Tag Archive for 'Amitav Ghosh'

Chetan Bhagat: the paperback king of India

Published
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on January 24, 2010
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Robert McCrum in The Observer:

Chetan Bhagat

A year after the launch of Slumdog Millionaire, the Oscar-winning movie of Vikas Swarup’s novel Q & A, some more quiz questions: Who is the most read living Indian writer? Is it a) Aravind Adiga (Booker prize-winning author of The White Tiger); b) Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children); c) Vikram Seth (A Suitable Boy); or d) Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things)?

The answer: none of these. Two generations after independence, one of the vital characteristics of the new India is that the educated middle class who once turned to English for business applications now see it in a different light. To them, in a manner typical of English language and culture in many parts of formerly colonial society, it is becoming decoupled from its bitter imperial past.

This new middle-class audience – small entrepreneurs, managers, travel agents, salespeople, secretaries, clerks – has an appetite for literary entertainment that falls between the elite idiom of the cultivated literati, who might be familiar with the novels of Amitav Ghosh or Salman Rushdie, and the Indian English of the street and the supermarket. Theirs is the Indian English of the outsourcing generation. For these people, there is only one author: Chetan Bhagat. Who? More:

Golden age of Indian writing

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on July 17, 2009
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Writers are finding inspiration in the furiously evolving societies and encouragement in a buoyant book market, writes Andrew Buncombe in The Independent

Colin Thubron, Vikram Seth, William Dalrymple and Pico Iyer at the Jaipur Literature Festival, 2009
Colin Thubron, Vikram Seth, William Dalrymple and Pico Iyer at the Jaipur Literature Festival, 2009

There was a time, not so long ago, when a visit to a Delhi bookshop to browse its section of Indian literature would be a somewhat depressing experience. There would a handful of stellar stand-out names, of course; Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh and one or two others. But the collection would be a half-hearted affair, seemingly there more out of duty than joy, and usually it would be hidden away at the back of the shop. ”Now, that has all completely changed,” laughs V K Karthika, publisher and chief editor of HarperCollins India. “Now those books are at the front of the shop. What’s more, they’re actually the books you want to read, rather than the books you read because you feel you should.” more

Caju and conversation

Published
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on June 13, 2009
in Books and Travel
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ghosh_chakravarti

Once a hippie wonderland, then a tourist haven and now a creative idyll. Zac O’Yeah hobnobs with Goa’s new literary set. In Mint-Lounge. [Photo: Amitav Ghosh and Sudip Chakravarti]:

A regular visitor to Literati, author Sudeep Chakravarti has set up house in Panjim. His debut novel was Tin Fish (2005), which some critics have termed “the Indian Catcher in the Rye”. Like Salinger, who left New York for a cabin in the woods, Chakravarti traded his job as an editor in Delhi for a space to write. And so he is, in fact, the third person, in a short span of time, who tells me about the joy of leaving a metro in favour of a new life in Goa.

Chakravarti’s friends, of course, told him he was crazy when he drew up a list of four places he thought might be suitable for a writer: Mussoorie, Puducherry, Goa and Santiniketan. Goa won hands down. It wasn’t an emotional choice, but a practical one-a decision which brought creativity back to him. “In some ways, I had arrived at a time and place in my life when the urge to pursue a lifelong dream to write books couldn’t any longer be put on hold,” he says. Since coming to Goa he has been prolific, publishing three books: Nos. 4 and 5 are on the way. He also wants to start a writers’ cooperative, The East India Writing Company, to support literary work in South Asia. “You could say Goa and I are in a state of pleasurable cohabitation,” he says.

In Goa, writers are so abundant that they seem to grow on trees. One of the first days in February, at a Kala Academy poetry reading, I bumped into Ghosh. At the youthful age of 52, he has written himself into literary history and nowadays spends about half the year in picture-pretty Aldona, in the bucolic interior of Goa. He’d been visiting for decades, until one day he found himself a crumbling old villa which he lovingly restored. One wing was in such a state of disrepair that it had to be almost fully rebuilt, he explains, after inviting me home to a dinner party. Ghosh’s study, which naturally interests me the most, impresses with its large writing desk, his personal range of hide-bound Egyptian notebooks, and, right outside, there’s a wide terrace suitable for recreational birdwatching. More:

Soldiers and victims of the opium war

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on October 20, 2008
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Shashi Tharoor reviews The Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh in The Washington Post:

Since the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children in 1981, a new and ancient land has imposed itself on the world’s literary consciousness, — a land whose language and concerns have stretched the boundaries of the possible in English literature. A generation of post-colonial Indian writers has brought a larger world — a teeming, myth-infused, gaudy, exuberant, many-hued and restless world — past the immigration inspectors of English literature. Today it seems no year goes by without yet another Indian novel announcing its entry into the global canon, confirming Indian writing as among the most innovative and interesting anywhere.

Over the last two decades, the Indian author Amitav Ghosh has established himself as a writer of uncommon talent who combines literary flair with a rare seriousness of purpose. His first novel, The Circle of Reason, seemed very much in the Rushdie magical-realist tradition, but he has evolved considerably since then, notably in works like The Shadow Lines and more recently The Glass Palace, which deal movingly and powerfully with the dislocations of post-imperial politics in Bengal and Burma. Sea of Poppies, his sixth novel (and the first of a projected trilogy), marks both a departure and an arrival. It sees Ghosh painting upon a larger canvas than ever before, with a multitude of characters and an epic vision; and the novel is his first to be shortlisted for Britain’s Man Booker Prize, one of two Indian novels in a list of six.

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Previouosly in AW:

Lascars, sepoys and nautch girls

Confessions of a Poppy writer

‘Token Asians’ in the Booker shortlist

Published
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on September 10, 2008
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Aravind Adiga

Aravind Adiga

The shortlist for the Man Booker Prize, considered to be the most prestigious award for literary fiction in English, is out. Early favourite, Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence gets passed over while two other Indian writers — Amitav Ghosh (Sea of Poppies) and the 33-year-old Aravind Adiga (The White Tiger) make it to the final six.

BBC lists the six who made it.

In The Telegraph (UK), James Delingpole is unimpressed with the list of ‘token Asians’, ‘Irish misery novelist’ and ‘gay’ writer — usual suspects. But writers rarely slag off other novelist or, for that matter, literary awards.

Token Asian; Oirish misery novelist; another token Asian; Guardian woman; gay; token Australian wild-card with beard who looks definitely a bit foreign. Hmm. I wonder which of the usual suspects on the shortlist is going to win the Booker Prize this year.

“Aaagh!” I’m going to go, when I see these appallingly sexist, racist, homophobic words under my byline in bald print in a respectable, widely read national newspaper. “Did I really write that sentence? Was I drunk? Was I trying to kill my literary career stone dead?”

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Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh

And in The Telegraph (India), Amit Roy takes a closer look at the Indian contenders

Two books by Indian authors — Sea of Poppies by Calcutta-born Amitav Ghosh and The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, a debut novelist from Chennai — have been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

There was bitter disappointment for Pakistani author Mohammed Hanif, whose much-fancied A Case of Exploding Mangoes was on the long-list of 13 novels announced in July and was being talked about as the probable winner.

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In The Guardian, why Salman Rushdie not is “not good enough” for Booker shortlist:

Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence was simply not a good enough book to make it past the longlist stage of this year’s Booker prize, according to the chair of judges, Michael Portillo. To add insult to the double Booker of Booker winner’s injured pride, Portillo added that the judges didn’t even spend that much time discussing it.

“I can say that the discussions we had about Salman Rushdie, as with all the other books, was a discussion about the book and not about the author. It was about the merits of the book,” he told guardian.co.uk after the press conference at which the shortlist was announced.

“In the opinion of these five people taken together, Salman Rushdie’s was not one of the top six books for us. We didn’t have a huge debate about it.”

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Confessions of a Poppy writer

Published
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on June 9, 2008
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In Hindustan Times, Amitav Ghosh goes behind the curtains of his latest novel, The Sea of Poppies, and talks about what led him to this epic tale of drug-running and sea-faring.

Near the beginning of Sea of Poppies, Deeti, the central character, has a vision of the Ibis, the schooner that will eventually carry her away from India. For me, too, the book began in much the same way – except that the vision that was revealed to me was of Deeti herself. I knew from the start that her story would be the main current of this novel; she would be the river that carried the weight of its many tributary streams.

One of the reasons why I was drawn to Deeti’s story is that my own ancestors set off on their travels at about the same time as she did: the difference was that they moved in the opposite direction. The founder of the family is said to have left his village in eastern Bengal in the early part of the 19th century. Moving gradually westwards, he came to a halt in 1856, when he settled in Chhapra, a small town in Bihar – the very place in which Deeti and Kalua come to their fateful decision to sever their links with the past and seek a new life overseas. It was this unnamed ancestor who led me into the story of opium by prompting me to wonder why he had ended up where he did. What led him to settle in this relatively obscure place? What opportunities could he have been seeking? This was then the world’s single most important poppy-growing region and was thus one of the chief sources of the wealth of the British Raj. Such opportunities as existed there must have been connected with opium in some way. Could it be that the star that ruled my family’s destiny – and thus my own – was the same as Deeti’s, that is to say, the seed of the poppy?

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Previously in AW: Lascars, sepoys and nautch girls

Lascars, sepoys and nautch girls

Published
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on June 8, 2008
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In The Guardian, James Buchan reviews Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh:

This terrific novel, the first volume in a projected trilogy, unfolds in north India and the Bay of Bengal in 1838 on the eve of the British attack on the Chinese ports known as the first opium war. In Sea of Poppies, Amitav Ghosh assembles from different corners of the world sailors, marines and passengers for the Ibis, a slaving schooner now converted to the transport of coolies and opium. In bringing his troupe of characters to Calcutta and into the open water, Ghosh provides the reader with all manner of stories, and equips himself with the personnel to man and navigate an old-fashioned literary three-decker.

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Death comes ashore

Published
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on May 21, 2008
in India and environment
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Amitav Ghosh on cyclones in the Bay of Bengal, in the New York Times

THE word “cyclone” was coined in Calcutta (now called Kolkata) in the 1840s by an eccentric Englishman named Henry Piddington. Inspired by the great British meteorologist William Reid, Piddington became one of the earliest storm-chasers, besotted with a phenomenon that he once likened to a “beautiful meteorite.” His elegant coinage was originally intended as a generic name for all revolving weather events, but is now applied mainly to the storms of the Indian Ocean region like Cyclone Nargis, which struck Burma with devastating effect last week.

Piddington was among the earliest to recognize that a cyclone wreaks most of its damage not through wind but through water, by means of the devastating wave that is known as a “storm surge.” In 1853, when the British colonial authorities were planning an elaborate new port on the outer edge of Bengal’s mangrove forests, he issued an unambiguous warning: “Everyone and everything must be prepared to see a day when, in the midst of the horrors of a hurricane, they will find a terrific mass of salt water rolling in …” His warning was neglected and Port Canning was built, only to be obliterated by a cyclonic surge in 1867.

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