Back in 1986, the year Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate came out, a teacher told her class to read a first novel by an author we'd never heard of. Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children had been published just five years previously: it was still new, still fresh-minted, as was the idea that the Empire could write back. The Circle of Reason blew us away, presenting forgotten history as though it could and should be as important as the stuff we learned in our textbooks. I didn't know, then, that The Circle of Reason heralded the arrival of a great writer, or that it was just the first of a line-up of books, which would each break new ground, from The Shadow Lines to In An Antique Land to Calcutta Chromosome to The Hungry Tide.
Very few people read Amitav Ghosh today in the relative innocence with which we came to Circle of Reason. It was a decade later that I heard the "back-story": the hard grind in a sweltering barsati in Delhi, in the era BA (Before Advances), the dedication that spawned a tale about Ghosh partially shaving his head so that he wouldn't be tempted to desert the typewriter.
As we arrange a breakfast meeting, the first thing to be jettisoned is nostalgia. He had wanted to revisit the dosas at the south Indian restaurant at the Ambassador Hotel "" but Dasaprakash has long since closed its doors. We're meeting at another hoary bastion instead "" the India International Centre (IIC). Even that has changed with the times and acquired an Annexe, where we're having breakfast.
The Hungry Tide is both a return to Kolkata, which tends to reappear in Ghosh's fiction, and a departure from it. It's set in the Sunderbans, where through the criss-crossing lives of a local fisherman, a translator from Kolkata, a schoolteacher and a cetologist in search of rare dolphins, The Hungry Tide explores history via the massacre of refugees at an island called Morichjhapi.
IIC breakfasts can run to the lavish, but all Ghosh wants is a croissant and tea. (All I want is a croissant, too, but I get a muffin instead.) And it's while we're nibbling at bread from France and cake from England with tea from Assam that we discuss the massacre that Bengal chose to forget. In 1979, a cluster of refugees from Bangladesh who'd been repatriated to central India fled to the Sunderbans in search of more congenial shelter. The Sunderbans is protected forest land; but the crackdown on them was brutal. They were murdered, the women raped, the few survivors evicted.
The longer Ghosh worked on The Hungry Tide, the more Morichjhapi began to assert its power over Ghosh's story. "More people were killed in Morichjhapi than in Gujarat [the Gujarat riots]," he tells me. "Maybe it's been easier to forget them because these people were overwhelmingly dalit "" they could be easily sidelined, marginalised. But when you're in the Sunderbans, you can't get away from it. People talk about it all the time."
The reason Ghosh was in the Sunderbans at all had to do with expediency "" The Glass Palace was nearing completion, and in 2000, he decided to revisit the place where an uncle had settled in 1948. What he found was a hugely-marginalised area, with around four million inhabitants surviving the twin threats of predatory animals and predatory officaldom. The tiger is held in such respect, says Ghosh, that it is never referred to by name; it's called "mama" or "mamafokir". The forest guards are held in considerably less respect: "The local proverb goes if you're caught between a dakat (dacoit) and a forest guard, throw your lot in with the dakat."
At the book launch in Kolkata, veteran writer Sunil Gangopadhyay remarked that The Hungry Tide reads as though it were written in Bengali, a compliment close to Ghosh's heart. One of his central characters, Kanai, is a translator "" a calling whose significance Ghosh discusses while crumbling his croissant to bits. "Translation is the critical endeavour of our times; this book is centrally about the dilemmas of language. One of the basic questions I've always had to face as an Indian writing in English concerns language." He's a longtime resident of New York, but his conversation is liberally sprinkled with Bangla words; he's done a fluent translation of Tagore's short story Khudito Pashan (The Hungry Stones), and he's contemplating translating The Hungry Tide into Bengali. He continues as the waiters refill cups in deference to our table's addiction to tea: "We never discuss the suppression of language "" the ways in which for emotional reasons, often, we develop a deeply-conflicted attitude to language. Many of us who opted away from domestic languages carry that baggage with us."
In his college years, Ghosh remembers Bengali books, Hindi books, but little that was available in English by Indian authors. "When one walks into bookshops in India now, there's such a wealth of books telling so many untold stories. We read Anita Desai, Kamala Markandeya, Sastibrata "" that's all. But I devoured them. They were the closest you came to reading about an experience anything like your own. Reading about potted shrimp "" what did it mean to us, it's hard to imagine." He speaks of enjoying Upamanyu Chatterjee's Mammaries of the Welfare State. "Then I became aware that this was a book that could only be appreciated by about five hundred people who shared the same language, experiences. Evelyn Waugh must have had the same appeal, at his time, in his place. This is the experience of reading common to people who don't have our fractured linguistic circumstances: a writer is whispering into your ear."
Language and history were linked in his decision to withdraw The Glass Palace from the lists when it won the Commonwealth Prize. His justification was set out in a classic letter: "The Glass Palace is eligible for the Commonwealth Prize partly because it was written in English and partly because I happen to belong to a region that was once conquered and ruled by Imperial Britain. Of the many reasons why a book's merits may be recognised, these seem to me to be the least persuasive."
More global influences were at work when Ghosh wrote The Hungry Tide. He was reading a great deal of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke in English and Bengali translation after 9/11. "So many people have such a great despair with the world that they are willing to destroy it. The Rilkean idea of praising the world suddenly became very powerful for me. Rilke had these beautiful lines: "when you praise the world to the angels, don't speak of the grand emotions, speak of the little things" "" and that became my mantra. It's strange to think that you can read a poet who's been dead for so long but who speaks to you with such intense clarity across 50 years and says, this is what you must do, and this is how you must do it."
The tea has accompanied us to a quiet landing where Ghosh shares a wry amusement at the fate of his books: in India, The Shadow Lines is his best-loved work; in the US, it appears to be In An Antique Land; in Europe, it's The Calcutta Chromosome, but in the UK, the most successful book has been The Glass Palace. He has, I suggest, a book for every region; and he laughs briefly before looking back at the travails of a writer's life.
"You have to believe in the essential validity of what you're doing, that it's the most important thing you could possibly do. And these are not easy things to believe," he says. "Writing is the fiercest, most intense discipline anyone can have. I haven't been writing for this past month-and-a-half. When I get back, it'll take six months before I can produce a sentence."
This may dismay fans of Dancing in Cambodia, his essays and his travel writing, but Ghosh feels that the non-fiction books are behind him. As the apparently bottomless teapot finally empties, he leaves me with a final, elegant comparison: "About non-fiction, I feel less and less interested in expressing an opinion as such; I just feel so much happier writing fiction. Fiction is a marathon runner's thing "" non fiction and essays are sprints. I really do think that the novel is the most complete and most demanding form on earth."
