In the summer of 1976, a 20-year-old Amitav Ghosh visited some 30 plus foreign embassies in Delhi, delivering letters that offered his services as a teacher. The actual intention was not to teach, but to travel. He wanted to be a writer, but how could he if he did not enrich himself through travel? As it happened, none of the embassies entertained his wish; but he persisted, and eventually got himself a scholarship to Oxford, reluctantly opting “for higher study principally as a means of seeing the world”.
Studying cultural anthropology at Oxford was liberating and would lead, through a newfound interest in the Middle Ages, to further travel – this time to Egypt, to do fieldwork for a DPhil in the discipline. He did that in a small village in Beheira, near the town of Damanhour. He was 24. Growing up in Nehruvian India, he had always had an interest in Egypt; and during his fieldwork, he observed two things: rural Egyptians were pretty knowledgeable about Hindi films and their stars, and were heavily reliant on “Kirloskars” – water pumps manufactured by the Indian company of that name. It was de-colonisation and the Non-Alignment Movement that made that moment possible avers Ghosh – that renewal of connections between India and Egypt after centuries of disruption by European imperialism. And what drew him to Egypt in 1980 was, he says, “at bottom… a kind of xenophilia, a desire to embrace the globe in my own fashion, a wish to eavesdrop on an ancient civilisational conversation.”
The xenophile and the scholar
The above narratives are recounted in the essays “The Making of In an Antique Land: India, Egypt and the Cairo Geniza” and “Confessions of a Xenophile” in Amitav Ghosh’s latest book Wild Fictions. And obviously, underline the xenophile and the scholar in him. The anthology itself is a paean to both. For Ghosh did embrace the globe in his own fashion, as his writing amply demonstrates; and he did so not just through travel but a deep love of scholarship. It is only apposite then that the book is dedicated to two extraordinary scholars – Sukanta Chaudhuri and Supriya Chaudhuri, Emeritus Professors both, at the Department of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata.
Wild Fictions has six sections – Climate Change and Environment, Witnesses, Travel and Discovery, Narratives, Conversations, and Presentations. In his Introduction, Ghosh writes that “one thread that runs through most” of the pieces in this collection is “of bearing witness to a rupture in time, of chronicling the passing of an era that began 300 years ago”. True. But it could also be said that scholarship is another thread that connects different sections of the book. This comes out most forcefully in the pieces featured under “Conversations” and “Witnesses”, which are about books and authors who gave the writer new insights – into colonialism, postcolonial thought, and the Indian presence in the First World War.
Ghosh’s correspondence with Dipesh Chakrabarty after he read Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000) is well known. It was published in the Radical Historical Review in 2002, which has been re-published in this volume under “Conversations”. There are two forums in the same section – one on the Ibis Trilogy, published in The American Historical Review, and the other on The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, published in The Journal of Asian Studies. They attest to his influence on academics across varied disciplines. Two reviews by him also deserve mention: Time’s Monster (2020) and An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India (2016). Ghosh had come to Priya Satia’s book via her earlier works – Spies in Arabia and Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution; he spends quite some time on both, making the piece more of an analysis of her trajectory as a historian. “Shashi Tharoor’s An Era of Darkness” expresses his unalloyed admiration for the diplomat-parliamentarian-polemicist’s prodigious gifts in articulating/exposing the rapaciousness at the heart of the British colonial enterprise.
It is, however, Santanu Das who commands a formidable presence in this anthology – with two-thirds of a section (“Witnesses”) devoted to his pioneering work on the First World War, in the field of literary criticism, and to books that his scholarship brought to light for Ghosh: the memoir of Sisir Sarbadhikari, who was a member of the Bengal Ambulance Corps, Abhi Le Baghdad (On to Baghdad, 1957); and Mokkhoda Debi’s Kalyan-Pradeep: The Life of Captain Kalyan Kumar Mukhopadhyay, IMS (1928), an extended commentary on the letters of her grandson who was a doctor in the Indian Medical Service
In “Santanu Das and the First World War”, Ghosh tells us about his surprised delight in reading Das’s Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (2005), in finding a literary critic “who actually writes comprehensible prose”! He lost no time in seeking Das out through mutual friends and commenced a correspondence with him that led him to more literature on the subject. The next essays in this section are detailed accounts of Abhi Le Baghdad and Kalyan-Pradeep – both of which were written in Bengali and were about the Mesopotamian theatre of the war. At times, these essays read like a patchwork of quotations from the texts – so liberal are the doses of block quotes in them – the intention clearly being, giving the readers not just a flavour, but a meaty sense of the content and style in each. Abhi Le Baghdad had a “tantalising textual history”: written in secret in captivity, its pages torn and hidden in boots during a long march from Samarra to Ras al-’Ain, then copied anew, hidden underground and later retrieved. But Kalyan Pradeep stood out for Ghosh in a different way:
… [for] its extraordinary intellectual and imaginative ambition. Mokkoda Debi was clearly no rebel, socially speaking. Yet the book is itself an act of rebellion, for it is an assertion of her right to narrate the story of the world as a woman. She lays claim to this right through grief and bereavement, as a grandmother’s privilege. The voice of the book is profoundly maternal, at times nurturing and at times riven with pain. Yet the story is one of soldiering, imprisonment and war. It is as if the very act of describing masculine violence in a woman’s voice were a way of restoring a primal balance.
Re-visiting earlier work
For those who have followed Ghosh’s work with keen interest since his debut, Wild Fictions is reminiscent of The Imam and the Indian (2003) in the range of topics covered. Only here, it spans almost the entire arc of Ghosh’s career as a writer – from the early 1990s to the present decade. To read these essays is thus also to re-visit, second hand, his earlier fiction and non-fiction. Indeed, in the prefaces to the different sections, Ghosh himself points out these connections.
The title piece, ‘Wild Fictions’, is about “the conflict between exclusivist and participatory approaches to forest conversation”. Ghosh is in favour of the latter, as he finds the idea of the “untouched” forest “a wild fiction”, and believes it is about time that Indigenous people were given their due for the role they have played in preserving nature. The piece was written while Ghosh was working on Sea of Poppies, but in trying to establish his argument, he refers to the legend of Bonbibi and Dokkhin Rai in the Sunderbans, which is vitally related to the plot of The Hungry Tide (2004) – a novel that was one of the early manifestations of Ghosh’s environmental concerns.
“Wordless Pasts: The Indian Exodus from Burma and the Writing of The Glass Palace” is an open invitation to engage with his 2000 novel, the high point of which is the exodus precipitated by the Japanese attack on Burma in 1942 – which marked the beginning of the Burma campaign in the South-East Asian theatre of the Second World War – and the rank racism in the way the British administration handled the crisis. In the essay, we get the account of the exodus from Ghosh’s descriptions of the diary of Dr Shanti Brata Ghosh, written long after the event in 1978, and generously shared with him by the doctor’s family.
“The Great Uprooting: Migration and Displacement in an Age of Planetary Crisis” traces Ghosh’s encounters with Bengali migrants in Italy, following the European “migration crisis” of 2014-16. “Much, if not most, of my work is about migrants and displaced people”, Ghosh says at the beginning of the essay; and what he writes in it is essentially a non-fictional account of what Tipu and Rafi – millennials from Bangladesh – experience in his novel Gun Island (2019): from being lured into visions of a better life elsewhere by social media and also driven to it by the example of friends and relatives who had left home (in what Ghosh terms “the mimetic urge”), to the perilous journeys undertaken to reach Europe from South Asia via the Middle East or Africa, and (ironically) the tortuously uncertain lives led after reaching their dream destination.
“The Spice Islands”, written by Ghosh after his visit to Indonesia at the invitation of the country’s Ministry of Culture, explores the role that Ternate and Tidore have unwittingly played in the history of colonialism for producing spices – nutmeg and clove – that set off trade rivalries between European nations (Portuguese, Dutch and English), leading to violent consequences. This is the anchoring narrative of The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021).
The life of the mind
Many of the essays in Wild Fictions are pieces that Ghosh wrote for the mainstream media – ranging from Outlook, The Hindu, and Condé Nast Traveller to the New York Times and The New Yorker. Two of them are refreshing exceptions to the general engagement with weighty subjects in the rest of the volume: “The Mountains are High and the Emperor is Far Away” and “The Well-Travelled Bunyan”. The former (published in Condé Nast Traveller in 2011) narrates his trip to Xizhou, in the province of Yunnan in China, with his son – with a focus on the Linden Centre there and its significance; and the life story of a Bengali entrepreneur, Uttara, who is a pioneer of the tourist industry in the area. The latter (published in a Vogue anthology in 2017) is a light-hearted take on an inner garment worn by Indian males, tracing both its etymological history and its evolution from being a sailor’s tunic to a domesticated wear.
Ghosh stopped writing for the mainstream media at one point. It is thus ironic that two of the most memorable pieces in this anthology are those that were published by magazines – “11 September 2001” (The New Yorker) and “A Town by the Sea” (The Hindu). The former was written soon after the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers of New York. It is about an architect couple – Frank and Nicole De Martini – with whom Ghosh and his wife (the writer Deborah Baker) bonded as neighbours and as parents of their children’s friends. They were integrally associated with the Towers through their work, and happened to experience the initial impact of the attack on 9/11 together in his office, but Frank went missing later… he had insisted on being in the building after the attack to help people exit.
The latter is a first-person account by Ghosh of the devastation wrought on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands by the Tsunami that hit them on 26 December 2004. During his visit to the islands immediately after, he met many survivors, one of whom he accompanied to the site of his home’s wreckage. The man happened to be the Director of Car Nicobar’s Malaria Research Centre, where he had worked since 1991. The Tsunami had wiped away both his home and family. While walking through the debris, some old photographs and his daughter’s paintbox were found, but he didn’t take them; the only thing he salvaged instead were a dozen photographic slides of bacteria magnified under a microscope. Ghosh was amazed at this choice and tried to fathom the reason behind it:
In the manner of his choosing there was not a particle of hesitation, not the faintest glimmer of a doubt. Was it perhaps that in this moment of utter desolation there was some comfort in the knowledge of an impersonal effort? Could it be that he was seeking refuge in the one aspect of his existence that could not be erased by an act of nature? […] Did the worth of those slides lie precisely in their exclusion from the unedurable pain of his loss? Whatever the reason, it was plain his mind had fixed upon a set of objects that derived their meaning from the part of his life that was lived in thought and contemplation. […] the life of the mind takes many forms, and some time after the day had passed I understood that in the manner of his choosing, the Director has mounted the most singular, the most powerful defence of it that I would ever witness.
The life of the mind is the only life Ghosh has known for close to five decades. It is what he has lived by. Wild Fictions is an eloquent testament to that.
Wild Fictions: Essays, Amitav Ghosh, HarperCollins India.
