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: Speaking about the language that you are using for example the nautical and the sailor language as well, do you think it will be difficult for the readers to get? Or did u include it in that without too many explanations as you can understand it in context.

Amitav Ghosh: I think most of it is understandable in context but say for example I use a phrase from the nautical language, now if I say it to you in English would you understand what I said? No, of course you wouldn’t, now if I say it in Bajao Tirkat It’s the same, as nobody today knows what it is.

Amrita Tripathi: I assume u do?

Amitav Ghosh: Yes, I do. So how does it matter? No, in every good novel there is as a good friend of mine says, a certain element of white noise. I mean it’s the background noise, the noise that we’re hearing now; you don’t have to understand every little bit of it. It’s not necessary, perfect understanding doesn’t exist.

Amrita Tripathi: Alright you brought up Stephens, I want to ask you a while ago there was this whole tag of being one of the proponents of the St Stephens school of literature. Did you ever agree that there was such a sort of category of writing by Indians in English?

Amitav Ghosh: This I will say you know, that I consider myself extraordinarily fortunate. I mean when we were all in college, none of thought that he was anything special or he was anything special, we were just in college and you know but I realise now what an extraordinary group of people I was with. So many of my contemporaries have become extraordinary writers, some have gone to the villages and spent their lives in the villages. One of my contemporaries Mihir Shah has been one of the leaders of the Narmada Movement. So many have done different things and completely different things. I think in a sense when you are with a group of really outstanding people you make each other better.

Amrita Tripathi: You are of course still friends with some of your college friends?

Amitav Ghosh: Yes. Mihir who I was just telling you about, he runs a water management NGO in Devas. He remains a close friend. Ram Guha, the great historian, he was a close friend. Gautam Mukhopadhya who is the Indian Ambassador to Syria now, he was a close friend. Shashi Tharoor I knew well. Upamanyu Chatterjee I helped him find his first agent. Mukul Keshavan who was one of my closest friends and remains to this day. Yes, I mean I could go on.

Amrita Tripathi: You travelled a lot when you were young?

Amitav Ghosh: Yes, my father had a transferable job so I just went wherever he went. And for a while he was attached to the foreign ministries, we were in Dhaka and then we were in Colombo.

Amrita Tripathi: You think that also shaped not your world view but maybe your identity as a writer, even then maybe when you were younger as well?

Amitav Ghosh: I don’t think of myself as being just of one place, just of Delhi or just of Calcutta. Because I feel I saw so many places so it gives me a certain confidence I think in dealing with places which are not immediately adjacent to my experience if you like.

Amrita Tripathi: And now you are of course based in New York?

Amitav Ghosh: No, not really. I spend most of my time in India now. My wife is American and we’ve been living in New York for a long time. But I’ve always spent a lot of time in India and now I divide my time. I’m actually in India more than I am there. My family home is in Calcutta, I have a house in Goa so I go back and forth. What people don’t see I think is the incredible creativity in Goa. I mean just in my little village, a village surrounded my rice fields there are writers, there are artists, there are photographers, there are historians, it's quite an extra-ordinary community, a very intellectually and culturally rich community so it’s a lot of fun to be there.