The Writing of the Nation by its Elite by MK Raghavendra

Author:MK Raghavendra [Raghavendra, MK]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Asia, India & South Asia, Literary Criticism, General, Subjects & Themes, Politics, Political Science, Political Ideologies, Democracy, Libertarianism, World, Asian, Social Science, Popular Culture, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781000410556
Google: s_kvEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2021-07-15T16:03:58+00:00

8

Past as pastiche

Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008)

Fact into fiction

Amitav Ghosh has a special place among Indian novelists in that his fiction is not ‘personal’ in nature – as much of contemporary Indian literary fiction in English is – but can be characterized as a systematic exploration of spaces and scientific/anthropological issues often involving the experiences of Indians in faraway lands. Ghosh is an anthropologist by training and, instead of academic work, has turned his skills to producing fiction. An association has, for instance, been made1 between his doctoral thesis and his partly fictional work of narration In an Antique Land (1992). Ghosh has been prolific and writes novels which often employ a common strategy: the individual stories of several protagonists are woven in parallel and brought together so that the novel becomes the multi-layered exploration of a single historical space or development. This ‘multi-layered’ approach implies that his novels are long and the fiction only a ruse by which to explore the underlying social and/or historical processes. That so much research is turned into fiction – rather than academic writing – may undermine the value of each undertaking as serious enquiry, but the compensation is that historical/scientific/anthropological issues are brought alive to the reader. One could even say that Ghosh’s novels make members of the educated anglophone class aware of their past – the nation’s past as well as that of the diaspora – in a way that formal education itself would not have. To illustrate Ghosh’s strategy, his novel The Hungry Tide (2005) brings together an American marine biologist of Indian descent with other outsiders and local fishermen to investigate environmental, anthropological, and political issues and bring an obscure space – the Ganges delta and its labyrinth of islands – vividly to the reader. Here is a passage which illustrates how factual information is used in the service of fiction:

She had spotted the crocodiles long before him of course – she had seen them when they were a mile or so away. There were four of them, and they were huge: from tip to tail, the largest of them was probably about the same length as the launch. She had wondered what it would be like to encounter one of these monsters up close, and the thought had prompted an involuntary shudder. But this was all. She had seen nothing else of note. Even though she hadn’t known what to expect, she had not foreseen as complete a blank as this. That these waters had once contained large numbers of dolphins was known beyond a doubt. Several nineteenth-century zoologists had testified to it. The ‘discoverer’ of the Gangetic dolphin, William Roxburgh, had said explicitly that the fresh-water dolphins of the Ganges delighted in the ‘labyrinth of rivers and creeks to the South and South-East of Calcutta’. This was exactly where she was and yet, after hours of careful surveillance she had still to spot her first dolphin. Nor had she seen many fishermen: Piya had been hoping that

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