| BOOKS: INREVIEW
A Resounding Voice
By
Shailaja Neelakantan/NEW DELHI
Issue cover-dated February 8, 2003
The Imam and the Indian:
Prose Pieces by Amitav Ghosh
Amitav Ghosh is of that rare breed
of writers for whom the personal is the political and vice versa.
His novel The Shadow Lines was informed by the profound effect
that the horrendous massacre of Sikhs in the Delhi riots in
1984 after the assassination of Indira Gandhi had on him. In
an Antique Land, his memoir about his fieldwork in Egypt, includes
anthropological essays and a vignettes about the ancient and
the modern, the old East and the new West, and the responses
of individuals to change.
Until now, however, much of Ghosh's eclectic production - his
journalism, scholarly essays, travelogues and genre-defying
pieces written for various magazines and journals - had disappeared
into the void. At long last, Permanent Black, an art-house Indian
publisher, has collected many of Ghosh's prose pieces in The
Imam and the Indian. The sheer variety of these pieces - ranging
from the 1984 riots to a fundraising dinner in New York for
the Tibetan cause - may leave some readers confused, grasping
for a theme to give them cohesion. A close reading, however,
shows these works are bound together by Ghosh's abiding concern
for the political, whether it takes him to India, Myanmar, the
US or Egypt.
The self-critical, perceptive title essay relates an incident
from his time doing fieldwork in Egypt. He argues with an intolerant
village imam over the relative merits of cremating the dead,
as Indian Hindus do, and the Egyptian Muslim practice of burying
them. The imam calls the Hindu custom "primitive"
and argues that the "advanced" West doesn't burn dead
bodies.
Ghosh, soon incensed, lashes out, saying that even Western
countries burn their dead: "They have special electric
furnaces meant just for that." Both sides are stung. The
imam accuses Ghosh of lying, with the logic that the West cannot
be so ignorant, as they "have guns, tanks and bombs".
Ghosh retorts that India not only has those heavy armaments
but also nuclear weapons: a response that shocks Ghosh himself.
"So there we were," Ghosh concludes, "the imam
and I, delegates from two superseded civilizations vying to
lay claim to the violence of the West."
This subtle, all encompassing worldview is vintage Ghosh. His
historian's eye takes in the breadth of peoples' experiences,
and his anthropologist's mind makes connections between their
religions, wars, cultures and ways of life. Above all, he describes
these complex connections with simple profundity - with the
skill of the novelist that he is.
Ghosh can be jocular, too, without being trite. His essay "Four
Corners" about a road trip in the US illustrates his keen
observational powers and ability to relate the commonplace to
history. America's recreational vehicles (RVs), are, in his
words, "if not quite palaces, then certainly midtown condos
on wheels". He notices their curious names, Native American
words like Winnebago and Itasca. "The names of the dispossessed
tribes of the Americas hold a peculiar allure for marketing
executives of automobile companies. Pontiac, Cherokee - so many
tribes are commemorated in modes of transport," Ghosh observes.
And then, as always, the summing up: "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. This tradition of naming
has a long provenance: Did not Kit Carson himself, the scourge
of the Navajo, name his favorite horse Apache?"
Why doesn't Ghosh come off as a know-it-all? With disarming
frankness, he acknowledges that he doesn't have all the answers,
or even explanations, for the fascinating quirks of culture
he describes. In a short essay about a New York fundraising
party for Tibet, for instance, Ghosh confesses that as an undergraduate,
he and his friends would get drunk when they went to eat Tibetan
food at a Tibetan refugee camp in Delhi. "You couldnt help
doing so it was hard to be in the presence of so terrible a
displacement." As Ghosh muses thus in the trendy Manhattan
restaurant, he catches the eye of the sole monk at the gathering
and finds that "... his smile seemed a little guilty: the
hospitality of a poor nation must have seemed dispensable compared
to the charity of a rich one." Or perhaps he was merely
bewildered, Ghosh continues. "It cannot be easy to celebrate
the commodification of one's own suffering."
Despite the mysterious omission of Ghosh's marvelous essays
on Cambodia The Imam and the Indian is one collection that should
be on the bookshelves of all who call themselves readers.
The Imam and the Indian: Prose Pieces by Amitav Ghosh,
Ravi Dayal & Permanent Black, New Delhi, 2002. ISBN: 8175300477.
Price: Rs 495 (US$10), pp 361.
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