Reading between the lines with Amitav Ghosh

WRITER'S SPACE: Ghosh has been winning awards since his first book The Circle of Reason was published in 1986.

          

J & K | Chhattisgarh | Delhi | MP |
Mizoram | Rajasthan

Featured Blog

Rajdeep Sardesai

26/11: Terror comes precariously close

Featured Slideshows

Amrita Tripathi: What is your reaction to the review by The Guardian which compares you to Tolstoy, Dickens and Alexander Dumas all in the same sentence?

Amitav Ghosh: I'm profoundly flattered.

Amrita Tripathi: How seriously would you take reviews or critical acclaims?

Amitav Ghosh: I do my best not to read them, but sometimes if someone does sends me excerpts, or a review saying that you have got to read this, then I read it. Otherwise I don’t try to read them because once you start paying attention to that kind of thing, it really gets into your head and that is not what I should be thinking about.

Amrita Tripathi: You have been winning awards ever since your first book in 1986 and you have won the Padma Shri as well, so how important do you think awards are for your recognition?

Amitav Ghosh: Awards are very important when you are young and at the start of you're career, they can really help to launch your career and they can bring your books a lot of visibility, so all those things are really wonderful about awards. I think as you get older they matter less and less but I must say of all the awards I have got the one that I really cared a lot about was the Padma Shri because it became such a big event for my entire family in Calcutta, as their neighbours were coming and distributing sweets. And I just thought it was so wonderful, I mean I had no sense that it was such an event. Then when I actually went to receive the Padma Shri that itself was such an amazing occasion as there were people who really wanted to see an entire diversity of India. There were people from the northeast in their traditional costume; it was seeing the pageant of India right there. And there was something very moving about that.

Amrita Tripathi: Were you surprised at the reaction of the media when you turned down the nomination at the commonwealth for The Glass Palace?

Amitav Ghosh: I was surprised that it got as much attention as it did because the commonwealth is not very big in my consciousness, but it goes to show that those issues are still very much alive. I think commonwealth games are fine, commonwealth secretariat is fine, if it wants to be a political body, it's fine, I don't have any problems with that. But my objection is that when it starts intervening in culture, it's a real issue because why should it intervene in culture? What would we say to a nato prize for literature? What is the point of that? And especially when it's structured in such a way that it's explicitly promoting the English language at the expense of others. I mean one of the great lessons we learn from being in contemporary India is to learn the protocols of a multi-dimensional, multi- cultural, multi-lingual society. It's like in India if someone were to say that we would push one language at the expense of all others.

Amrita Tripathi: I found on your website this chrestomathy for this new book, could you explain to us what that is all about?

Amitav Ghosh: I'm a Stephanian and when I was in St Stephens one of the things we really loved were puns, there was this whole sort of tradition of bad puns, I would say we had a very odd relationship with language perhaps because for us it wasn't really a first language. I think that carried on into this book and while I was writing it one of the really fun parts of it was just writing about the words but I was doing it for my own pleasure. And then I happened to show it to one of my editors and she was really excited, in fact in America they are actually going to include in the book. It's really a series of notes on words but it's written in the voice of one of the characters in the book.