33 Travel/History/Space: Amitav Ghosh The Imam and the Indian

Anindita Das

Born in Calcutta in the year 1956, Ghosh grew up in India, Bangladesh Srilanka and Iran. He did his schooling from The Doon School, graduation from Delhi’s St. Stephen’s College and later joined St. Edmund Hall, Oxford for higher studies and received a Ph.D in social anthropology. Earlier, he worked as a reporter and editor of a daily. He taught in Delhi University, Columbia University and American University in Cairo as well as in many other institutions as visiting faculty. Presently residing in New York City, Ghosh is now dedicating his time mostly in writing. He was shortlisted for Booker prize for his fictional work Sea of Poppies (2008), and conferred with Sahitya Akademi for The Shadow Lines (1988) and the prestigious Padma Bhushan in the year 2007 by the Government of India.

The Indian born writer has been contributing a lot towards contemporary Indian Writing in English. In the literary world Ghosh is known for his journalism, travel writing and fiction. Amitav Ghosh blends history, ethnography, anthropology, travel, fact and fiction in a variety of ways in his writings. To talk about Ghosh’s novels, they all vary in their subject and treatment. His versatility is manifested both in his fiction and non -fiction. It is seen that he seeks a neutral place on this earth, beyond any demarcation of borders through his writing. The best known novels of Ghosh are The Shadow Lines (1988), In an Antique Land (1992), The Calcutta Chromosome (1996) and The Glass Palace (2000). He employs complex narratives in fictions as a strategic measure to explore the question of identity. At the same time, being a scholar with anthropological training, his novels exhibit his keen observation of the characters, settings and histories from a close proximity. It enables him to delve into the different cultures and extract the commonality and differences, moving beyond the boundaries to reach out to the broader historical and cultural context. As Dr. Bibhash Choudhury remarks:

Ghosh’s novels are not confined to India alone; his narratives traverse different locations of the world and, in doing so, present varieties of cultural practise in genre- splitting fictional frames.

It is thus difficult to put Ghosh’s novels in a single generic structure. The concerns of the people and characters of his novels are different. For him the novel is a “hybrid genre” as it cannot be straitjacketed in a single pattern. His readers are given full freedom to interpret his characters as well the happenings and expression of his novels. The motive behind the varying issues that are dealt with in his novels seem to have emerged from his realisation of the “dubious nature of the borders” between people, nations and genres. It is so we find him on one hand examining ideas of reasons and the association of science and technology with those in The Circle of Reasons (1986), and on the other his postmodern concern of the displacement of the white supremacy, giving non-whites central position in his Ibis trilogy. The issue of migration in the postcolonial era, another attribute of postmodernism, constitute the theme of The Hungry Tide (2004). In a similar vein In an Antique Land is also carried on with the same basic foundation of not being fitted into any particular framework. Its narrative is divided into two parts, one dealing with his travel experiences in the Nile Delta and the other is the reconstruction of the lives of a Jewish trader Abraham Ben Yiju and his slaves Ashu and Bomma in the eleventh century. In this work too Ghosh merges narrative, travel, autobiographical pieces and history.

The Imam and the Indian, like In an Antique Land cannot be defined generically. It is one of his non- fictional works, a miscellaneous collection of journalistic and scholarly articles and lectures published in the year 2002. The book is named after the first article included in it. In the preface itself Ghosh declares that the pieces are heterogeneous by nature and they cannot be put under same captions, as in the introduction he argues “…in the circuitry of the imagination, connection are of better importance than disjunctions…”. He further remarks that the pieces are written in between his other works, except for the initial five narratives which were written in his utterly attentive phase. Every piece entails a particular issue or story behind it, which he later develops into full-fledged ones in his other works. A reading of the collection makes it apparent that Ghosh’s extensive travelling combined with enthusiastic scrutiny prompted him reproduce his experiences as reflected in his narratives. For instance, the first five pieces are based on the period of his research. He particularly mentions about ‘An Egyptian in Baghdad’. He wrote the piece soon after the Gulf War. The autobiographical piece of the horrible aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination in the year 1984 in Delhi is rendered in ‘The Ghosts of Mrs Gandhi’ and in ‘The Imam and the Indian’ Ghosh talk about his experience in Egypt. It was the period when he was there for his research work. It also includes a translation of a short story ‘Kshudhita Pashan’ (The Hunger of Stones) by Rabindranath Tagore, which he describes “…As an allegory of the colonial condition…”. His dexterity of being an ethnographer, anthropologist, historian, translator and a fiction writer is weaved together throughout the work. In the “Empire of the Soul: A Review of The Baburnamas” he reviews the first autobiography by a Moghul Emperor.

In John C. Hawley’s words:

Outside the world of fiction Amitav Ghosh is heavily engaged in the political and cultural wars that shape a postcolonial and globalised world. One cannot pretend that the Imam and the Indian is a unified work, since it consists of essays written over a couple of decades. But it does offer a fascinating overview of the many topics that emerge in the fiction that was being written— as if by Ghosh’s other hand—while he worked on these prose pieces.

Hence, though it is difficult to put the essays in a single thematic structure, a careful reading of the pieces can bring forth the implicit political, social and cultural concern of Ghosh. He, without directly referring to the issue of globalisation, has focused on the various aspects related to it. The fact that today’s world is about interaction, communication, and development, culminating in a globalised world seems to be the underlying subject matter in a number of pieces in the collection. For instance, large scale migration of people taking place between continents due to social, political and economic reasons has faded the borders. There are many other factors too contributing to the matter. Globalisation has also given rise to a uniform world order, as people belonging to different continents are living together, since in the piece ‘The Ghat of the Only World: ‘Agha Shahid Ali in Brooklyn’ Ghosh mentions in a symbolic manner:

……..The journey from the foyer of Shahid’s building to his door was a voyage between continents: on the way up the rich fragrance of rogan josh and haak would invade the dour, grey interior of the elevator; against the background of the songs and voices that were always echoing out of his apartment….

The Kashmiri-American Poet Agha Shahid was born in Delhi and was brought up in Kashmir. In the year 1975 he migrated to Pennsylvania. One of the dominant themes of Ali’s poetry is meeting of culture. Ghosh talking about “voyage between two continents” in the building of Shahid reflects the microcosmic view of the transcontinental milieu in which Ali was living. The overwhelming “fragrance” of Kahmiri food is invading “the dour, grey interior of the elevator”. Shahid’s apartment would always be filled with vibrant sounds of Indian music and conversations, in the building in which people of different culture and background lived. On the other hand, as a postmodernist who had been travelling to alien lands, Ghosh juxtaposes such a scenario with that of cultural disintegration, imperialism and hegemony, waning human relationships, materialistic outlook of the people, hankering for security and love, diasporas etc. For instance, in the title essay ‘Imam and the Indian’, Ghosh records how a country today is measured in terms of destructive forces, rather than productive ones, as the Imam says… we have guns and tanks and bombs. And the’re better than anything you have- we are way ahead of you…. Ghosh realises that the superiority of the West has become an acceptable fact among all, no matter either it be an Indian or an Egyptian, or anyone else, their preoccupation with Western hegemony is a reality of the present times. Ghosh aptly grasps the truth when he remarks:

At that moment, despite the vast gap that lay between us, we understood each other perfectly. We were both travelling, he and I: we were travelling in the West. The only difference was that I had actually been there, in person: I could have told him about the ancient English university I had won a scholarship to, about punk dons with safety pin in their mortarboards, about superhighways and sex shops and Picasso. But none of it would have mattered. We would have known, both of us, that all that were mere fluff: at the bottom, for him as for me and millions of people on the land masses around us, the West meant only this—science and tanks and guns and bombs.

It shows how the Imam, who had never been to the west and Ghosh had the same notion of it. The Imam’s refusal to acquaint Ghosh of his traditional healing process is perhaps for the reason that old customs are not trusted anymore. In fact Ghosh mentions that the Imam had been ashamed of talking about it himself. The customs and traditions, which constitute the identity of an individual, community and a nation, have now become obsolete. As an anthropologist Ghosh’ visit to Egypt is search of a genuine and settled culture bewilders him when he finds the restlessness prevailing there, as the villagers seemed to be the “airlines passengers in a transit lounge”. Jose N. Ornelas observation in this context on Ghosh’s bringing up the analogy of the image of the rural village as an airline transit lounge can be mentioned here, as he says:

We seem to be living in a world of rootless identities and histories, of virtual reality, of mobility, of globalization of the economy and culture, where the image of the jungle as a site for movements across borders and between cultures does not seem paradoxical or illogical.

It suggests how one’s location no longer matters in the postmodern era. But this argument does not perhaps seem to be appropriate for another essay of Ghosh. ‘The Egyptian in Baghdad’, which tells the tragic story of a migrant Nabeel who moves to Iraq in order to earn money to give his family a comfortable life. Unfortunately, he never returns to live in the pucka house that was being built with his money. He became missing without any whereabouts. The awful situation of the Egyptian migrants in Iraq, as they lived there in high risk of being killed any moment by the Iraqis, has been illustrated in the piece. As the piece is written shortly after the Gulf war, the Iraqis acted wild and blamed the Egyptians to have taken advantage of their situation of being indulged in the war. They were accused of taking their jobs and money, and so in their wilderness would kill the Egyptians, snatching their papers, so that no records remain. On a lighter note, another aspect of Egyptian life is portrayed in the interesting piece called ‘The Relations of Envy in an Egyptian Village’. In an otherwise peaceful atmosphere of a rural Egyptian life, not much affected by the outside forces, having their own principle of living, there is the practise of witchcraft that prevails. The solidarity between the people in the village, as they say “we are one” is amply replicated through their sharing of…..the same dialect and the same cultural ethos, which distinguish them from the people of the cities… … The close knit community of the village are dependent on each other in spite of the “relation of envy” which according to Ghosh is “itself a relation”, between the rich and the poor.

The upshot of migration is again depicted in a very poignant manner in the piece ‘The Tibetan Dinner’. While at a dinner organised for a Tibetan cause at a restaurant in Manhattan, Ghosh comes across a Tibetan Buddhist monk. The monk and the “momos” served at the restaurant takes him back to his college days in Delhi, when he and his friends used to frequent the shacks of the Tibetan refugees where they served their local delicacies like momo, noodles and rice beer known as chhang . He mentions:

As we drank our jugs of chhang, a fog of mystery would descend on a windy, lamp- lit interior of the shacks. We would look at the ruddy, weathered faces of the women as they filled our jugs out of the rusty old drums in which they brewed the beer, and tried to imagine the journey they had made: from their chilly thin aired plateau 15,000 feet above sea level, across the passes of the high Himalaya’s, down into the steamy slum, floating on a bog of refuse and soil slicks on the outskirts of Delhi.

The passage thus reflects the destiny of the migrants. Migration has been a driving force of the last century and the fact is that whether it is forced or self- willed, the sense of dislocation, alienation and nostalgia permeates the minds of those who are away from their homeland. Ghosh’s acquaintance with Agha Sahid and his poetry made him realise that that the poet could not be away from Kashmir ever. Shahid lived in Kashmir through his poetry, though being away from the place. Shahid had experienced rejection and disappointment as well as unhappiness for being a Kashmiri-Muslim during his Delhi University days. He was suffering from a fatal disease, and once during his bed-ridden days he expressed his resentment when he asked Ghosh:

I wish all this had not happened…the dividing of the country, the divisions between people, Hindu, Muslim, Muslim, Hindu—you can’t imagine, how much I hate it. It makes me sick. What I say is: why can’t you be happy with the cuisines and the clothes and the music and all these wonderful things?.. At least here we have been able to make a space where we can all come together because of the good things.”

Ghosh too perhaps did not have an answer to Shahid’s query. As a diasporic writer Ghosh thus puts forward in the cross-cultural perspective such as an idea of space, for which a person has to move to another country in search of that security and love which he is unable to receive in his own. In ‘The Ghost of Mrs Gandhi’ when Ghosh recounts his first hand experience of the after effects of Indira Gandhi’s murder in Delhi, the idea of space is called upon again. The dreadful face of violence that Ghosh witnessed being inflicted upon the Sikhs raises the pertinent concern that in a country where people of various ethnicity, culture, religion lives together, can become so brutal to their own people. The plight of the Sikhs being so much insecure could only be felt by the “ordinary people”, referring to the ones who did not belong to any group or political party. Ghosh also expresses the dilemma of being a writer who was supposed to be reproducing such a situation of terror, or would be writing about the ones who took risk to help the victims. Though there had been other anomalies too behind such a ruthless act of violence, the Sikhs, who had been living in Delhi for a long time, could feel the sense of alienation triggered by an incident which they might not even approve or had not been aware of. In the essay ‘The Greatest Sorrow: Time of Joy Recalled in Wretchedness’ also Guha throws light on another dismal picture of civil- violence meted out in places like Kashmir, Sri Lanka and even America. It seems violence too is not constrained by any border.

The fact that Ghosh does not conform to the postmodern condition where people and culture cannot be defined with their distinct identities is evident when in the essay ‘Petrofiction: The Oil Encounter and the Novel’ he comments:

And think of the postmodern present: city-states where virtually everyone is a ‘foreigner’; admixtures of people and cultures on a scale never before envisaged; vicious system of helotry juxtaposed with unparalleled wealth; deserts transformed by technology, and military devastation on an apocalyptic scale.

The identities are lost somewhere in the name of a global culture and technology. At one hand, the system, which Ghosh regards as the “vicious” one has brought slavery into practise, whereas a particular segment is getting rich day by day. This is what is happening in the present scenario. The technology which can be used for constructive purpose has also given rise to modern warfare of mass destruction. Nothing seems to be in a balanced state of order.

Nevertheless, critics have regarded globalisation as a western phenomenon, a process through which they can disseminate their achievements. According to them literature has also become a means to proliferate western culture so that they can achieve their imperialistic aim. Ghosh’s digging of history in ‘The Slave of MS. H.6’ through archival material to tell the story of the slave Bomma is read as a resistance to such western hegemony by Robert Dixon. He thus says:

Ghosh’s empirical research can be read as an ethnographic allegory in Jame’s Clifford sense—a form of commentary that uses the past to speak indirectly about the present. His essay…’The Slave of MS. H.6’ …is remarkably restrained and highly suggestive piece of writing that is surely to be taken as an ironic raspberry blown at the theoretical and critical pretensions of the West. The archive is a synecdoche of postmodernism and post-modern theoretical practice, with its globalising tendency, and its complicity with the most imperialistic aspect of the modern American state. In Philadelphia, Amitav Ghosh might be travelling in the West, but his sly civility ensures that he is not travelling with the west. To recover the subaltern consciousness, Ghosh has learned not French but Village Arabic; instead of affiliating his text with high theory, he has spent years reading ancient manuscripts and talking to Egyptian peasants. The painstakingly specific and situated nature of his historical research and anthropological inquiry, and the way he has foregrounded his own location, not only in relation to his Egyptian informants but also to the intellectual and military culture of the West, is a challenging model to literary critics in the Western academy whose critical practice involves the application of high theory to Third World texts—we might call that travelling in the East.

However, Ghosh seems to affirm the emergence of world literature, as in the piece ‘The Human Comedy in Cairo’ he talks about the recognition of Arabic literature with the winning of Nobel Prize by the writer Naguib Mahfouz in the year 1989. He further mentions that such award means a lot in countries like Egypt and India– both representing two old civilisations and the tremendous effort they are putting to break away with the bondage imposed upon them by the modern world. In ‘March of the Novel through History’ also Ghosh accepts novel as an international genre, which does not restrict to the boundaries irrespective of variation in language and culture. At the same time in “The Diaspora in Indian Culture” Ghosh regards the repressive action of the Government of India of banning the Area of Darkness by V. S Naipaul and Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie as “reprehensible and senseless”. Ghosh believes that repression does not work in tackling with ideals. The “colonial mentality” of belittling ideas and responses thus revealed through it, as he thinks that it is always through the mediation of London that the relation between modern India and its diasporic population is sustained.

The assortment of pieces in this work of Ghosh takes the readers to different territories altogether. The time frame of the essays varies too, which seems to be the critical tactic he employs to connect his work to a larger perspective. His range in dealing with different subjects is evident, as he moves from serious topics to the lighter ones, as in ‘Four Corners’ he mentions the point in America in which four American states meets, those being New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Utah. He further mentions that it is a favourite haunt for the ones who are interested in road trips. The Recreational Vehicles or RVs he notices are named after the Native American tribes, the interesting fact that Ghosh observes. He wittily remarks:

Often those RVs have striking names: Winnebago, Itasca….The names of the dispossessed tribes of the Americas hold a peculiar allure for the marketing executives of automobile companies. Pontiac, Cherokee—so many tribes are commemorated in forms of transport. It is not a mere matter of fashion that so many of the cars that flash past on the highways carry those names, breathing them into the air like the inscriptions on prayer wheels.

It denotes how Ghosh is capable to relating usual occurrences to history. The essay also bears testimony to the fact that all borders are subjective, as it is found that the tourists though throng to this place attracted by its beauty and also to view….the magic of the spectacle of two straight lines intersecting…., the division is hardly noticeable. In another essay ‘Categories of Labour and the Orientation of the Fellah Economy’ Ghosh’s focus is directed toward the social relation within the fellahin community which form their process of labour. His study centres round the different factors contributing towards attaching so much value to labour within the community. On the other hand in ‘The Global Reservation: Notes towards an Ethnography of International Peacekeeping’ is an anthropological study on the Sylheti UN peace keeper who had been assigned with the task of digging out the Khmer Rouge’s members in Cambodia, gradually becomes accustomed to the cruelty prevailing there. Nonetheless, the personal viewpoint that he provides in the essays makes them appear more vivid to the readers and also succeeds in seizing one’s attention as it makes the narratives more gripping in nature. For instance, while expressing his bewilderment over the modern interpretation of religion which according to him is the product of mere ignorance, he puts forward his idea that it ….needs to be destroyed with the weapons of literary, artistic and scientific progressivism…. He thus bestows responsibilities over the “good things”, as to convey in Shahid’s words, to remove all sorts of ignorance from the minds of the people. It requires to make them aware of the true nature of all the developments taking place around them, so that they can use those for their benefit rather than succumbing to the adversities produced by them.

Reference

• Asela, Rodriguez, de, Laguna.(ed.), Global Impact of the Portugese Language, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2001.
• Bose, Brinda., Amitav Ghosh: Critical Perspectives, New Delhi: Pen craft International, 2003.
• Choudhury, Bibhash.(ed.), Amitabh Ghosh: Critical Essays, New Delhi: PHI Learning Pvt. Ltd, 2009.
• Chowdhary, Arvind., Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines: The Critical Essays, New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 2008.
• Hawley, John. C., Amitav Ghosh: An Introduction, New Delhi: Foundation Books Pvt. Ltd, 2005.
• Said, Edward. W., Culture and Imperialism, Great Britain: Vintage, 1994.
• Sankaran, Chitra. (ed.), History, Narrative, and Testimony in Amitav Ghosh’s Fiction, . New York: State University of New York, 2012.
• Tomlinson, John., Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction, Great Britain: British Library, 1991.
• http://www.academia.edu/7538983/Review_of_Amitav_Ghosh_s_The_Imam_and_the_Indian.
• http://www.ukessays.com/essays/english-literature/diaspora-placed-by-amitav-ghosh-english-literature-essay.php.
• http://www.newmanpublication.com/admin/issue/br/10%20OCT%202014%20%20Issue%20Fin al%20-%20Copy.pdf.