his latest novel, Smoke and Ashes. Supposedly, this book also deals with the famed Opium wars with which the writer seems to be obsessed with. Kolkata had a full-house audience, at separate venues like the heritage Oxford Bookstore where the writer enthralled his audience with some rare archival material, peppered with personal anecdotes and – equally rare – insights.
“From the tea we drink, to the sugar we add to it, the sarees and blouses that Indian women wear to even the furniture we use, there is a bit of China in everyone’s life.” – Amitav Ghosh
Like all great novelists and writers around the world, Ghosh’s books have startling first sentences or paragraphs the captivate the reader and holds him by the noose or lasso. The beginning of his book on Egypt, In An Antique Land goes like this:
“The slave of MS H.6 first stepped upon the stage of modern history in 1942. His was a brief debut, in the obscurest of theatres, and he was scarcely out of the wings before he was gone again – more a prompter’s whisper than a recognizable face in the cast.”
The Hungry Tide begins:
“Kanai spotted her the moment he stepped onto the crowded platform; he was deceived neither by her close-cropped black hair, nor by her clothes, which were those of a teenage boy – loose cotton pants and an oversized white shirt. Winding unerringly through the snack-vendors and tea-sellers who were hawking their wares on the station’s platform, his eyes settled on her slim, shapely figure.”
The Calcutta Chromosome which is based on the life and works of Sir Ronald Ross, who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1906, starts with:
“If the system hadn’t stalled Antar would never have guessed that the scrap of paper on his screen was the remnant of an ID card. It looked as though it had been rescued from a fire: the plastic laminate had warped and melted along the edges. The lettering was mostly illegible and the photograph had vanished under a smudge of soot.”
Like all great books, these lines urge the reader to read on… and on…. Amitav Ghosh’s books have a wide readership across the globe. There are many more to come in the forthcoming years. Let us all wish this great writer and novelist good health and best of luck! Always!