Rootlessness through Displacement in Amitav Ghosh’s writings

Dr. Joydeep Banerjee

National Institute of Technology Durgapur, West Bengal, India

The transition from the colonial to the post-colonial is a subtle one. In India the British were the last of the major colonizers who appropriated native values and resources to their best advantage. What they left behind are elements that account for the hangover which had an upper hand of our post-colonial preoccupations. Pre-independence political priorities took the form of idealization, generalization, mystification and what not. The post-independence cultural scene was an ironic counterblast. The net result of the colonial experience was an acute sense of inferiority and rootlessness engendered by the intellectual slavery under conditions of political and economic domination. A remarkable talent in contemporary post-colonial fiction in the English-speaking world is Amitav Ghosh. The impermanence of cultural rootings and the cross-fertilization of art, society and politics in the modern world are judged by Ghosh to make national descriptions redundant. Ghosh’s writings do not occupy discrete cultures but dwell in ‘travel’ in cultural spaces that flow across borders the ‘shadow lines’ drawn around modern nation states. He seems to be saying that we are all travelers and thus there is always a process of displacement, confusion and tension when people from different cultures interact, but also of hybrid constructions and instant connections.

“The Imam and the Indian” (1986) is a comparative study of intercultural studies in the late twentieth century between two superseded civilizations—the Islamic and the Hindu. It is the experience of this social anthropologist in his encounter with some disconcerting inhabitants of an Egyptian village. The displacements and localizations occur within a powerful force field: “the West”:

When I first came to that quite corner of the Nile Delta I had expected to find on that most ancient and most settled of soils, a settled and restful people. I couldn’t have been wrong. The men of the village had all the busy restlessness of airline passengers in a transit lounge. Many of them had worked and travelled in the sheikhdoms of the Persian Gulf, others had been in Libya and Jordan and Syria, some had been to the Yemen as soldiers, others to Saudi Arabia as pilgrims, a few had visited Europe: some of them had passports so thick they opened out like ink-blackened concertinas. And none of this was new: their grandparents and ancestors and relatives had travelled and migrated too, in much the same ways mind had, in the Indian Subcontinent- because of wars, or for money and jobs, or perhaps simply because they got tired of living always in one place. You could read the history of this restlessness in the villagers’ surnames: they had names which derived from cities in the Levant, from Turkey, from far away towns in Nubia; it was as though people had drifted here from every corner of the Middle East. The wanderlust of its founders had been ploughed into the soil of the village: it seemed to me sometimes that every man in it was a traveller. 1

Ghosh’s professional ethnography has been based on intensive dwelling, albeit temporary in delimited fields or cultural centers. Travel adapts to new conjunctures, reckoning with all sorts of different histories and Ghosh seems to be telling that: “Everyone is on the move, and they have been for centuries: dwelling –in –travel”. Here in this tale Ghosh is travelling with the Imam in the West. And Khamees the Rat tolerates this visitor and shows his willingness, to visit the narrator in India suggests ‘travelling in the East’.

Ghosh discovers that migration and cross-cultural encounters had always affected the lives of these villagers; the only difference was that the pace of transnational travel had picked up in recent years. This is the story of the sparks that fly or the bridges that are built when people from different backgrounds are suddenly thrown together.

Ghosh had a direct influence of the writers of the Arab world on his writings. Besides the Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih (the author of Season of Migration to the North) and Taufiq al-Hakim, his greatest inspirer was an Egyptian Nobel Laureate Naquib Mahfouz on whom he wrote the essay “The World According to Naguib Mahfouz” (1990). Ghosh argues that Mahfouz rakes up the past to have an insight into the future and deals with the dramatic changes of the Middle East within the lifetime of his generation.

In one of his major articles “The Mask of Nationalism” (1993) Ghosh discusses the meaning of nationalism in the present context. In the first half of this century nationalism derived its meaning from the conflict between colony and colonizer and in this phase it is a vision of political community founded on the notion of a ‘pure’ homogenous body of people, undivided by divergent interests, and united by common traditions. The process of decolonization benefitted the colonial powers in that their economies have grown faster than they did in the pre-war period whereas the decolonized countries paid an enormous social price. Vast numbers of people were left behind, mired in circumstances of deadening economic stagnation. He seems to suggest that the so called “cultural nationalism” is a part of the same mindlessly destructive phenomenon and it may lead to economic stagnation and disaster. He is thus not in favor of disarraying the rich cultural heritage of India from the forces within it.

Ghosh disapproves of violence and destruction as means of registering one’s protest and differences whether individual or communal as they need to be tackled carefully. He thinks that in order to curb violence a citizen whether he is a writer or not should bear responsibilities when the constitutional authority fails to act. For a writer it is hard enough to write about the mishappenings verbatim but one should find a form, and a voice to accommodate both violence and peace. He has been persistently trying to imaginatively reconstruct the past throughout his novels with the central concern of devising the invisible threads that links humanity. Amitav Ghosh’s novels implicitly suggest the need for coexistence and strong humanitarian ties across cultures overlooking personal, regional and political considerations. His novels evidence his commitment to a broadly defined, secular –humanist frame of values. The novels of Amitav Ghosh chronicle the loss, discovery or blurring of national and cultural identities of individuals or a people, seen through the eyes of the historian, the traveller or the writer. Men and women in his novels lose -- or at least, begin to question -- their sense of themselves, conditioned by the events which take place around them, and embark on a journey of discovery of their identities.

Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason presents history as a collective memory which gathers, in a symbiotic fashion all that existed in the past into all that happens in the present. His narrative method combined with his treatment of history weaves delicate connections between different phenomena, so that no event becomes absolutely autonomous. This generates the mobility with which history traverses past and present creating an acceptable fluid pattern of time. In The Shadow Lines, the world of war torn London is overlaid by the memories of Calcutta and Dhaka. Letting his stories interplay with time, Ghosh achieves an unusual synthesis of time. If his first two novels move from present to past to present again and achieve a symbiotic narrative structure, In an Antique Land blends fiction, fact and history competently. Ghosh writes on two parallel planes of time: one recounting his visit to Lataifa and Nashway the other reconstructing the life of Bomma, the Indian slave. The two narratives initially seem arbitrarily connected, but they gradually illumine and complement each other. In The Calcutta Chromosome the mystery of the novel accentuated by the use of magic realism dissolves the boundaries between the physical and spiritual truths and explores the possibilities of existence of various levels of consciousness. In The Glass Palace, Rajkumar’s journey to India in search of Dolly becomes a metaphor in his search for himself and his identity. In The Hungry Tide, insights into other people's worlds give rise to a deep central sense of connection, the real essence of things. In Sea of Poppies it is the British who are the fatalists, trying to condemn others to their own fixity, and it's their colonial victims who make their own destinies.

The trauma of an uprooted protagonist has received an unusual treatment in his novels since he struggles hard to adjust himself to new surroundings. His creative impulse demonstrates a propensity for deconstructing, often overturning the models and assumptions of Western civilizations, a typically post-colonial preoccupation.

Works Cited:

1. “The Imam and the Indian,” Indian Express (Mag.), November 9, 1986, 1.

“The Mask of Nationalism,” Business India, 15 (1993), p. 48.

Amitav Ghosh, The Circle of Reason, London: Hamish Hamilton Ltd., 1986.

Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines, Delhi: Ravi Dayal Publisher, 1988.

Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land, Delhi: Ravi Dayal Publisher, 1992.

Amitav Ghosh, The Calcutta Chromosome, Delhi: Ravi Dayal Publisher, 1996.

Amitav Ghosh , The Hungry Tide, New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2005.

Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2008