Q

CHAPTER - III

The Novels of Amitav Ghosh

 CHAPTER - IH
The Novels Of Amitav Ghosh

Introduction

History and politics have always been a predominant preoccupation of

most of the Indian English novelists. This compulsive obsession was perhaps
inevitable since the genre developed concurrently with the climatic phase of
colonial rule, the stirrings of nationalist sentiments and its full flowering in the
final stages of freedom movement. The Indian English novel developed at a
junction when the consciousness of its being a part of history was a national
phenomenon. The intense emotional stirring of people united in the effort to
be free from all shackles of foreign rule made individuals unusually conscious
of being a part of a momentous historical movement. This consciousness is
exemplified in the novels o f Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, R. K. Narayan,
Manohar Malgonkar, Chaman Nahal, Shashi Tharoor, Salman Rushdie,
Amitav Ghosh, etc.
 57

In the recent times, a bulk of historical fiction has emerged on the

Indian literaiy scene. Many Indian English novelists have turned to Ihe past as
much to trace the deepening mood of nationalism as to cherish the memories
of the bygone days. The contemporary novelists are preoccupied with our
historic past and the readers have unabated interest in the novels that depict
the past or that treat some events of national importance that had wide
repercussions.

v/j^ K. Dhawan considers it quite improper to compare historical novel

with history proper. Justifying his own statement in this regard, he writes:

The novelist concerned with history is beyond the

traditional way of assessing events; he has to blend
history with his vision and philosophy. The novel
deals with history through a camouflage.1

P. V. Narasimha Rao’s debut novel The Insider, for example, is a

fictionalized biography of an ex-Prime Minister. Anand, the protagonist of the
novel, is an alter-ego of Rao; the events o f his life run parallel to the author’s
life-history. It is a historical novel that throws useful light on a slice of the
country’s socio-political life. A historical novel evaluates a segment of
historical reality as projected by the novelist whose techniques of writing
fiction enable him to describe his vision or world-vision. Historical forces
have a tremendous effect on almost all things in the world today. To quote
Walter Allen:

In the literature of an age, its conflicts, tendencies,

obsessions are uncovered and made manifest to a
degree which is continually astonishing; good
writers are, so to speak, mediumistic to the deeper
 58

stirrings of life of their time while they are still

unknown to, or at any rate unsuspected by, the
public, politicians and current received opinions ...
contemporary novels are the mirror of the age, but a
veiy special kind of mirror that reflects not merely
the external features of the age but also its inner
face, its nervous system, coursing of its blood and
the unconscious promptings and conflicts which
sway it.2

The novels o/Salman Rushdie,'imitav Ghosh and^LJpamanyu Chatteijee are

mirrors of this kind. They establish a dynamic interaction between the
individual and the multifarious forces o f histoiy. This aspect is emphasized by
xXJma Parameswaran with particular reference to Rushdie in the following
words:

What Rushdie has done in Midnight's Children, is

to recognize and demonstrate that the Indian
situation is the perfect metaphor for
characteristically twentieth-centuiy questions about
history, language, social and political fragmentation
and creativity. Whereas Narayan’s view in Waiting
for the Mahatma or Khushwant Singh’s view in
Train to Pakistan, for example is microcosmic,
Rushdie’s view in Midnight's Children is certainly
macrocosmic. India, because of its size and
complexity, and the fecundity of its myth and cult is
the ideal metaphor for the plight of the individual
and histoiy.3

The historical novel represents a deep, unconscious movement towards

national homogeneity and not a surface wave of escapism. The most valued
virtues in historical fiction are entertainment and instruction. The factual and
 59

informational values of history illuminate the subject and increasingly whet

the reader’s curiosity.

A writer of historical fiction is as much a historian as a novelist. But

history does impose limitations on him. He is not free to distort history. So,
factual accuracy has to be strictly^adhered to. Explaining the position of a
historical novelist Chaman Nahal writes:

Herein lies the additional burden, that a historical

novelist places on the artist. The novelist is obliged
to do careful research into the period he has chosen
for presentation and every detail o f that period has
to be accurate.4

The detail is not only about the layout of a geographical region, but also about
the people living in that region, their mode of speech, their dress, their habits,
their peculiar traits and countless other characteristics of that particular
community. Indeed, every care must be taken to verify incidental details, as a
sure guard against anachronism.

The interaction between historical and fictional characters is the most

challenging part of writing a historical novel. Great political movements,
conflicts or revolutions are the warp and woof of a historical novelist. A
majority of the Indian English novels have been written in response to
historical movements or events such as the Gandhian freedom movement,
imperial rule, partition of the country and the emergence of the New India. An
epic struggle covering the first half of the twentieth century was the heroic
effort to throw away the foreign yoke.
 60

The freedom struggle caught the imagination of the entire nation. No

significant writer could escape the impact of the mighty movement sweeping
the country. The novels dealing with the freedom struggle give vivid pictures
of the exploitation and the arrogance of the foreign rulers, as well as portrayal
of an awakened people struggling for their birthright. The growth of the
historical novel coincided with the intensification of the struggle for Indian
freedom, especially after the First World War. Novels written previously had
confined to religious aestheticism but by now the focus shifted to
contemporary socio-political concern. A number of novels during the period
reflect the injustice of the British rule and the grim fight the people were
determined to launch against it and get rid of it. Politics became synonymous
with nationalism.

The most important historical event of our age was the partition of the
Indian subcontinent. The religious and political differences between Hindus
and Muslims reaching the climax with the Partition led to the widespread
disturbances, causing destruction of human life on a scale unprecedented in
the recent history of the subcontinent. A communal frenzy causing great
havoc and misery was let loose. At least one million Hindus and Muslims lost
their lives in the massacres which continued for several months. A large-scale
cavalcade took place from one country to the other. In the process, thousands
were massacred; women were raped; children were flung on spears; and
property was looted on a vast scale.

The Indian English novelists, like their counterparts in Indian

languages, responded to these happenings with a sense of horror. A number of
the novels were written on the theme of partition, its dire consequences and
 61
the plight of the refugees. They faithfully record the reign o f violence that
characterized the period and provide a sad and telling commentary on the
breakdown of human values. A strain of despair and disillusionment is
predominant in these novels.

Amitav Ghosh, Salman Rushdie, Upamanyu Chatteijee and many

others intersperse their narratives with incidents from the pre-Independence
struggle and the Partition holocaust. The new techniques in these novels do
not present incidents and events of history in chronological order. Current
events bring to focus events of the past. The new and old events are
synthesized so artistically that events of the past come alive, making it a living
experience. Significantly, the novels o f the eighties present a radically
different perception of history. History is no more the biographies of kings
and queens but an important place for the common man to be an active
participant in the making of it. Salman Rushdie is deeply concerned with the
politics of the subcontinent. In an interview given to Gordon Wise, Salman
Rushdie calls himself “a fairly political animal.” He further claims that his
novels, Midnight’s Children and Shame, are “novels on historical themes.”5
His presentation of politics and history is innovative.

The patriotic fervour, the tireless endeavour, the unflagging human

spirit and the inner strength are highlighted and are the points o f focus in all
the novels. The writers of the eighties show that the suffering did not end with
the coming of freedom. Their novels show that the post-Independence
scenario is equally challenging. Today, the word ‘politics’ has acquired a
variety of unpleasant interpretations.
 62

Amitav Ghosh’s engagement with history is not the same kind as that
of a historian in all his writings. But this does not in any way lessen its
significance as historical fiction. The fictional framework renders histoiy
more readable and lively. He is able to involve the reader more than what
history does. Ghosh’s fiction reveals the novelist’s involvement with histoiy
to be his prime obsession. Indeed, he intellects a new dimension into his
encounter with history. His fiction is imbued with both political and historical
consciousness. Ghosh is a novelist who virtually bends his novels to the needs
of history; they largely derive their purpose and shape from it.

Amitav Ghosh provides interesting glimpses of various facets of the

Nationalist movement in his two novels, The Circle of Reason and The
Shadow Lines. Militant nationalism, socialism and non-violence were all
paths leading to the common goal of independence. Ghosh never attempts to
bulldoze histoiy into some other preoccupations. Histoiy retains its historicity
and hinges on characters who are representative of important historical
tendencies.

Society is the sum total of people’s thought processes, vision of life,

needs and aspirations, customs and traditions, and national commitments.
Some of the evil customs, such as Sati, child marriage, fanaticism and
untouchability were abolished by reformers like Raja Ram Mohan Roy,
Swami Dayanand Saraswati, Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar.
However, they could not wholly uproot them.

A great change has taken place in the condition of the weaker sections
of society since the government has taken up many drastic reforms for the
 63

eradication of social problems. Indian English novelists, writing in the post­

independence period have realistically portrayed the changing phases and
diverse aspects of the Indian society, and their novels reflect the varied
features of the contemporary society.

The modem urban India unleashes a plethora of experience for the

Indian English novelists. The rainbow colours and chameleon like altercations
of the modem urbanized society have gravitated the novels; they have dealt
comprehensively with the urban and cosmopolitan situations where language
is no serious barrier; and which truly represent the Indian life; and are plenty
and varied enough too for the novelist to find fictional raw materials. Indeed,
they have tried to draw, through their novels, a living picture o f the modem
Indian society, projecting here and there its salient features - caste system,
disintegration of joint families, man-woman relationship, position of women
in society in connection with their traditional concept versus recent
emancipation, East-West encounter, the disillusionment and dilemma of the
modem man in this urbanized world and his resultant alienation from it. In
this connection we may significantly quote William Walsh’s remark:

Theirs are thoughts and imagery and idioms and

consciousness of their own country’s milieu, but
they have also, with their personal experience,
transformed the material into literature that is
universal in its artistic appeal.6

For instance, the class discrimination, horrible caste system, atrocious

and contemptuous attitude o f the upper class towards the underprivileged
class forms the fabric of the novels o f Bhabani Bhattachaiya. The tight
mechanical structure of joint families, the growing functions on its wall and
 64

its slow disintegration, man-woman relationship especially the post-marital

problems, the traditional concept o f woman versus awakened and
emancipated self of woman in the wake of new feminist movements - their
assertion of self identity and awareness o f self rights - are some of the issues
which have been emphatically dealt with in the novels of Anita Desai, Raja
Rao and Ruth Prawar Jhabvala. Further, Kamala Markandaya has
concentrated on the tragic consequences o f the growth of science and
technology in the life of rural people. The process of urbanization followed by
another problem of social isolation and alienation resulting in the direct clash
between the old traditional culture and values o f the East and the new modem
culture and ethics brought by the contact with the West are some of the issues
which have been delineated vividly by Indian English novelists like Manohar
Malgonkar, Raja Rao, Anita Desai, Kamala Markandaya and Ruth Prawar
Jhabvala.

The post-independence Indian English novelists have also seriously and

painfully recorded in their novels, the tragedy of Partition, the communal, and
the linguistic passions which maddened the people in the very hour the
freedom was bom and the agonizing spectacle of “the divided house in place
of emotional integration, with a deceptive floor and a precarious roof.”7

The scope of ‘political novel’ in Indian writing in English is very wide

and large. It covers all the political and social problems in the history of
Indian society because, in it (history), political change is the most important
change to which other changes become subordinate. It is difficult to
distinguish between social problems and political problems since every social
problem acquires a political dimension, pointing towards an all encompassing
 65

political solution. In the history of Indian writing in English, the period before
Independence was such a time when the prevailing concerns of political
change were the most important and a study of political novel after
Independence, therefore, first focuses our attention on the social novel before
Independence.

A large number of Indian English novels written in the post-

Independence period have in them treatment of various political issues. Some
of them are the communal riots, the Chinese aggression, disputes between
India and Pakistan, differences between the political parties of the country and
the rise of parochial tendencies. For instance, the Hindu-Muslim riots of 1947
have been treated in Manohar Malgonkar’s A Bend in the Ganges, Chaman
NahaPs Azadi, and Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan', the Hindu-Sikh
riots have been treated in Khushwant Singh’s Delhi; the Chinese aggression
has been treated by Bhabani Bhattacharya in Shadow from Ladakh’, the
disputes between India and Pakistan have been highlighted by Salman
Rushdie in Midnight's Children-, the fight between the political parties of the
country leading to the declaration of Emergency has been treated in Shashi
Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel and Arun Joshi’s The City and the River;
and the rise of parochial tendencies has been dealt with in Nayantara Sahgal’s
A Storm in Chandigarh. Each great writer has moulded and shaped these
significant national events in some artistic pattern. With the newly achieved
freedom of expression, these novelists have expressed in their novels their
suppressed fury and forceful reaction at the political upheavals o f the country.
We see that political events and issues over a hundred year period are
reflected in various ways in literature, both directly and indirectly. The novel,
A Storm in Chandigarh by Nayantara Sahgal, projects the scenes of chilling
 66

horror and inhuman violence which could be witnessed with the naked eyes at
the time of Partition, through the reminiscences of the characters. The novel,
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth narrates in retrospect the ghostly event of
separation. He conjures up the images of the uprooted ‘marginal man’ fleeing
across the borders, the scene of transition which has been set in train by the
separation and independence. Likewise, the problems caused to the country by
changing foreign relations have been brought to light in Nayantara SahgaPs
novel The Day in Shadow.

Thus, tiie horrible violence and bloodshed caused by the tragic division
of India and Pakistan has sprinkled its bloody drops on some of the novels
written in post-independence era. Giving the significance and relevance of
these novels to the contemporary socio-political scenario, we may refer to
Devendra Satyarthi’s views on these novels as quoted by K. R. S. Iyengar:

No literature based on hate and prejudice can really

be great. It was a drama o f degradation and shame,
a drama of human decay, showing how the minds of
the two communities were poisoned by the dogma
of the two-nation theory.8

Yet, it is certain that in all these novels there is the continuous flow of the
stream of humanity which sometimes is dried up due to the sandstorm of
communal hatred.

Another major political perspective traced in these novels is the

depiction of the decline and fall of the feudal glory. Mulk Raj Anand and
Manohar Malgonkar have given in their novels a sensational and graphic
account of the merger of princely states, and decline of feudal glory. In The
 67

Private Life o f an Indian Prince (1953), Mulk Raj Anand describes the
socio-political situation of the post-independence period when the Indian
Government was appealing to the princely states to merge themselves with the
Indian Union.

The Freedom movement in India was not merely a political struggle,

but an all-pervasive emotional experience for all Indians. The Indian writers
were so much emotionally attached with the movement for freedom that even
after independence it was difficult for them to escape its influence. Therefore,
most of the Indian English novelists recollected it in tranquillity and depicted
this national experience, either directly as a theme, or indirectly as significant
public background to a personal narrative. This was an experience that was
national in scale and was felt far and wide beyond the boundaries of language,
race and community.

The Indian English novelists were also greatly influenced by the

teachings of Gandhi and, according to Professor Iyengar, Gandhi’s style of
writing influenced the novelists of that era as much as his political aims for an
independent India. Even the works o f the post-independence Indian English
novelists revealed a marked impact of the teachings and philosophy of Gandhi
and his expedient strategy in winning freedom. Different novelists have
depicted him in different personalities. While some of them treat him as a
saint and his teachings as quasi-religious dogma, there are others who present
him as a giant and forceful political leader, leading his countrymen to the path
of freedom and self-rule. A.V. Krishna Rao throws light on Gandhi’s
influence on Indian English fiction in the following lines:
 68

Almost all the Indo-Anglian novels have one or

more of the following nuclear ideas, predominant in
them: the Evil of partition, the cult of ‘Quit India’;
and the Gandhian Myth.... It is a significant fact
that the image of Gandhi is present in all the three
types of novels, though the details and emphasis
may vary.9

While some of these writers, like Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao, carry
a burden of commitment which they hardly lay down, there are others like
R.K. Narayan and Manohar Malgonkar, who write as observers and
chroniclers. This is also partly true of Khwaja Ahmad Abbas’s Inquilab
where the novelist refuses to get involved because he intends to present the
total picture as impartially as he can. Some of the novelists like Jhabvala,
Nayantara Sahgal, Nagarajan, Kamala Markandaya, Futehally, Venu Chitale,
Anand Lall and Attia Hosain present this nationalist movement and the impact
of Gandhi in their novels - sometimes as a theme or sometimes as a
background.

Raja Rao, in his novel Kanthapura (1938), has presented Gandhiji as

the most potent force behind the freedom movement. He has treated Gandhi in
various forms as an idea, a myth, a symbol, a tangible reality and benevolent
human being. R. K. Narayan’s Waiting fo r Mahatma also deals with the
impact of Gandhism on Indian political life. Mulk Raj Anand in his novels
Untouchable and The Sword and the Sickle also shows his awareness and
associations with the great national event of the struggle for independence,
under the able leadership o f Gandhiji. (Nayantara Sahgal’s This Time o f
Morning deals with politics in the last days of Nehru’s Prime Ministership.)
Some Inner Fury by Kamala Markandaya is based on the impact of the
 69

troubled national spirit of the year 1942 on the young romantic love of two
individuals - Mirabai and Richards, an Englishman. Arundhati Roy, a great
champion of the cause of Gandhism, in her novel, The God o f Small Things
points out these unnoticed shades of the Dalit and the deserted which
generally escape the eyes of a social scientist. The novel is a strong vehicle of
her opinion, like that of Mahatma Gandhi, that even a Dalit or an untouchable
can become an engineer or a doctor or a lawyer or a professor.

One important trend commonly found in some post-independence

Indian English novels is the presentation o f the background of the two World
Wars and foreign invasions specially those of China in 1962, and of Pakistan
in 1965 and 1971. The novelists like Bhabani Bhattacharya, Manohar
Malgonkar and Khushwant Singh have presented these political events as the
background of their novels.

In the novel, The Distant Drum (1960) which deals with the life of
army officers commissioned before Independence, Manohar Malgonkar has
tried to show that regimental codes have more than proved their worth in
practical affairs. The army, with a great fighting tradition at its back, survived
the struggle for Independence by steering clear of politics in India and
preserved the mystique which could bind into a single unit, men of diverse
provinces, faiths and castes. His another novel, A Bend in the Ganges
presents the freedom struggle in the background of the Japanese invasion of
British Asian territories in World War n . Khushwant Singh’s I Shall Not
Hear the Nightingale is set against the freedom movement and the war years
from April 1942 to April 1943, the disturbed pre-partition period at
Jallianwalla Bagh in Punjab. It delineates how, with the Japanese at the gate
 70

of India, the British faced the imminent collapse of the Indian Empire, and the
Indian nationalists, sensing the end of the Raj, are tensed for revolution. Thus,
the presentation of the image of Indian army and the echoes of foreign
invasions and wars with other countries including the two World Wars has
been an important thematic concern of some of the novelists of the era.

One important and oft-repeated trend visible in Indian English fiction

of the period is the projection of corruption cancerously spread in the high
ranks of politics. The corrupt and affluent lives of the high-ranked British
officials had left a deep mark on the thinking and policies of those people
enjoying power and authority in independent India. The high-ranked ministers
and those seated in gorgeous and grand chairs were so maddened and dazzled
by their narrow selfish motives that they turned a deaf ear to the woes and
grievances of the public.

Public exposure of acts of corruption and various secret happenings

going on in the corridors of power has been of utmost thematic concern of the
journalists and writers, specially the novelists of the period. Some novelists
like Nayantara Sahgal, Manohar Malgonkar, Sudhin Ghose, G.V. Desani, etc.
have gone a long way in delineating the chameleon type morals and policies
of these politicians in post-independence India. Amitav Ghosh’s treatment is
not only more detailed and imaginative but also more significant in
understanding the role of politics in the subcontinent, and its effect on history
and the individual. He suggests that the politics of the nations of the
subcontinent are inseparable, that incidents in one part reverberate also in
other parts of the subcontinent. And Sushila Singh relevantly writes:
 71

Drawing heavily from his personal experiences, he

brings in collision personal and public happenings
with locales shifting and merging between Calcutta,
London and Dhaka.10

The volatile nature of political forces has turned the subcontinent into a
tinderbox ready to ignite at the slightest provocation.

The Indian English novelists, though writing in a foreign language, are

rooted in the soil. Whereas, the pre-independence writers were more lured by
the British politics, the social economic policies of the government and the
British milieu, and other European canonical systems, writing in free India,
feel more at home in the delineation of Indian political milieu and important
national events. They have recreated and represented the very spirit of Indian
political ethos in their novels.

The above thematic study of the novels of different Indian English

novelists of the pre- and post-independence times in the socio-political and
historical perspectives shows that the form of these novels is alien while their
content is Indian. In the light of the above socio-political and historical
settings the six novels of Amitav Ghosh are discussed and analysed critically
in the following pages under six sections.
 72

I.

The Circle o f Reason.

Historicizing Scientific Reason

Amitav Ghosh’s debut novel, The Circle o f Reason marks a break

from the traditional themes of the Indian English novel and structure of the
well made novel. In fact, this novel can be taken as the starting point o f a
whole generation of new writers — often called Ghosh generation11 or
Stephanine School12 - who have left a lasting imprint on the novel of the
eighties setting the tenor for new thrust in Indian English fiction. The novel is
a journey from Satwa: Reason to Rajas: Passion to Tamas: Death. The novel
symbolically deals with three phases o f human life. Satwa symbolizes the
search of wisdom, Rajas symbolizes the life o f passion and Tamas stands for
darkness and destruction. The novel basically tells three stories knitted around
three characters. The first part deals with the story of Balaram who is a
rationalist and is influenced by Life o f Pasteur. He is an enthusiastic student
of phrenology and is always busy, measuring heads with a huge pair of
callipers and thereby making solemn predictions. He considers Pasteur his
model and shapes his life with scientific temper and nationalistic outlook
since his very childhood. One of his childhood ambitions was to study
Science and emulate the great masters of Science - Pasteur and Jagadish
Bose. But his teachers at Dhaka decide that he was good for the study of
history. Accordingly, they guide him to Dr. Radhakrishnan, the teacher of
Philosophy at Presidency College.
 73

Balaram says that he turned to phrenology because this appeared to him

to be a field of study that bridged science with personality:

Don’t you see? ... In this science the inside and the
outside, the mind and the body, what people do and
what they are, are one. Don’t you see how
| T

important it is.

From that moment on, he began discovering meaningful bumps on heads that
confirmed the veiy personality traits that he had observed in the individuals -
the ‘science’ of phrenology seemed a case o f self-fulfilling prophecy. He is
also a passionate believer in the virtues o f carbolic acid, which he thinks is a
panacea for almost eveiything.

The second part of the novel tells the story of Zindi,anearthly,

practical and zestful trader who tries to bring together the community of
Indians in the Middle East. But these efforts prove to be unrealistic. This part
moves forward through Alu, the nephew and only survivor of Balaram’s
family. He attempts to form a co-operative community which should try to
dispense with money and trade but it results in bringing his community to
death and destruction.

The third part tells the story of Mrs. Uma Verma, who outrightly rejects
rational thinking. She is unorthodox and an emblem of the changing woman.
She tries her hand at creating Indian model of community life in the desert.
She worries a lot about humanity. Explaining her feeling in this regard, she
says:
 74

All you ever talk about is rules. That’s how you and
your kind have destroyed everything - Science,
Religion, Socialism with your rules and your
orthodoxies. That’s the difference between us: you
worry about rules and I worry about being human.
[p.409]

The novel begins with the description of the protagonist, Alu - who
remains present in all the three sections o f the novel. He is an eight year old
orphan coming to stay with his aunt, Toru-devi and uncle, Balaram in
Lalpukur village. His real name is “Nachiketa”, which reminds us of the
enterprising young boy in Katha Upanishad, who pursues the God of Death,
importuning Him to reveal to him the secret o f existence. He is immediately
nicknamed Alu because of his “Alu” (potato) like head.

The novel starts in the past with Balaram’s excitement at exploring the
shape of Alu’s skull, moves further back in time to Balaram with his friends,
all in their mid-thirties. It then returns to Balaram’s relationship with Alu,
moves forward to the present with Inspector Das interviewing Gopal, a friend
of Balaram. Then it slips back to the beginnings of Balaram’s life and career
in Presidency College. Each story unfolds in linear time. The novel ends with
Alu, along with Zindi and Boss, walking the streets of Medina upwards to the
high battlements of the Kasbah waiting for Virat Singh’s ship that would carry
them home - to India.

Alu is indisputably the main protagonist, the glue that holds a nomadic
novel together, but for much of the action, he is the silent centre around which
an abundance of other stories are fabricated. Many of these include fabulist
elements and, although Ghosh never departs from the bounds of what is
 75

strictly possible, the use of fantasy suggests a world-view that has affinities
with both contemporary magic realism and a range of South Asian narrative
traditions. Alu, fascinated by the loom, wants to be a weaver. But his thumbs
shrivel with atrophy making it impossible for him to weave. M. K. Naik and
Shyamala A. Narayan compare the situation of Alu with Eklavya of the
Mahabharata in the following words:

Perhaps there is an implied reference here to the

stoiy of Eklavya, the tribal in the Mahabharata
who learnt the art of archery by worshipping a
statue of Dronachaiya, the great martial arts teacher
of the Pandava and the Kaurava princes. The Guru
demanded Eklavya’s thumb as payment, because he
wanted Aijuna to have no rival, that too one of the
wrong caste. Alu too is of the wrong caste - society
disapproves of a higher caste boy learning to
weave. Then his thumbs grow back miraculously.
And when he is trapped in the basement of a multi-
storied building, which collapses, he is saved by the
sewing machine there, which he has gone to
salvage.14

The novel spans the middle decades of the twentieth century, the period
of decolonization, and it concludes in the 1980s. Much of The Circle o f
Reason is set against the backdrop of the Bangladesh war of independence in
1971. Other historical events, such as the Indian national struggle of the 1930s
and the international tide of migration to the Middle East of the 1970s
onwards are foregrounded in the novel. Its meandering narrative tracks the
misadventures of Alu, an orphan, who becomes embroiled in a feud between
his foster father, Balaram and the village strong man, Bhudeb Roy who is also
a police informant. Consequently, the police falsely identify him as a
dangerous insurgent and set a special agent on his trail. When Alu flees to a
 76

Gulf kingdom, Assistant Superintendent of Police Jyoti Das, the police

detective assigned to pursue him, eventually joins him and his companions in
flight. Seamlessly interweaving descriptions of characters and events, the
three parts of The Circle of Reason chronicle Alu’s Quixotic misadventures
in India, al-Ghazira and finally Algeria.

The novel is more concerned with the period of British colonization of

India. Ghosh explores the continuing impact of the Raj’s educational policies
on post-colonial India through the character of Balaram. Under British rule,
many Western scholars set out to interpret India and build up a storehouse of
data about its geography, history, people, languages and so forth. British
administrators used this to legitimize colonial rule and simultaneously
attempted to stage Western knowledge as constituting a “superior and
universally applicable world view.”15In this novel, Ghosh argues that science,
technology and machine were not conveyed to India by the British in a one­
way process of transfer, but were in fact involved in a complex series of cross-
cultural exchanges, translations and mutations, and says:

Science does not belong to countries. Reason does

not belong to any nation. They belong to history -
to the world, [p. 54]

The Circle of Reason, as its title suggests, is a novel that closely

examines philosophies of reason, and the science and technology associated
with these philosophies. The concept of reason is very much Western and is
associated with many traits like the power to think rationally, scientific way of
discriminating between right and wrong, a state minus superstition,
progressive attitude and civilized way of life. To follow Popkin and Stroll,
 77

reason may be defined as a set of inductive processes that supposedly allow

access to “knowledge in the strongest sense, knowledge that can under no
circumstances be false.”16 It is important to note that there is a plurality of
concepts of ‘reason’. For instance, in India, discourses of reason and logic
long predated British expansion into the subcontinent and were not confined
only to the Hindu tradition. However, the Enlightenment boldly asserts that its
own brand of reason had unique and universal applicability. The title of the
novel is suggestive of the fact that Ghosh brings Indian and Western elements
together in the novel. Reason connects people all over the world; it defies
countries. In using the word ‘reason’ in the title of his novel, Ghosh invokes
one of the key values of nineteenth centuiy Bengali culture. In this
connection, Tapan Raychaudhuri writes:

Rational assessment of current needs and received

traditions, both indigenous and alien, became the
hallmark of Bengali thought in the nineteenth
century. Arguably, this development marked a total
discontinuity in the history of the region. A product
of the colonial encounter, it was a development
with explosive potentialities which acquired a
measure of autonomy.17

Colonial discourse tended to hinge upon one particular version of reason,

which manifested itself in material advances.

Reason is a paramount theme of the novel and much of my attention in

this section will be concentrated upon the character of Balaram who figures
prominently in the early part of the novel. In the first part, Alu’s uncle and
foster father, Balaram is a passionate advocate of a super-national vision of
scientific reason. He is a product of Western education and despite his fervent
 78

Indian nationalism he has internalized the notion that Western science

transcends national boundaries in its search for truth. Throughout the novel,
the scientific reason which Balaram celebrates is contested by other voices.
His friend Gopal, for example, historicizes the practice of reason and views it
as a source of power, contending that “even Reason discovers itself through
events and people” [p. 38]. The culturally relativist stance which Gopal takes,
suggesting that scientific reason is a product of history and society, finds
endorsement in the arguments of modem sociologists and historians of
science. Mobilizing the theories of Michael Foucault, the scholars like David
Arnold, Deepak Kumar and Ashis Nandy seek to situate reason in a particular
time and space. For example, Foucault writes:

What reason perceives as its necessity, or rather,

what different forms of rationality offer as their
necessary being, can perfectly well be shown to
have a history ... which is not to say, however, that
these forms of rationality were irrational. It means
that they reside on a base of human practice and
human history; and that since these things have
been made, they can be unmade.18

In addition, Foucault’s writings frequently contend these discourses, including

the discourse of a supposedly ‘universal’ form of reason, are not accessible to
all. He argues that only certain numbers of privileged groups, such as the
Western male bourgeoisie, are given the right to use these discourses: “the
property of discourse is in fact confined ... to a particular group of
individuals.”19

Forms of scientific knowledge, which were deemed to be irreconcilable

with the rhetoric of Western superiority, were labelled deviant or ‘pseudo­
 79

scientific.’ Ghosh’s well-researched allusions in The Circle o f Reason

suggest that the labels of ‘science’ and ‘pseudo-science’ disguise the fact that
these disciplines are not as incompatible as they are made out to be. Western
science is often interpreted as a discipline founded upon logic, empiricism and
rationalism, even if these goals are not always met.

The notion that science is a product of history and society is affirmed in

The Circle o f Reason's examination o f two contrasting groups of scientific
practitioners that Balaram admires. First of all, the novel’s portrayal of the
mainstream science o f Louis Pasteur and others suggests that a perception of
science as consisting of a series of groundbreaking discoveries made by great
men is misleading. Secondly, Ghosh interrogates the equally false
assumptions that surround the so-called ‘pseudo-scientists’, whose theories
are judged by history to have failed. The novel invites us to consider many
pseudo-scientific practices, such as Lambroso’s criminology, phrenology, and
the plant physiology of Jagadish Chandra Bose. Though Ghosh calls Balaram
a rationalist and a believer in science and reason, he acts in a very irrational
way. His interest in the Life of Pasteur and the Rationalists ’ society is what
Ghosh terms “A Pasteurized Cosmos” [p. 35].

The inspiration of the work of Louis Pasteur heads him to make an

attempt to clean the surrounding area in his village Lalpukur. He is obsessed
to introduce a rational programme of hygiene in his village. His obsession
with reason and order had started much earlier. In his student days, at
Presidency College in Calcutta, as President of the Society for the
Dissemination of Science and Rationalism among the people of Hindoostan
whose motto was “Reason rescues Man from Barbarity” [p. 46], he had
 80

induced his classmates to follow Pasteur’s principles of hygiene and wage a

campaign against dirty underwear. Balaram’s campaign was somewhat
successful in the beginning, but the campaign was brought to an abrupt close
when some bullies at the college demanded to inspect his underwear, and he
jumped off a balustrade and broke his legs. This is the first of several
occasions in the novel where might overcomes the forces of reason. Again, in
the college, Balaram and two of his friends, Dantu and Gopal, had started an
organization called the Rationalists. They proposed to find universal
principles of reason to explain all phenomena. Thus, when the plane crashed
into Bhudeb Roy’s school, burning more than half of it to the ground,
Balaram argues:

If it has no meaning, why would it happen? Of

course, it has a meaning, but the meaning must be
read rationally - not with the hocus-pocus of these
Stone Age magicians, [p.87]

His obsession with intelligence and reason can be seen in his

infatuation with phrenology, which he alighted upon as the key to the
scientific interpretation of character. It suggests not only the hegemonic
appeal of Enlightenment rationality but also its colonial belatedness. Balaram
had discovered the copy of Practical Phrenology that was to spark his interest
on 11 Januaiy 1950, exactly the day Nobel Prize winner Irene Joliot-Curie
arrived in Calcutta. Her presence signals the present state of scientific
knowledge.

The path of reason is not only skewed by a belated temporality, but it is

also hindered by the operation of base interest. Balaram’s pseudo-scientific
 81

line of investigation brings him into conflict with the school’s headmaster,
Bhudeb Roy, an unscrupulous profiteer. At a school festival put on by Bhudeb
Roy, to which public officials and a priest have been invited, Balaram notices
a growing cranial lump on a displayed figunne of Saraswati, the Goddess of
Knowledge which is caused by the heat of the lights inside the image’s head.
Then he jumped up onto the statue’s platform and ripped off its head,
declaring it to be Vanity, rather than Knowledge. In this episode, different
rationalities - those of science, the sacred and the profane - come into
ludicrous conflict.

Balaram is undeterred by Bhudeb Roy’s threat and he initiates an even

more ambitious struggle for the rationalist cause. The second war against
germs is fought with carbolic acid which is credited later with saving many
lives in Lalpukur. It occurs against the backdrop of the 1971 war for
Bangladeshi independence as refugees from East Bengal stream across the
border. Balaram tries to champion sanitary and moral order against this cross-
border influx of refugees and against Bhudeb Roy’s profiteering. At Bhudeb
Roy’s instigation, Balaram’s house is raided by the police on two counts of
harbouring terrorists and abetting the elopement of his wife Parboti-devi with
Shombu Debnath, the enigmatic local weaver, to whom Alu is apprenticed.
The innocent boy is caught in the crossfire of two men trying to destroy one
another. The inevitable outcome of Balaram Bose’s blind passions is that he is
blown to smithereens in a bizarre confrontation with Bhudeb Roy and the
police. Alu is, however, saved by a miraculous quirk of fate, but now branded
an extremist, is forced to flee the village, shadowed by the policeman Jyoti
Das.
 82

On the run, Alu first reaches Calcutta and then moves to the south,
always just rpanaging to elude the police and Jyoti Das, till he finally reaches
Mahe, the southernmost part of India’s west coast. He decides to set sail over
the Indian Ocean to al-Ghazira to evade the reach of the police. He even had
to give up travelling by buses and trains. He moves through Nilgiri forests and
his life is away from the normal.

Throughout the novel, the scientific reason which Balaram celebrates is

contested by other voices. His confidence in the power of scientific rationality
is not merely idiosyncratic, but a confidence shared by rationalist thinkers in
the colonial world. Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, is
one forceful exponent in India of this faith in science. In The Discovery of
India, he writes:

I am convinced that the methods and approach of

science have revolutionized human life more than
anything else in the long course of histoiy, and have
opened doors and avenues of further and even more
radical change, leading up to the very portals of
what has long been considered the unknown.20

Nehru’s vision led directly to the setting up of the Department of Science and
Technology in independent India. Balaram’s promotion of science and
scientific reason echoes the vision of post-colonial character upon historical
figures such as Jawaharlal Nehru and Rammohun Roy who attempted to
forward a progressive, rational programme of social transformation. Balaram
personifies reason. Rational thinking is his only goal in life but in practical
situations, scientific temper, the cause and effect theory do not work.
Balaram’s case is that of firmness of logic and he cannot look beyond reason.
 83

He cannot accept a hair breadth’s difference from the upright, straight,

unchangeable logical path. That is why his plans are invariably put out of gear
when put into practice. His uncompromising stand on rationality as the only
theory of life wins him a life-long friend, Gopal. He also gets associated with
a rationalist society. But Gopal, even though he was his best friend, senses
something wrong. Balaram’s wife also senses foul quite similarly and puts his
books on fire. Alu is able to save just one book - Life o f Pasteur, which is a
significant symbol in this novel. Premonition comes true but rationality does
not die, either.

Inspired by this book, Balaram starts a school called ‘School of

Reason’ when Bhudeb Roy closes down the school where he teaches.
Students are taught practical skills apart from the conventional subjects. Toru-
devi teaches sewing and Shombu Debnath, weaving. For the time being,
Balaram and Bhudeb Roy with their opposing obsessions come to a common
point - serving society with the tool of education. But this is a short lived and
temporary phase. Soon the conflict between them reaches the boiling point.
The role played by the book, Life o f Pasteur, is quite intricate. When Alu is
first introduced to the book, Balaram is worried about Alu’s lack of response.
He lectures Alu with animated passion and Alu listens to him with ‘wide-eyed
silence.’ Balaram is touched. He reads from the book and stops to see tears in
Alu’s eyes. Again, when Alu retrieves the book from fire, it is Balaram’s turn
to be wet-eyed. So the book exists as a bond between uncle and nephew - an
extension of the tradition of reason from one generation to the other. This is
the greatest win over someone else on his side.
 84

This rationality wages a war against germs, which are the root of all
diseases. Carbolic acid is used as a tool of scientific temper. It tries to finish
diseases and rationality as the thought offshoot of scientific temper tries to
end the ills of society. Anthony Burgess read the episode as a satire on
Western imperialism: while Alu stands for tradition, Balaram “stands, in his
demented way, for progress.”21 Balaram’s enthusiasm for Reason can
certainly be read as a satire on those diasporic Indian intellectuals who
enthusiastically embrace the theories o f the West. The cleansing mechanisms
run in different forms as a metaphor throughout the novel. In al-Ghazira, Hajj
Fahmy makes Adil and his cousin bath in antiseptic. Carbolic acid is very
much part and parcel of Alu’s cleansing programme. Mrs. Verma uses
carbolic acid instead of Ganga Jal towards the end of the novel. Dr. Mishra
remarks, “carbolic acid has become holy water” [p.411]. To this Mrs. Verma
retorts:

What does it matter whether it’s Ganga Jal or

carbolic acid? It’s just a question of cleaning the
place, isn’t it? People thought something was clean
once, now they think something else is clean. What
difference does it make to the dead, Dr. Mishra?
[p.411]

The above view has been put forth in the following way by Shubha Tiwari:

Ghosh is of course pointing out to the blind faith of

millions of Indians in Ganga Jal even though the
water of the life giving river is so badly polluted.22

In fact, the book, Life o f Pasteur is related to Mrs. Verma’s life. Her father
introduced her to the book and it was because of it only that she became a
 85

microbiologist. The story of the book comes to an end only when Kulfi dies. It
is indeed a defeat of reason because the course of action does not go on
rational lines. The book itself states:

. . without the germ ‘life would become

impossible because death would be incomplete.’
[p.396]

Again, at Kulfi’s death, paste for puja is made of carbolic acid instead of ghee.
In this connection Shubha Tiwari says:

At times, I feel, The Circle o f Reason is simply a

response of Amitav Ghosh to the unhygienic
conditions of India. It is a complex response of the
author at appalling dirt and filth in a land whose
people have always talked o f purity of soul as well
as surroundings. The contradiction is fascinating.
People insist on taking morning baths, purifying
their homes with havans (fire) and keep fasts for
internal cleansing. And still, they turn a blind eye to
all the garbage and dirt in their holy rivers and holy
places.23

But Balaram fails in his attempt to educate the village youths to think
rationally. His knowledge of Science and his faith in Reason have no base in
real life situations. His is the abstract knowledge and knowledge without
worldly wisdom brings disaster. Balaram, and everything and everybody
around him are engulfed by the fire that breaks out. The fire was caused by
Balaram’s plan of attack on Bhudeb Roy with the help of Rakhal. It is the
rationalist and scientific mind of Balaram that brings about his destruction and
death. Pasteur has discovered a life-saving drug but Balaram’s knowledge
 86

brings death. In fact, Ghosh presents the folly of obsession by his limited
knowledge of scientific inventions of the Western science.

Reason achieves new configurations as Balaram says that “Weaving is

Reason, which makes the world mad and makes it human” [p.58]. Alu’s
extraordinary ability epitomizes the potentialities of reason and Balaram says:

Man at the loom is the finest example of

Mechanical man; a creature who makes his own
curse and his salvation, and no machine has created
man as much as the loom. It has created not
separate worlds but one, for it has never permitted
the division of the world. The loom recognizes no
continents and no countries. It has tied the world
together with its bloody ironies from the beginning
of human time ... It has never permitted the
division of reason, [p. 55]

Ghosh’s ‘Man at the loom’ is a metonym for man in his total capacity to
transform his world - for better and for worse. Weaving is presented here as a
complex figure for human experience. The above passage emphasizes the
ambiguities of human agency, as seen in his working of the loom. Balaram
tells Alu a history of the technology of weaving that evokes cultural instability
and borrowings across borders. Balaram develops the idea that culture is a
process of circulation that has nothing to do with national borders. The
narrator, in propounding a vision of praxis through this figure of weaving, is
folly cognizant of the history of imperial exploitation that inheres in its forms
- as is clear from the brief excursion in the novel on slavery, colonialism and
weaving:
 87

It is a gory history in parts; a story of greed and

destruction. Every scrap o f cloth is stained by a
bloody past. [pp. 57-58]

Loom united human race at times; it divided at others; it brought victories to

some, subjugation to others. Here, an anti-colonial note against the monopoly
of Lancashire cloth is also indicated.

The novel circles around the concept of reason, exploring its various
meanings via philosophical categories and metaphorical figures: Pure Reason,
Practical Reason, Reason Militant, the Circle of Reason, and Reason as
Weaving. In the novel, we have a rejection of reason as an unworldly
abstraction. Reason is rather prescribed a secular role, a role that involves the
creative use of the intellect in everyday practices. Ghosh’s play with ‘circle’
and ‘reason’ is everywhere in the novel - in the title of the novel, in his
narrative technique and in the various travels that Alu makes in the story. He
contrasts the ‘circle’ with straight lines that comes from the West as Bhudeb
Roy says:

The time has come . . . for straight lines. The

trouble with this village is that there aren’t enough
straight lines. Look at Europe, look at America,
look at Tokyo: straight lines, that’s the secret.
Everything is in straight lines. The roads are
straight, the houses are straight, the cars are straight
(except for the wheels). They even walk straight.
That’s what we need: straight lines. There’s a time
and an age for everything, and this is the age of the
straight line. [p. 99]
 88

Ghosh also elaborates the concept of reason through the figure of the circle
and the process of weaving. However, Ghosh suggests, this more complex,
fractal kind of reason as vulnerable to the action of the police.

The novel resists the narrative logic of police by making Alu, instead of
Jyoti Das, the central character. In fact, the description of Alu’s flight as an
unwitting fugitive from the police elicits the sympathy of a misfit, with his
strange cranial bumps, his solitary nature, and his passion for weaving. Alu’s
very opaqueness as a character, his ignorance, can be seen as yet another way
in which Ghosh marks the limit of Enlightenment reason and its guarantee of
epistemological transparency. He is elusive not only to the reader, but also to
the police who attempts to pin him down.

The shopping complex called ‘The Star’ which was built of adulterated
cement collapses and Alu gets trapped in the concrete ruins. His friends think
him to be dead, but Alu is miraculously saved by two sewing machines that
propped up the concrete slab above him. He is neither able to come out nor
change his position. He lays there for four days without food and water, but
just meditates on the collapse of the building. His meditation results in an
epiphany. He realizes the truth under scientific reasoning - money is the
parasite infecting the healthy society. After his friends freed him from among
the ruins, he emerges as a new man. Alu, writes Ghosh:

. . . was sitting behind the loom on the platform,

weaving very fast, but without so much as looking
at the loom, and talking all the while. And in a way
that was the strangest thing of all, that, he was
talking. For Alu was a very silent man. [p. 278]
 89

Alu no longer remains an introvert. He is changed. He begins to speak at

length about Louis Pasteur; about dirt and cleanliness. Reminding us of his
uncle Balaram, the champion against germs, Alu explains to his companions
that Pasteur’s struggle against germs was spurred by a quest for purity, but
this quest was frustrated because Pasteur had failed to discover the breeding
ground of germs - which, according to Alu, is money and money is
destroying civilization. Alu then proposes:

We will drive money from the Ras, and without it

we shall be happier, richer, more prosperous than
ever before, [p. 281]

Inspired by Pasteur, like Balaram, Alu is as zealous as his foster father had
been in his mission to rid his community of germs. Professor Samuel devises
a scheme to provide, in the fashion o f Marx, “from each according to his
ffk A

ability to each according to his need” whereby the inhabitants of the Ras are
to pool their earnings and jointly buy goods and services from the Souq
through a designated agent and no one makes a profit from their enterprise
beyond what they immediately need. Alu and his companions predicate an
entire social and moral transformation upon their scheme of economic reform.

However, the police put a forcible end to a revolutionary project once

again. When Alu and his companions leave the Ras and enter the town to
spend their pooled earnings, uniformed men with guns ambush them. In the
encounter, many of Alu’s friends are killed, just as many had been in
Balaram’s: Rakesh and Karthamma and the survivors are rounded up and
deported. Alu himself escapes with Zindi, Kulfi and Boss, but is forced once
again into migratory flight. Zindi leads Alu, Kulfi, the baby Boss, Abu Fahl
 90

and Zaghloul, to her native village. But instead of finding refuge there, her
family rejects them - even though it had been her money over the years that
had built homes for her brothers and their wives. She had been abandoned
long ago by her husband in Alexandria, when it was discovered that she was
barren. Now, Zindi and company head further west to Algeria and Alu’s circle
of journey continues.

In Algeria, Zindi has Alu and Kulfi pretend to be married - Mr. and
Mrs. Bose. In this new setting, we are introduced to a small emigrant Indian
community: Mr. and Mrs. Verma. Dr. Uma Verma, “a short, pleasantly
plump, honey-complexioned woman in her mid-thirties” [p. 355], is a
microbiologist, and daughter of Hem Narain Mathur. Dr. Mishra is a surgeon.
His father has been Maithili Sharan Mishra, who had espoused fashionable
socialism after attaining his degree from the London School of Economics,
but who had grown fat on various governmental ministerial positions. The
‘real’ socialist, Hem Narain Mathur, had meanwhile sunk into obscurity.

Meanwhile, Jyoti Das lands in the house of the Mishras as a guest.

There, he encounters Alu and the still attractive Kulfi. They rehearse together
for a dance drama, and Jyoti Das, still a virgin, takes the opportunity and asks
Kulfi for a night’s liaison. Hearing the most unexpected, Kulfi suffers a stroke
and dies. Now that Kulfi is dead, Verma and Mishra argue over performing a
proper Hindu funeral for her. During the time, Alu learns from Jyoti Das as to
what really happened in al-Ghazira after their flight. Many of his friends had
not died as he had assumed, but they had been deported to India or Egypt,
though Hajj Fahmy had died of shock.
 91

After the funeral of Kulfi, Alu continues his journey as far as Tangier
along with Jyoti Das, Zindi and the baby Boss. Here, Jyoti Das parts with the
company and heads towards Europe to start a new life, and Alu and his
company turn happily back towards home —India. Ghosh had foreshadowed
Jyoti Das’ fate much earlier in the book when he had him reflect as follows:

Foreign places are all alike in that they are not

home. Nothing binds you there ... He knew that his
swimming head had no connection with that hint of
sand in the distance. It would have made no
difference whether that bit of land was al-Ghazira
or Antarctica. The journey was within and it was
already over, for the most important thing was
leaving, [p.266]

Alu, on the other hand, has found a new community with Zindi and seeks a
new rootedness - in a foreign land, to be sure, but with a sense of new
connection. Although the novel ends with an assertion that “Hope is the
beginning,’’ [p. 423] the reader is left with a strong sense that the bulk of hope
lies with bourgeois migrants.

Amitav Ghosh feels very deeply about history’s victims. The novel is a
story of obsession - obsessive rationalism that some embrace as science and
others ridicule as insanity (the science o f ‘queues’ and purification by carbolic
acid), and obsessive manhunts. Balram’s mind, therefore, tends to merge
science with history, and emphasize scientific knowledge. The novelist
describes his response to the new situation in the following words:

He had his own version of Calcutta. For him it was

the city in which Ronald Ross discovered the origin
of malaria, and Robert Koch, after years of effort,
 92

finally isolated the bacillus which causes typhoid. It

was the Calcutta in which Jagadish Bose first
demonstrated the extraordinarily life -like patterns
of stress responses in metals; where he first proved
to a disbelieving world that plants are no less
burdened with feeling than man. [p. 41]

Here, politics does not enter into Balaram’s notion of the history of Calcutta.
Ghosh is reminding us clearly that there is much that goes on that is never
recorded or, if recorded, is nonetheless ignored.

Phrenology and criminology cast mainstream science into doubt with

their handling of ‘race’. Scientists, often over-swayed by figures and
experiments, fail to notice that their choice of data and methodology may
skew results. Thus they sometimes inadvertently land a scientific mantle of
respectability to the justification of an existing social order. This is illustrated
in the novel when Balaram is questioned by Gopal for making his ‘scientific’
findings fit with his observation of people’s behaviour, rather than first
collecting data on subjects’ mental organs and then formulating a theory out
of the evidence. For example, Balaram notices Bhudeb Roy’s “organ of
secretiveness” [p. 10] only after it has been discovered that he is spying on
local people and reporting to the police. In an indictment of scientific
methodology as a whole, Gopal thinks to himself, “The trouble with people
like Balaram was that theories came first and the truth afterwards” [p. 13]. In
this context, the following statement by Stephen Jay Gould is illuminating and
worth quoting:

Science is rooted in creative interpretation.

Numbers suggest, constrain, and refute; they do not,
by themselves, specify the content of scientific
 93

theories. Theories are built upon the interpretation

of numbers, and interpreters are often trapped by
their own rhetoric. They believe in their own
objectivity, and fail to discern the prejudice that
leads them to one interpretation among many
consistent with their numbers.25

Pseudo-science, like a distorting mirror, reveals the subjectivity and

dangers of mainstream scientific discourse. All narratives in the novel are
simply stories which arise from particular spatial and temporal perspectives.
The Circle o f Reason problematizes the practice of modem science by
introducing into its narrative deviant sciences such as phrenology and
criminology. It calls into question what constitutes scientific methodology.
Ghosh also introduces into his novel the ‘myths, legends, anecdotes’ to
indicate that these allow alternative ways of looking at the universe.

The Circle o f Reason is an extraordinarily accomplished novel of

Ghosh. It combines wit, intelligence and creative innovation to explore new
possibilities for the novel form in the Indian context. In this novel, Balaram
embodies the impact of nineteenth-century scientific reason on India. For him,
the modem age began with Pasteur’s development of disinfectant and
inoculation, and Madame Curie’s experiments with radiation to control cancer
cells. With these scientific discoveries Balaram believes superstition and
ignorance were done away and the scientific basis of life established. Indeed,
Balaram’s concepts of the ‘new science’ were already out of date, Curie and
Pasteur being both creators of a new consciousness and the inheritors of the
old. Again, Ghosh complicates the issue. For Balaram’s reliance on a
nineteenth-century pseudo-science, phrenology, in fact approximates to the
Indian “superstition” of popular religion and astrology that he opposes. His
 94

search for a new Western vision of reality, reflected in the chapter titled ‘A
Pasteurised Universe’, brings to mind the Vedic legend of the creation of the
world, in which the milk ocean of creation was churned by the gods and
demons using a snake to separate the poison from the ‘amrit’ (ambrosia).
Shiva drank the poison, purifying (Pasteurising) the universe. However the
outcome was that only the gods drank the ‘amrit’: Ghosh suggests Balaram
also has a one-sided strategy.
 95

II.
The Shadow Lines:
Political Freedom and Communal Violence

Amitav Ghosh’s second novel, The Shadow Lines is a highly

innovative, complex and celebrated novel. It was published in 1988, four
years after the sectarian violence that shook New Delhi in the aftermath of the
Prime Minister, Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s assassination. It was written when the
homes of the Sikhs were still smouldering and so, some of the most important
questions the novel probes are the various faces of violence and the extent to
which its fiery arms reached under the guise of fighting for freedom. Its focus
is on a fact of history, the post-Partition scenario of violence; but its overall
form is a subtle interweaving of fact, fiction and reminiscence. It combines
private lives and public events in India, England and Bangladesh with
adroitness. It excavates personal and social history vis-a-vis the racial riots in
some parts of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and, mainly, Calcutta in India.
It is about any place and any time that has known violence, death, memory
and pathos. Ghosh tells us that he was greatly upset by the riots that followed
Indira Gandhi’s assassination, and that his novel has come out of the turmoil
of that moment. The incident revived his memories of 1964 riots in Calcutta,
Dhaka and elsewhere. In an essay published in 1995, Ghosh traced the origin
of the novel to his personal experience o f the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in Delhi and
their aftermath in the following words:
 96

Within a few months, I started my novel, which I

eventually called The Shadow Lines —a book that
led me backward in time, to earlier memories of
riots, ones witnessed in childhood. It became a
book not about any one event but about the
meaning of such events and their effects on the
individuals who live through them.26

Though The Shadow Lines is mainly about 1964, it is about 1984 as well.
Rather, it is a continuous narrative, which replicates the pattern of violence,
experienced in the 11 September 2001 World Trade Centre incident of
America.

The novel is a family saga which is also a roller-coaster riding through

the currents of history. The novel spans three generations of the narrator’s
family spread over Dhaka, Calcutta and London. It is broadly divided into two
parts: “Going Away” and “Coming Home” which are in keeping with the
major preoccupations of the novel. The first section “Going Away” ends with
the narrator’s coming face to face with Ha’s indifference towards him. It also
ends on a note that Ila possessed his life and her going away meant death to
him. The second section “Coming Home” ends with the narrator’s regaining
self-possession; his getting over his love for Ila, union with May and an
acceptance of Tridib’s death.

In other words, the novel relates the history of an Indian family living
in Calcutta. This family has its roots in Dhaka on the (East) Pakistan side of
the borderline and connections in Britain. The intertwined history of the
family and their British acquaintances, the Prices, is presented as stories
filtered through the narrative’s anonymous narrator of the novel who refers to
 himself as T . The mode of narration indicates that the narrator is ostensibly
relenting the experiences of a past which involves his father’s aunt s son
Tridib, his cousin Ila, his uncle Robi, his grandmother Tha’mma, May Price
and others. Most of these stories, in other words, are told by the narrator’s
grandmother, Tridib, Robi, and Ila, and the British family friend, May Price.
The life in Dhaka before Partition, life in London during the war and the life
the narrator leads in the Calcutta of die 1960s and the London o f the 1970s are
patched together by these stories. Through these stories, a picture is formed of
the personal, communal and national identity o f this migrant family living in
India having connections with both the then East Pakistan and Britain. The
experience of Partition along with that o f living in the nation-state of India in
the 1960s is presented through the symbolism of lines, be they geographical,
temporal or cultural, or lines dividing differing realities, consciousness or
identity. In general, the novel comments on the artificial nature of cultural,
ideological, geographical and psychological borders in favour of a broader
humanism that has traditionally been very unfashionable in the discourses of
post-modernism and post-colonialism.

The overall focus of the novel is on the meaning and shades of political
nuances in contemporary life. Some important aspects of contemporary life in
the sub-continent, which are stressed in the novel are —the universal urge for
political freedom, the response to violence and strident nationalism. The
vision of life shown in the novel is a dynamic desire to find a harmonious and
complete relationship with the rich diversity of the modem world. In this
section, I would focus on the major themes of the novel, i.e. the quest for
political freedom, the violence in modem life Mid the role of rumours in riots,
which are all aptly delineated in the novel, The Shadow Lines.
 Ghosh clearly explores the concept and meaning of freedom in the
novel. The novel weaves together the idea of freedom juxtaposing past and
present, the personal and the public, the social and the political. Ranging
across three generations and moving between two contrasting cultures, the
narrative provides a penetrating study o f freedom, an important all-pervading
force. The principal characters in the novel reflect ideas in their own
individualistic freedom. The three major women characters, namely: the
grandmother Tha’mma, Ila and May Price pine to be free from their troubled
past, unbearable present or bleak future. Tha’mma, the grandmother, glorifies
political freedom. Ila is in search of an elusive, personal, social and moral
freedom. May also strives for a quest that seems elusive. Various strands of
political ideology are untied in this novel. Amitav Ghosh, by exploring
connections, distinctions and possibilities shows that in a changing world,
different strands of nationalism and ideology exist and even compete. He also
reveals that the force of nationalism in the quest for freedom or an ideology is
often a source of violence. So the ‘shadow lines’ between people is an
important concept in this novel. It is connected directly or indirectly to all
other connotations of freedom. The author also shows that political freedom
has different nuances of meaning for different people.

Political freedom was a momentous event that took place in 1947 when
India became independent. With the attainment of freedom, all the citizens of
the country were granted equality and freedom, irrespective of caste, creed or
sex. By liberating themselves from the shackles of the British Empire, people
thought, that they had achieved something very precious, which the Empire
had denied them —the freedom of the individual. Once this freedom was
legally granted to them, it became evident that while it was easy to enact a
 99

law, it was very difficult to actually experience this freedom because of the
complex and contradictory forces inherent in the Indian society.

In the novel, The Shadow Lines, political freedom is explored through

the character of Tha’mma, the narrator’s grandmother. She is the product of
the bygone era. She is a displaced person and had to leave her ancestral home
Dhaka and settle in Calcutta after Partition. She returns to Dhaka, her
ancestral home in 1964. Dhaka is a different city yet in her mind; the place of
her childhood remains as real as ever. The idyllic vision o f the ancestral home
at Dhaka is shattered by political events like communal riots in both India and
Pakistan in 1964. In other words, her home in Dhaka, which was like a
pastoral retreat, a golden vision, is now a reminder of death and communal
violence. The grandmother is complex in the sense that she wants to break
away from her traumatic past, yet she is unable to disentangle herself
completely from that very past. She hates to be nostalgic but most of her
vision is nostalgic. Remembering this hatred the narrator says:

She hates nostalgia, my grandmother, she has spent

years telling me that nostalgia is a weakness, a
waste of time, that it is everyone’s duty to forget
the past and look ahead and get on with building
the fiiture.27

The grandmother is a self-reliant and independent woman who creates

an impression of “too formidable a woman for people to thrust their help upon
without being asked” [p. 129]. Political freedom has been the single
dominating, overpowering force in her life. And it was the lure of freedom
from the colonial rule that ingrained the feeling of ‘nationalism’ in her. But
Ghosh criticizes militant nationalism. According to him, though nationalism is
 100

considered to be a very positive feeling, it nourishes the feeling of hatred and

antagonism and leads to violence. In this regard the philosopher, Bertrand
Russell’s view is worth quoting:

Nationalism is undoubtedly the most dangerous

vice of our time - far more dangerous than
drunkenness, of drugs, of commercial dishonesty.28

As a student in Dhaka, Tha’mma had been exposed to the fierce

revolutionary nationalist spirit that was sweeping through Bengal. She tells
her grandson, the story of how one of her classmates was arrested during a
police raid in their college. She further says that he seemed an unlikely
terrorist, shy and bearded, but while being arrested he did not show his fear or
allow his gaze to drop from the British Officer’s face. She thinks if she had
known, she would have helped him and declared that like the revolutionary
she too would have killed for the cause if given a chance. The aim was to be
associated with infighting for a political cause. Tha’mma tells her grandson
that one has to be ready to die for one’s country, ready even to kill. She never
permits herself any over-indulgence and works hard at her job. She feels that
the political freedom obtained after long years of foreign rule required
dedication of each citizen.

However, the freedom won in 1947 did not create that perfect order that
Tha’mma had hoped for. In fact, the political freedom won by the nation had
created grounds for animosity and hatred by drawing up superfluous lines,
demarcating nations and boundaries. The struggle for freedom could not even
ensure the territorial integrity of India. Partition was viewed as the price for
political freedom from British colonial rule. Curiously, she was an Indian
 101

national, but her place of birth was Dhaka. Her distress and disillusionment is
evident when she has to fill up the disembarkation card before landing at
Dhaka airport and she is not “able to quite understand how her place of birth
had come to be so messily at odds with her nationality” [p. 152].

The narrator realizes that if his grandmother wanted to free herself from
her past, she had to go back to Dhaka, and accept the reality of the Partition
not only between two families but also two countries. She had tried all her
life, but now it was time to be reconciled with whatever had happened in the
past. The first realization comes to her when she gets to know that there is no
visible demarcation line between two countries. Her disenchantment is
complete when she realizes that her sacrifice has been in vain, and describing
the situation she says:

But if there aren’t any trenches or anything, how

are people to know? I mean, where’s the difference
then? And if there’s no difference both sides will
be the same, it’ll be just like it used to be before...
. What was it all for then - partition and all the
killing and everything - if there isn’t something in
between? [p. 151]

This shows the failure of her nationalist faith. In the absence of any clear cut
division, the meaning of nationalism becomes quite blurred and vague.

A wall was erected to divide the house, where Tha’mma lived as a

child. She tries to break down this very wall. But there was no such visible
wall which she could destroy in order to break the animosity between the
people of the two countries. In the process of integration, she loses her
 102

nephew, Tridib, which is indeed the climax of the political theme in the novel.
She then realizes that the freedom struggle, the war, which was raging in the
country,was to protect its freedom. For the 1965 war with Pakistan, she
donates her only gold chain, her husband’s gift, to the war fund. The narrator
finds her in a hysterical state listening to the war news on the radio. And when
he asks her about the chain, she screams back to him:

I gave it away___I gave it to the fund for the war.

I had to, don’t you see? For your sake; for your
freedom. We have to kill them before they kill us;
we have to wipe them out. [p. 237]

Tridib is an imaginative person doing his research in Archaeology. His

endeavour is only to enable himself to be free from other people’s
imagination. His belief is that one cannot see anything he sees without
inventing it for himself. He believes in what can be called the intellectual
form of freedom. He had talked of going “to a place where there was no
border between oneself and one’s image in the mirror” [p. 29]. This is a
transcendental view, which closes the gap between imagination and reality
and only such a man reaches forth to others.

It is tragic that Tridib could realize his dream only in death. He tries to
save the helpless old man, Jethamoshai, from being attacked by a frenzied
mob. He must have known that he was not going to come back alive in that
movement. But it was in that moment when the border between ‘oneself and
one’s image in the mirror’ had ceased to exist for him. It was his final
redemption and he had to die the death o f a martyr.
 103

Again, political insights become an intrinsic part of the story because of

the memory technique. For instance, during the grandmother’s final illness,
while lying in bed, she was told a story about a communal experience Ila
underwent in London. The private crisis mirrors public turmoil. That the
grandmother’s response to Ila is not sympathetic is shown when she tells the
narrator:

Ila has no right to live there. . . . She doesn’t

belong there. It took those people a long time to
build that country . . . years and years of war and
bloodshed. Everyone who lives there has earned
his right to be there with blood. . . . War is their
religion. That’s what it takes to make a country.
[pp. 77-78]

Here, in the above statement, the grandmother reveals an alarming prospect,

that feelings of nationalism can only develop through the process of war and
sustained bloodshed.

The novel moves backwards and forwards in time, which makes

political issues more realistic. Ila is fascinated by the romance of freedom that
life in London offers. For her, freedom means liberty from the restrictive
customs that delimit the individual’s activities in India. Tha’mma has nothing
but contempt for Ila’s living in London. She feels that she lives there for the
money and comfort and although the narrator tries hard to convince her that
Ila lives in London only because she wanted to be free, the grandmother is not
at all convinced. Giving a contradictory view she says:

It’s not freedom she wants___ She wants to be left

alone to do what she pleases: that’s all that any
 104

whore would want. She’ll find it easily enough

over there; that’s what those places have to offer.
But that is not what it means to be free. [p. 89]

When the narrator tells Ila about the ranting grandmother’s reaction, the latter,
a University graduate in history, promptly categorises the response as of
“warmongering fascists.” The narrator aptly rejects such easy generalisations
and recalls more worldly-wise Tridib’s observations:

All she wanted was a middle-class life in which,

like the middle-classes the world over, she would
thrive believing in the unity of nationhood and
territory, of self-respect and national power: that
was all that she wanted - a modem middle-class
life, a small thing that history had denied her in its
fullness and for which she could never forgive it.
[p.78]

So, the grandmother was not a fascist, but a motivated middle-class

person not living in a world of fantasy and self-deception. Her motivation was
a desire to be free and so feelings of nationalism got linked to self-respect and
national power. She could never understand the fact that nationalism had
destroyed her home and spilled her innocent kin’s blood. After the tragic
killing of Tridib and Jethamoshai, she still did not change her views on
nationalism. Her visit to Dhaka led to the death of her uncle and nephew.
However, instead of remorse she clung even more fervently to her
nationalistic faith. She even gave away her gold chain to the war effort. She
could never understand that national liberty couldn’t always guarantee the
individual’s liberty. Through such narrative the author clearly shows that it is
not possible for human beings to be totally free. One can only attempt it.
Though all the characters in the novel exhibit an urge to be ‘free’, none of
 105

them is totally free at the end. ‘Freedom’, therefore, means a number of

competing discourses that cannot be mistaken for a single metaphysical state.
The impossibility of attaining complete freedom is voiced by the narrator:

If freedom were possible, surely Tridib’s death

would have set me free. And yet, all it takes to set
my hand shaking like a leaf, fifteen years later,
thousands of miles away, at the other end of
another continent, is a chance remark by a waiter in
a restaurant, [p.247]

The force of nationalism in the quest for freedom or an ideal is often a

source of violence. In this novel, Ghosh probes the various facets of violence
and how it masquerades as freedom. Violence runs as an undercurrent
throughout the novel. It is explored at both the personal and the social level,
as Ghosh investigates the complex connection between freedom and violence
in our lives. The force and appeal of nationalism cannot be wished away, just
as death by a communal mob in the bye-lanes of old Dhaka. Many people
share Tha’mma’s idea of nationalism. Many have been giving themselves
frenziedly and madly to terrorism and communal violence for the sake of
political freedom. Robi, the IAS officer, in charge of a district, philosophizes
to Ila and the narrator near a derelict church in Clapham, London:

You know, if you look at the pictures on the front

pages of the newspaper at home now, all those
pictures of dead people - in Assam, the north-east,
Punjab, Sri Lanka, Tripura - people shot by
terrorists and separatists and the army and the
police, you’ll find somewhere behind it all, that
single word; eveiyone’s doing it to be free, [p.246]
 106

This is the hallmark of the novel. It recognizes and acknowledges the

violence in our lives. Amitav Ghosh shows that even characters like the
grandmother and Ila, who do not indulge in violence, are on the fringe of it.
The grandmother, even though afraid, was willing to run errands for the
Bengal terrorists and kill the English magistrate at Khulna during her student
days. There is a certain cruelty in the way Ila breaks from her family to adopt
to the more cosmopolitan life style of London for personal freedom. The force
of nationalism in the quest for freedom is often a source of violence. The
quest for political freedom in the novel makes it very contemporary and this
leads Ghosh to question the very existence of nationalism as the shadow line
between people and nations is often a mere illusion to him.

The core of the novel is the death of Tridib in the mob-violence

between the Hindus and the Muslims after Partition. The trouble started when
the sacred relic known as the Mu-i-Mubarak, which is believed to be a hair of
the Prophet Mohammed himself, disappeared from its place on 27 December
1963 in the Hazratbal mosque near Srinagar. The effect of its disappearance is
explained by the author in this way:

Over the next few days life in the valley seemed to

close in upon itself in a spontaneous show of
collective grief. There were innumerable black flag
demonstrations, every shop and every building
flew a black flag, and every person on the streets
wore a black arm-band. [p. 225]

But surprisingly there was not a single incident of Hindu-Muslim animosity in

the valley. Probably it was because o f the gifted leadership of Maulana
Masoodi who “drew the various communities of Kashmir together in a
 107

collective display of mourning” [p.226]. While India was deeply agitated,

Pakistan fanned communal passion, and spoke of ‘genocide. Fortunately the
Mu-i-Mubarak was ‘recovered’ on 4 January 1964 by the officials of the
Central Bureau of Intelligence, and Kashmir heaved a sigh of relief.

The protests in Pakistan subsided. A demonstration turned violent only

in Khulna, a small town in the distant east wing of Pakistan, and “some shops
were burnt down and a few people killed” [p. 226]. Headlines in newspapers
of 7 January 1964 were as follows: “Fourteen die in frenzy off Khulna”
[p.228]. The riots spread from Khulna to the outskirts of Dhaka. It is now that
rumour took over.

However, the novel is made very contemporary and relevant by Amitav

Ghosh’s subtle implication, that the lessons of history have not been learnt.
For instance, the deplorable violence unleashed upon the Sikhs in Delhi, from
31 October to 4 November 1984, shows history repeating itself. The report of
the Citizens’ Commission (1985) indicates that the motivation for the Delhi
riots, after the assassination of late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, followed a
familiar pattern - insidious spread o f rumours. It is worth quoting the report
prepared by five senior and responsible citizens of Delhi which runs thus:

The basic provocation [for the riots] was provided

by the spreading of rumours, some of them of a
most incredible nature. . . . On the night of 1/2
November numerous citizens received telephone
calls or were told otherwise that the city water
supply had been poisoned, by Sikh extremists.
Allegations circulated like wildfire that truck-loads
and a train-full of dead Hindus had arrived from
 108

Punjab and that Sikh students danced the Bhangara

on hearing of Sint. Gandhi’s death.29

Similarly, The Shadow Lines shows how rumour mongers thrived and
intensified feelings of anger, which triggered off violence in Calcutta in 1964.

The narrator is concerned with the impact of this event on life in

Calcutta and Dhaka. Commenting on the novelist’s successful delineation of
scenes Novy Kapadia rightly remarks:

Amitav Ghosh’s greatest triumph is that the

depiction of communal strife in Calcutta and
erstwhile East Pakistan, and its continuation in
contemporary India, is veiy controlled mid taut.
There are no moralizing or irrelevant digressions.
Lucidity and compactness is achieved primarily by
his unusual narrative device.30

Indeed, Amitav Ghosh very sensitively handles the complexities of majority

and minority communalism. Using the memory technique, he links two
events, riots in Calcutta and mob violence in Dhaka which led to Tridib’s
death. The violence in Calcutta started on 10 January 1964 and the narrator
connects it with the fact that, that was the day when the first cricket test match
of the 1964 series against England commenced at Madras. The narrator, by
recalling wicketkeeper batsman Budhi Kunderan’s maiden Test Century, is
able to focus on other eventful happenings on that day. The school bus was
nearly empty and he notices that there were only a few boys, all sitting
huddled together at the back of the bus. It was because of a rumour circulated
that the whole of Calcutta’s water supply was poisoned. The school boys in
the bus do not doubt or question the authenticity of the information. Even the
 109

young minds were conditioned to assume and believe that it was ‘they’, the
Muslims, who had poisoned the water. The classes were cancelled half-way
through. After the early departure from the school, when the boys were
returning by bus, a mob hurled stones at it and chased it from its normal route.

As the narrator thinks about this, he comments:

It would not be enough to say we were afraid: we

were stupefied with fear. [p. 204]

The fear that the narrator and his bus-mates experience is not something
unique, but it grips the thousand million people who inhabit the Indian sub­
continent and distinguishes them from the rest of the world. The narrator, now
a wise young man, comments:

It is a fear that comes of the knowledge that

normalcy is utterly contingent, that the places that
surround one, the streets that one inhabits, can
become, suddenly and without warning, as hostile
as a desert in a flash of flood . . . it is the special
quality of loneliness that grows out of the fear of
the war between oneself and one’s image in the
mirror, [p.204]

This is a veiy evocative account of the fear that has rocked the people of our
sub-continent since the Partition and that threatens to engulf us any moment
without any warning. The author very subtly conveys that events in die novel
are also contemporaneous and can be linked to similar incidents in the 1980s.

Amitav Ghosh, by using the narrative technique of unfurling events, by

reading old newspaper reports, shows how communal violence spread in
Calcutta and cities of erstwhile East Pakistan in 1964. He stresses that due to
 110

social conditioning, the role of rumour in riots or mass movements is deep

rooted. The poisoning of water, the trains of dead bodies - all incredible
rumours - further vitiated the communal frenzy and increased the tone of the
violence. It is implied that the riots are contemporaneous. The 1964 Calcutta
riots could be the 1984 Delhi riots, the 1987 Meerut riots or the 1989
Bhagalpur killings. They all follow a similar pattern - suspicion, distrust and
rumour activating conditioned minds, all sources of terrifying communal
violence.

For instance, Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel, Ice Candy Man, which was
written at a period of history when communal and ethnic violence threaten
integration of the subcontinent, is an apt warning of the dangers of communal
frenzy. Bapsi Sidhwa shows that during communal strife sanity, human
feelings and past friendships are forgotten. At the Queen’s Park in Lahore,
friends and colleagues had argued endlessly about the impossibility of
violence against each other and of fleeing from their homeland. Yet ironically,
whilst the elders - Masseur, butcher, Ice-Candy-Man, Sher Singh and Ayah -
gossip about national politics, the child-narrator senses the change in the days
before Partition:

I can’t put my finger on it - but there is a subtle

change in the Queen’s Garden.31

Burkha-clad Muslim women and children have their own group. The saddest
fact as observed by Lenny is that even the children do not mix whilst playing.
In Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, the cause of the riots o f 1964 and the
violence at Khulna are presented as newspaper reports. Sixteen years later,
after a discussion with his friend Malik, the narrator reads these reports, at the
 I ll

Teen Murti House Library. The narrator is now a mature research student and
he is still shocked by the needless violence and recalls the motivations for
riots which triggered off the violent incident in Calcutta.

The author’s views on the impact of rumours are authenticated by the

distinguished historian Dr. Sumit Sarkar. Sarkar projects the role of rumour in
the growing popularity of the Gandhian movement especially during periods
of acute strain and tension:

From out of their misery and hope, varied sections

of the Indian people seemed to have fashioned their
own images of Gandhi, particularly in the early
days when he was still to most people a distant,
vaguely-glimpsed or heard-of tale of a holy man
with miracle working powers . . . peasants were
giving vague rumours about Gandhi a radical, anti-
zamindar twist.32

Sumit Sarkar notes that the currency which Gandhi’s name acquired in the
remotest villages was primarily due to the impact of rumour, perpetuated by a
desire to be represented by a saviour from above.

Amitav Ghosh makes his final statement on violence while recounting

the events leading up to the killing o f Tridib, Jethamoshai and Khalil, the
rickshaw puller. According to Alpana Neogy, the following song of John
Lennon written in 1975 that stirred a generation might have inspired Amitav
Ghosh also, when he created the character of Tridib:

Imagine there’s no countries

It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
 112

And no religion too.

Imagine all the people
Living life in peace [...]
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world.33

Tridib, too, had dreamt of a better place, a place without borders and
countries. He was happiest in neutral, impersonal places - coffee houses,
street comers - as though he did not seem to want to get too close to the
people he associated with. A few weeks before his most tragic death at the
hands of a mob in Dhaka, May sees an injured dog by the roadside and
threatens to jump out of the moving car to come to its aid. “Let it be, May,”
Tridib pleaded. “There’s nothing we can do.” But May is shocked at his
passivity. “Can’t you ever do anything?” [p. 173] She assists in putting to
death an already dying dog, to relieve it of its pain.

The narrator suffered the worst of fears in Calcutta when his

grandmother had gone on the visit to her sister, Mayadevi, who was in Dhaka.
After staying a few days in her sister’s house, the grandmother accompanied
by Mayadevi, Tridib, May Price and Robi set out in the Mercedes car with the
driver and a security guard of the High Commission. They had to walk to the
old house as they had to stop at a particular point in the by-lanes of Dhaka. To
their dismay, they discovered that there was an automobile workshop in what
was a garden in their house. Their house was crumbling and a large number of
families were living there. They found that their uncle Jethamoshai, who was
 113

now called Ukilbabu, was now decrepit and bedridden. He was looked after
by Khalil, a cycle-rickshaw driver, and his family.

The old man fails to recognize them. When his relatives are mentioned
in front of him, he speaks ill of them. As for going to India, he does not
believe in that. In fact, he had told his India-bound sons:

I don’t believe in this India-Shindia. It’s all very

well, you’re going away now, but suppose when
you get there they decide to draw another line
somewhere? What will you do then? Where will
you move then? Where will you move to? No one
will have you anywhere. As for me, I was bom
here, and I’ll die here. [p. 215]

The old man would have gone on with his talk, but the car driver intervenes to
say that they must leave immediately as “there’s going to be trouble outside”
[p. 216]. So the grandmother and Mayadevi and others depart. As Jethamoshai
denies going with them, they arrange that Khalil should bring their uncle to
their house in his cycle-rickshaw. Soon after that, the trouble starts. The old
lanes appeared to be normal at the beginning. However, the normalcy proved
to be illusory, as while returning, they confront not only empty lanes, but also
a violent mob. Girish Kamad makes the following observation on this episode
in a book review:

The grandmother’s visit to the ancestral hom e. . . is

surely one of the most memorable scenes in Indian
fiction. Past and future meet across religious,
political and cultural barriers in a confusion of
emotions, ideals, intentions and acts, leading to a
shattering climax.34
 114

The ‘climax’ occurs as the grandmother and her sister are returning
from their ancestral home. When they come to the bazaar area, they find the
shops closed and the street deserted, but for stray people as if they were
waiting for the car. A lot of men surround the car in no time and start breaking
the windscreen. The driver suffers a cut across his face. The car lurches and
comes to a halt with its front wheel in a gutter. The crowd begins to withdraw
from the car when the security guard jumps out and fires a shot from his
revolver. Suddenly, a rickshaw carrying Khalil and Jethamoshai popped up
diverting the attention of the mob towards them. The people surround the
rickshaw immediately. Though the sisters could have driven away, May Price
and Tridib leave the car to save the old man. They get lost in the whirligig of
the crowd. The mischief takes less than a moment and the crowd begins to
melt away.

The rescue mission turns tragic as Khalil, Jethamoshai and Tridib were
killed by the frenzied mob. Later on, May tells the narrator:

When I got there, I saw three bodies. They were all

dead. They’d cut Khalil’s stomach open. The old
man’s head had been hacked off. And they’d cut
Tridib’s throat, from ear to ear. [p. 251]

The factual honesty and curtness of this description is honest. The violence in
itself is so cruel that nothing else is needed to be added.

In this violent world the monster of mob-violence eats away living

people and unfortunately Tridib too becomes its victim. The witnessing of
Tridib’s death leaves strong imprints on the minds of Robi, May and
 115

Grandma. Robi, who is generally acclaimed as brave and strong, cowers

inside the car, voiceless and weak, when the mob attacks them. This
nightmarish memory haunts him all the time and does not allow him any
escape. He finds himself troubled and he experiences a nightmare
periodically. And May Price remains haunted for the rest of her life with the
guilt that she has been responsible for Tridib’s death as it was she who
stepped out of the car and thus provoked Tridib to go near the mob. She lives
in a small flat with her guilt. It is only at the end that she finds language to
assuage some of her guilt:

I thought I’d killed him. I used to think perhaps he

wouldn’t have got out of that car if I hadn’t made
him, if I’d understood what I was doing. I was safe
you see. I could have gone right into that mob, and
they wouldn’t have touched me, an English
memsahib, but he must have known he was going to
die. For years I was arrogant enough to think I
owed him his life. But I know now I didn’t kill him;
I couldn’t have, if I’d wanted. He gave himself up;
it was a sacrifice. I know I can’t understand it, I
know I mustn’t try, for any real sacrifice is a
mystery, [pp. 251-252]

The tragedy of Tridib is the central focus of the novel. His presence and
absence haunt the reader from the first page till the end when the mystery of
his death gets unfolded. The absence of Tridib and the violent manner of his
death is like an unexpressed sorrow, a silent pain and a suppressed sob.
Finally, when Ghosh talks about the killing of Tridib, we see the helplessness
of the individual in the face of collective frenzy. The hubbubs at national and
international level are reflected in the turmoil at the personal level. Being
trapped in the riots that had erupted after Indira Gandhi’s assassination, the
 116

writer has an immediate understanding of the insecurity and violence that riots
bring along with them. This makes Ghosh’s tone very urgent, poignant and
appealing.

We can also conclude that complete freedom is not without its darker
side. The fight for freedom may aim at ensuring peace for a particular
community, but it may also arouse and mobilize diabolic forces in man which
one would believe to have been cut long ago. It can also be concluded that the
Partition of the Indian sub-continent was the most traumatic experience of the
people of the two countries. D. K. Pabby is of the view that the violence
during the Partition “unleashed by the hooligan actions of a few fanatics, the
vengeance that the ordinary Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs wreaked on each
other worsened our social sense, distorted our political judgements and
deranged our understanding of moral righteousness.”33

In The Shadow Lines, the real sorrow of Partition is that it brought a

long and communally shared history and cultural heritage to an abrupt end.
The communal frenzy worsened the common bonds of mutual goodwill and
warm feelings of close brotherhood between the Hindus and the Muslims.
And the rich heterogeneity of the life of the two communities was seriously
threatened. Murari Prasad sums up the questions of the prevailing norms and
ethics in the novel which we inherit blindly by emphasizing empathy and
unimpeded flow of friendship in the following lines:

The message of the novel underlines the need of

friendly ambience for co-existence and
humanitarian ties across cultures independent of
political manager.36
 117

The novel shows that it is very much futile to draw lines and to expect
people to stay within neatly drawn religious boundaries. It can be concluded
that human beings suffer equally at the hands of violence. The citizens of the
Indian subcontinent face violence during riots; and every-time, riots harm
society equally and the difference transpires only in the death toll and
phrasing of newspaper headlines. Moreover, everyone must have tenderness
and concern for each other and must try to lead life peacefully and with full
mutual understanding.
 118

HI.
In an Antique Land:
A Voice of the Subaltern

“History”, writes Hegel, “travels from east to west: for Europe is the
absolute end of history, just as Asia is the beginning.”37 There havebeen
many debates over the kind(s) of history we have. The colonialdiscourse of
India’s lack of history was not just a consequence of alienation but also a
justification for the presence of the colonial powers. Gandhiji once observed
that it is impossible to find any record of the “silver-ore” of Satyagraha or
“passive resistance” in the “tin-mine” of history for the following reason:

History, as we know it, is a record of the wars of the

world . . . How kings played, how they became
enemies of each other, and how they murdered one
another is found accurately recorded in history.

He further adds that since “there are so many men still alive in the world”,
history has clearly failed to account for all varieties of human relationality,
especially those founded “on . . . love.”39 It is here that Ghosh strikes the
readers as he recreates a history of a merchant and his slave, two tiny dots in
the vast ocean of people who are nobodies in the canonical history of the
world. What I am interested in showing is how Amitav Ghosh’s narrative in
his third novel, In an Antique Land tackles the issue, thus restoring historical
agency outside Hegelian or Eurocentric definitions to the Indian subaltern.
 119

Not only does Ghosh return ‘histoiy’ to the colonial subaltern, he also
tackles the issue of ahistoricity-as-divisibility as it operates. Ghosh connects
the obscured and dichotomized parts of the ‘Orient’ —the nations that colonial
discourses have often implied would be ‘alien’ to each other but for the bridge
of colonial power and reason. This ‘alienness’ of the ‘nations of the colonial
other’ has been reported within a country as well as across countries and
continents. The latter is evident not only in the capital-based ability of ex­
colonial and neo-colonial countries to appropriate from post-colonial
countries, but also the gradual erasure from post-colonial memories of the
close historical and pre-colonial imbrications of the various cultures of Asia
and Africa. This erasure, in the context of India, has reinforced the colonial
conception of the ‘Muslim’ as a sudden and perpetual alien - a perception
repeated time and again in the rhetoric of the Hindu as well as in the views of
centric writers like V.S. Naipaul who “sees India as a country of headless
people wounded by Islamic rule”40 and conceives of the Hindu and Islamic
elements of Indian culture as essentially and always alien to each other. This
sort of erasure can also be seen in the context of the Middle East culture
where Jews and Muslims are perpetually portrayed as ‘aliens’ to each other,
and this is where Ghosh is going to break the rule and turn the table upside
down. He voices the voice of the subaltern and has made a constant and
hugely successful attempt to de-centre the so-called ‘colonial heritage’,
without ignoring it in a chauvinistic or even an idealist manner. In In an
Antique Land he not only traces the pre-colonial and post-colonial Indian-
Egyptian/Arab as well as Jew-Muslim lines of cultural exchange and
communication, but also embeds a brilliant metaphor in the argument between
the Indian Hindu narrator and the Egyptian Muslim village Imam: an
argument that, enacted in the post-colonial context, ignores centuries of
 120

Indian, Egyptian and Indo-Arab ties of commerce and trade. The two end up
arguing for their respective countries in terms of modem military capability.
Ghosh sees the two of them as “delegates from two superseded civilizations,
vying with each other”, and “travelling in the West.” It was a breach of the
ancient ties the two countries had and Ghosh remarks:

. . . the Imam and I had participated in our own final

defeat, in the dissolution o f the centuries of
dialogue that had linked us: we had demonstrated
the irreversible triumph o f the language that had
usurped all the others in which people once
discussed their differences. We had acknowledged
that it was no longer possible to speak, as Ben Yiju
or his slave, or any one o f the thousands of
travellers who had crossed the Indian Ocean in the
Middle Ages might have done. . . . for they
belonged to a dismantled rung on the ascending
ladder of Development.41

It seemed to be a crushing defeat to the purpose of the visit to Egypt.

The West had triumphed, but he still felt all were not lost. There was
something still that linked the two antique lands, and that ties he “believed to
be still alive, and in some tiny measure, still retrievable” [p. 237]. And this is
what he tries his best to retrieve.

Amitav Ghosh seems to argue against the canonical theories of History

set up by the European powers. The Western theory of education in history
might be the projection of their own views of subjugating the African and
Asian peoples. They want the colonized countries to view History not as it is,
but as they want it to be seen in that way. In this regard, Ranajit Guha’s
remark is worth quoting:
 121

[Educators] nominated the discovery of the route to

India as a theme of ‘European History’ and not of
South Asian History. What constituted the politics
of such thematisation was its attempt to persuade
Indians to take pride in an event that made for their
subjection to a number of Western powers
culminating in the establishment of British
paramountcy by an act of conquest.42

This note of lamentation or regret is clearly visible when Ghosh writes:

. . . the remains of the civilization that had brought

Ben Yiju to Mangalore were devoured by that
unquenchable, demonic thirst that had raged ever
since, for almost five hundred years, over the Indian
Ocean, the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf. [p.
288]

Ghosh presents a world of peace, harmony and individual freedom,

through his delving into the past and the present simultaneously. He digs up
that which existed only before the colonial times and compares it with the
present socio-political scenario in India or the Middle East. His
characterization moves through time and space, and there are lots of travels
and migrancy just as “travel and its conditions - migrancy and exile - are
recurrent concerns in the work o f many postcolonial writers.”43 And
accordingly there is the sense of alienation and diaspora for every centre or
home is someone else’s periphery and diaspora. What is a home to Nabeel is a
diaspora for Ghosh, and the trend continues.

Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land is a multi-generic book which

moves back and forth between Ghosh’s living in small villages and towns in
 122

the Nile Delta and his reconstruction of a Jewish trader and his slave s lives in
the twelfth century from documents found in the Cairo Geniza.

In this book, Amitav Ghosh points out the tragic turn of events in the
history of Asia and Middle East, and particularly India and Egypt This book
is also the story of Amitav Ghosh’s decade of intimacy with the village
community of Lataifa and Nashawy in Egypt. It is also a charged, eccentric
history of the special relationship between two countries, Egypt and India,
through nearly ten centuries of parochialism and sympathy, bigotry and
affection. The author wants to bring to focus a forgotten period of history,
which shows how free mid liberal India’s collaboration with the Arab and the
Chinese worlds was. He highlights the easy flow of human warmth and trust
that existed between a Tunisian Jewish merchant and his Indian helper
Bomma.

The novel rectifies the status of history as an objective record of the

past by asserting it as the relation o f the individual to his past. The novel
shows that Amitav Ghosh is not a mere fictionist but an indefatigable
researcher, a social anthropologist, a keen traveller and a social historian as
well. It bears testimony to Ghosh’s interaction with at least four languages and
cultures spread over three continents and across several countries. It is a
combination of autobiography, history, anthropology, travelogue and fiction.
It presents us with a truly subversive look at history, while suggesting
possibilities of an alternative discourse of dialogue rather than domination.

In 1978, Amitav Ghosh read about Abraham Ben Yiju, a Tunisian

Jewish merchant who came to India via Egypt at around 1130 A.D. and Ben
 123

Yiju’s slave Bomma who is from Tulunad of ancient India, while he was
going through manuscripts in Oxford library.

So far as the structure of In an Antique Land is concerned, it is divided

into six parts. The first part is the Prologue, the second is ‘Lataifa with
twelve chapters, the third ‘Nashawy’ containing seventeen chapters, the fourth
part ‘Mangalore’ extends up to ten chapters, the fifth part ‘Going Back’ has
seven chapters and the last one is the Epilogue. In the novel, the time span
covers from the middle ages up to the twentieth century, i.e. from 1132 A.D.
to 1990. This is done with the narrator’s own emergence time and again over
the broad bosomed breast of eight hundred years of history which is similar to
the view of a tiny boat surfacing on the wild and wayward waves of an
endless sea.

Repudiating the canonical forms of history, In an Antique Land is the

story of a Jewish merchant, Abraham Ben Yiju. Abraham Ben Yiju is
originally from Tunisia, who came to India at around 1130 A.D. as a trader.
He lived in India for seventeen years and married a Nair woman. He is a man
of many accomplishments, a distinguished calligrapher, scholar and poet. Ben
Yiju had returned to Egypt having amassed great wealth in India. He had an
Indian slave, Bomma, a native of Tulunad, and he had settled in Mangalore
with other expatriate Muslim Arab traders to overcome the feeling of
rootlessness and alienation.

Under mysterious circumstances Ben Yiju went back to Egypt with his
children and Bomma, and the story is intertwined with the narrator’s own
story of his visit to Egypt in 1980 to trace the story of Bomma. During his
 124

research work at Oxford, Amitav Ghosh discovered a letter apart from so

many other letters written by a merchant Khalaf ibn Ishaq o f Aden to Ben
Yiju. This letter bore the catalogue number MS.H.6 of the National and
University Library in Jerusalem. Now this single letter led him “to open a
trapdoor into a vast network of foxholes whose real life continues
uninterrupted” [pp. 15-16]. He “knew nothing then about the Slave of
MS.H.6 except that he had given [him] a right to be there, a sense of
entitlement” [p. 19].

With a ‘sense of entitlement’, Ghosh continued his probing inquiry

about this slave and his master Abraham Ben Yiju, initiated by a Hebrew
journal, Zion, Letters o f Medieval Jewish Traders, translated and edited by
Prof. S. D. Goitein of Princeton University. There was a short article by the
scholar E. Strauss, in the 1942 issue and it bore the title ‘New Sources for the
History of Middle Eastern Jews’ and it contained transcriptions of several
medieval documents. Among them was a letter written by a merchant living in
Aden - the port which sits like a fly on a funnel, on the precise point where
the narrow spout of the Red Sea opens into the Indian Ocean. In Strauss’
estimation, the letter was written in the summer of 1148 AD. Amitav Ghosh,
ultimately, gets permission from Oxford to use the Geniza library which,
despite its rich store house of past historical documentation, proves to be
inadequate leading him further from U.S.A. to the two villages of Lataifa and
Nashawy in Egypt to find out the authentic facts about the lives of Ben Yiju
and Bomma. Ghosh dives deep into antique texts or archives to discover some
remote past, to find some connection with the present.
 125

The narrator’s search, which lasted for more than ten years, began in a
small village called Lataifa, two hours ride on drive south of Alexandria. His
guides in the village were his neighbours: Abu Ali, his landlord; Khamees the
Rat, the beady eyed local wit; his adversary, the Imam; Zaghloul the weaver,
the quiet Nabeel and an elderly man Sheikh Musa. They remained friend,
philosopher and guide throughout towards the narrator.

In an Antique Land is a subversive history in the guise of a traveller’s

tale. At the outset the writer makes it clear that he plans to do research leading
towards a doctorate in Social Anthropology. He went to Egypt to trace the
history of the slave of MS.H.6. Ghosh’s choice of the Indian slave as the focal
centre of the narrative is itself significant He is literally a person who inhabits
the footnotes of history. To quote the opening lines of the novel:

The SLAVE OF MS.H.6 first stepped upon the

stage of modem history in 1942. His was a brief
debut, in the obscurest o f theatres, and he was
scarcely out of the wings before he was gone again
- more a prompter than a recognizable face in the
cast. [p. 13]

From this anonymity, Ghosh attempts to rescue the life of this slave
who was so much a part of Ben Yiju’s household that his friends would
enquire after Bomma in their letters. In tracing this fascinating history, Ghosh
makes us aware of how ancient the links are between what is today Egypt and
what is today India. The reader finds himself transported to Lataifa and
Nashawy with the writer. The reader too experiences the journey and gets
interested and absorbed in Ghosh’s tale of his experiences and findings in a
 126

new country. The tale is packed with anecdotes and exuberant details. It
provides magical, intimate insights into Egypt from the Crusades to Operation
Desert Storm. For instance, Ustaz Sabiy’s account of war between Iran and
Iraq gives the reader a feel of what it has done to the people:

It’s we who’ve been the real gainers in the war . . .

The rich Arab countries were paying the Iraqis to
break the back of the Islamic Revolution in Iran.
For them it was a matter of survival, of keeping
themselves in power. And in the meantime, while
others were taking advantage of the war to make
money, it was the Iraqis who were dying on the
front, [p. 321]

However, it is worth noticing in the progression o f the tale that Ghosh

doesn’t miss the opportunity to narrate tales of his own land also whether it be
the political events i.e., Calcutta and the formation of East Pakistan, the
stories of riots, or his scholarly commentary on the comparative study of
religion e.g., Judaism, Islam, Hinduism or Sufism. With utmost sincerity, the
author presents a fusion of fiction and history with “an objective view of the
details regarding the curiosity of Egyptians about Indian customs, burning of
the dead, circumcision of sex organs, etc.”44 The two most frequent questions
that Ghosh is asked are if the Indians bum their dead and worship cows. To
both questions he gives laconic, non-committal replies that evade the issue
rather than explore it. Further in the conversation Ustaz Mustafa remarks, “I
know it’s cows you worship” [p.47].

The curiosity about the worship of cows and the burning of the dead
comes palpable when, visiting the house of Ustaz Sabry in Nashawy, the
inevitable question is asked by an old woman:
 127

Is it true what they say about you? That in your

country people bum their dead?. . . Why do they do
. . . Don’t they know it’s wrong? You can’t cheat
the day of Judgement by burning your dead. [p.
125]

Giving the issue the same interpretation is another character called Khamees
who asks the same incredulous question that the old woman does. Ghosh finds
himself in a dilemma as he says:

My heart sank: this was a question I encountered

almost daily, and since I had not succeeded in
finding word such as ‘cremate’ in Arabic, I knew I
would have to givemy assent to the term that
Khamees used the verb ‘to bum’ which was the
word for what happened to firewood and straw and
the eternally damned, [p. 168]

The constant questioning and incredulity that Ghosh is subjected to is,

from his own point of view, like driving him into a comer. He wishes to
remainreticent on subjects that involve religious sensitivities but he is
deliberately drawn into queries that he is compelled to answer. It appears that
the Egyptians want to confirm the suspicions they have regarding Hindu
rituals not so much for verification as for its shock value. The shock in turn
becomes a morbid indulgence, an occasion for derision and sarcastic
comments such as Khamees’ remark that Hindus bum their dead “so that there
is nothing left to punish” [p. 169].

Here, Amitav Ghosh records such statements probably to prove that

canonical history is imperialist in nature. Nirzari Pandit continues this
argument that “it has created stereotypes about the Orient and these are
 128

stacked in books as objective records of truth. What history has to offer is not
a general and overall, but selective picture of the past. Amitav s attempt at
‘scholarly’ research on the lives of Ben Yiju and Bomma is also an attempt at
questioning Orientalist History.”45

Ben Yiju’s “origins lay in a region that was known as Ifriqiya in the
Arabic-speaking world of the Middle Ages —an area centred around what is
now Tunisia” [p.55]. Following the migration of traders to Egypt, Ben Yiju
also migrated to Egypt, joined the ‘Synagogue of the Palestinians’, the
building destined to last until a good seven hundred years after Ben Yiju’s
lifetime. His paper shows that his acquaintance with the wealthy and powerful
trader Madmun ibn al-Hasan ibn Bundar proves to be a turning point in the
life of Ben Yiju.

After Ben Yiju settled as a trader in the Malabar before 1132, there was
a continuous exchange of letters between Madmun, Yusuf ibn Abraham and
Khalaf ibn Ishaq from Aden and Ben Yiju from Mangalore in India. Yusuf
was “a judicial functionary as well as a trader: a man of a somewhat self-
absorbed and irritable disposition, on the evidence of his letters. The other
was Khalaf ibn Ishaq - the writer of MS.H.6 and possibly the closest of Ben
Yiju’s friends in Aden” [pp. 156-157]. Unlike other traders cum travellers,
Abu Said Halfon and Abu Zikri Sijilmasi, Ben Yiju “does not seem to have
travelled back to Aden or Egypt even once in the nineteen or twenty years that
he was in India” [p.159].

Most historians focus on the relations of states and kings, but Ghosh’s
novel focuses on the underlying relations and interactions of the people. The
 129

novel has three main symbolic characters - India, represented by Bomma and
the narrator; Egypt, represented by Ben Yiju, Ustaz Sabry, Khamees, etc., and
the West - represented by modem science and technology, and means of mass
destruction. India and Egypt have had close associations since the bygone
ages. The West intervenes, destroys the ties, and imposes new sets of
ideologies. The West dominates over the histories of the two antique lands. In
this context, the words of Nilanjana Gupta are worth quoting:

Ghosh tries to show that the intervention of the

West has destroyed the processes of dialogue,
exchange, assimilation and syncreticism of the
peoples of the two nations. Instead, there is a
metaphysic of domination, classification and
violence which Ghosh characterizes as ‘Western.’
He describes how in 1500 A.D. a Portuguese fleet
came with a letter from the King of Portugal to the
Hindu ruler of the city-state o f Calicut demanding
that he expel all Muslims. As the Hindu ruler
remained obstinate in his refusal to comply, the
Portuguese fleet attacked and conquered what is
today part of Gujarat. A hastily put together army of
the Muslim potentate o f Gujarat, the Hindu ruler of
Calicut, and the Sultan o f Egypt could offer little
resistance.46

Here again, the following words from the novel are also worth quoting:

As always, the determination of a small, united

band of soldiers triumphed easily over the rich
confusions that accompany a culture of
accommodation and compromise, [p. 288]

Ghosh establishes a modem parallel at the close of the novel. Almost five
centuries later, the Gulf War again disrupts history and this time characters
 130

like Nabeel “vanish into the anonymity of History” [p.353] just as Bomma
vanished in the twelfth century.

Ghosh’s reading of the Cairo Geniza letters of correspondence of Ben

Yiju with his trading partners, friends and family enlightens new concepts of
ancient Indo-Egyptian ties. The letters prove the close and free exchange of
cultures, religions, and traditions between the two antique lands. These are not
mere exaggerations for Ghosh’s own delving deep in the history of these
countries has supported the findings. Ghosh finds a Roman fortress called
Babylon, built in 130 A. D. by Emperor Trajan, as the historical home of Ben
Yiju. A Greek Orthodox Church had been built centuries ago incorporating
one of the two massive towers at the entrance of the fort. In Ben Yiju’s time,
it had functioned as a port busier than the combined traffic o f Baghdad and
Basra. The Arab general entered Egypt through this entrance in 641 A. D. and
made a decisive event in history marking the establishment of Muslim power
in Egypt. A new township soon established and replaced Alexandria as the
capital. Three hundred years later, this antique land was conquered by a
former Greek slave, and marked the boundaries of the new town, al-Qahira.
This very name soon passed “into European languages as Cairo, Le Caire and
the like” [p.36].

Coming back to Bomma and the Geniza letters, Ghosh tries his best to
decipher the true name of the Indian slave. His search for Bomma’s true
identity leads him to discover that ‘Bomma’ was represented by the three
characters B-M-H in the ancient Judaeo-Arabic script. The search further leads
him to Mangalore and into the history of the Tulus, a South Indian tribe. In
Mangalore, Ghosh comes to learn the Tulu myth and its deity, ‘Berme’ or
 131

‘Bermeru’, “the principal figure in the pantheon of Tuluva Bhuta-deities

[p.254]. He learns that the Tulu Brahma has taken the shape of a wamor deity
with curling moustaches, holding a sword, from its original four-headed, four­
armed image. He is surprised over the assimilated culture of the Tulus and
writes:

Over time, with the growth of Brahminical

influence the Tulu deity, ‘Berme’ had slowly
become assimilated to the Sanskritic deity
‘Brahma’, [p. 254]

Bomma had been bom in one of the several matrilineal communities of

Tulunad that played an important role in the Bhuta-cult. The Bhuta-cult was
not considered to be a religion at all. In fact, “it fell far beneath the Himalayan
gaze of canonical Hindu practice” and it was “dismissed as mere ‘devil
worship’ and superstition” [p. 264].

The actual terms of Bomma’s service towards his master, Ben Yiju,
were completely different from those which the word “slavery” suggests
today. According to Amitav Ghosh, the medieval concept of slavery was
totally different from the contemporary notion as he writes:

In the Middle Ages institutions of servitude took

many forms, and they all differed from ‘slavery’ as
it came to be practised after European colonial
expansion of the sixteenth centuiy. In the life-times
of Bomma and Ben Yiju, servitude was a part of a
very flexible set of hierarchies and it often followed
a logic completely contrary to that which modem
expectations suggest, [pp. 259-260]
 132

In the Middle East, as in a large part o f North India, “slavery was the principal
means o f recruitment into some o f the most privileged sectors o f the army and
the bureaucracy” [p. 260]. It was also used by merchants and traders as a
means of recruiting apprentices and agents. The “slaves” recruited in this way
were often given a share o f the firm’s profits and “could generally be sure o f
obtaining manumission” [p. 260], Again, servitude was used, over a large part
o f the medieval world, “as a means o f creating Active ties o f kinship between
people who are otherwise unrelated” [p.260]. The slaves were often inducted
into the household o f their masters and regarded as their members. Ben Yiju,
who hailed from the Arabic speaking religious world in the Middle East, was
also being rocked under the tremendous impact o f the Sufis - the mystics of
Islam.

Ghosh’s search for ancient ties o f relation between India and Egypt
leads him to acknowledge the West as an imperial power. The West
dominates the two antique lands not only politically but also in the field of
knowledge. The manuscripts of Ben Yiju’s letters of correspondence were
found in Egypt but they have been scattered in libraries and museums across
England, America and Russia where they are presently housed. The West uses
them to meet their ends and thereby distorts facts. Yet, the tomb of Rabbi
Abu-Hasira o f Morocco still stands, in the words of Ghosh, “in defiance o f the
enforcers o f History” (p. 342].

Persistently, Ghosh’s active and inquisitive mind searches for the

relevance of Egypt-India relations over the period o f time. Ghosh voices his
own opinion through one o f the characters o f the novel, Ustaz Sabiy, a school
teacher and scholar, in the following way:
 133

Our countries were very similar, for India, like

Egypt, was largely an agricultural nation. . . . Our
countries were poor, for they had both been
ransacked by imperialists and now they were both
trying in very similar ways to cope with poverty . . .
Our two countries had always supported each other
in the Past: Mahatma Gandhi had come to Egypt to
consult Sa’ad Zaghloul Pasha, the leader of the
Egyptian nationalist movement, and later Nehru and
Nasser had forged a close alliance, [p. 134]

In this regard, mention may be made of the following words of Pradeep

Trikha:
Ghosh is in Egypt in twentieth century as Ibn
Battuta was in India in the thirteenth century. Like
Battuta, Ghosh is nostalgic to retrace Ben Yiju’s
journey eastward which is “the simplest and most
natural means of availing himself of the most
rewarding possibilities his world had to offer.” But
unlike Battuta, Ghosh is writing a novel and not a
historical treatise. His efforts are to provide
“magical, intimate insights” not only into Egypt
from the Crusades to Operation Desert Storm, but
also into cross-cultural relations with India.47

Ben Yiju moved to the Malabar Coast and did not return to Aden for
nearly two decades for three reasons. First, his trade flourished and he felt no
need to travel back to Aden; secondly his comaraderie with Bomma, his
Indian slave, looked after his trade in the Middle East; and thirdly, what
tempted Ben Yiju to stay in Mangalore was a Nair woman Ashu, whom he
married and raised a family. Later, when he left Malabar Coast, he took his
children with him, leaving behind Ashu.
 134

The section ‘Going Back’ concentrates on the writer’s second visit to

Egypt after a period of eight years. It registers socio-cultural changes which
have occurred in Egypt in recent years under the spell of the Western
influence. He was astonished to see the village engulfed in a storm of
‘development’ and ‘progress’ created by the West. People in the village are no
longer ignorant about the city glamour. Popular culture of the day has lured
many, young and old alike. There was no electricity at Lataifa in 1980. But in
1988, he found refrigerators in every other house, new brick buildings in place
of adobe houses, calculators, TV sets, cassette players, and even food
processors. The people owed their prosperity to the Gulf money. Most of the
young men of the villages had left Egypt by that time to find jobs in Saudi
Arabia and the Gulf countries, but mostly in war-driven Iraq whose own men
had gone to the borders to fight with Iran. The “gleanings from that distant
war” [p. 299] had worked a silent economic revolution in rural Egypt and
changed the lives of the fellaheen. People were sending their children to
schools and colleges, and were talking about ‘development.’ But ignorance,
fanaticism and superstition still prevailed. They asked Amitav Ghosh the same
embarrassing question about Hinduism, the burning of the dead and the
>

‘purification’ of women in India over and over again.

In other words, the story of Egypt’s development begins with the

description of ‘the mud walls’ at Abu Ali’s house and ends with the
introduction of all sorts of comforts and luxuries. NabeeFs and Ismail’s dream
to remove the pains and hardships o f their families made them leave their
homeland and in this regard, we may quote the following lines:
 135

The flow had started in the early 1980s, a couple of

years after the beginning of the war between Iraq
and Iran; by then Iraq’s own men were all tied up
on one front or another, in Iran or Kurdistan, and it
was desperately in need of labour to sustain its
economy. For several years around that time it had
been very easy for an Egyptian to find a job there,
recruiters and contractors had gone from village to
village looking for young men who were willing to
work ‘outside’. People had left in truck-loads; it
was said at one time that there were may be two or
three million Egyptian workers in Iraq, as much as a
sixth of that country’s population. It was as if the
two nations had dissolved into each other, [p. 293]

This is the picture of Iraq at the time of crisis, but soon after the Gulf
war, the entire situation changes. Life is not easy there and the Iraqis become
cruel to Egyptians and their cruelty can be seen thus:

The Iraqis are wild, they come back from the army
for a few days at a time, and they go wild, fighting
on the streets, drinking. Egyptians never go out on
the streets there at night: if some drunken Iraqis
came across you they would kill you, just like that,
and nobody would even know, for they’d throw
away your papers. It’s happened, happens all the
time. They blame us, you see, they say: ‘you’ve
taken our jobs and our money and grown rich while
we’re fighting and dying.’ [p. 352]

Nabeel has gone to Iraq to earn money with a dream to provide

comforts and happiness to his family. But he has to pay a great price for this
noble cause. Even though his dream is fulfilled, he has to sacrifice his life.
 136

Thus, the novel is a beautiful study of the effect of socio-political

changes on ordinary men’s lives. To quote Pradeep Trikha:

Ghosh sustains reader’s interest by displaying rich

and varied kinds of men and manners. The writer is
absorbed by the variety of human types. It seems to
him that in Egypt and India the most impressive and
the most awe-inspiring monument of antiquity is
neither the citadels nor the pyramids, nor the Nile
but the man himself. To see human beings closely is
Ghosh’s chief aim in visiting Egypt. With a convex
lens in his hand he tries to penetrate into the people
of contemporary world and also the people of
antiquity. Their lives have dramatic situation and
their dialogues have dramatic intensity.48

The identity of ‘Bomma’ is very elusive in the sense that the very
essence that brought him into existence is dead - for the colonial powers had
succeeded in destroying it. Bomma is a symbol of the culture that flourished
in India (as elsewhere) in the medieval period, a culture of assimilation, peace
and tolerance. He is “the subaltern consciousness whose recovery justifies
Ghosh’s allegorical reading of the destruction of a polyglot trading culture by
Western influence . . . Ghosh develops a style of writing that is sufficiently
nuanced and elusive to sustain the ‘theatrical fiction’ of a recovery of
presence without actually falling back into essentialism.”49

The narrator’s search for Bomma’s history leads him to more and more
enquiries into a rich store-house of knowledge about the Tulu culture in
Mangalore, its language, customs and the like. He comes to know of the
picturesque geographical landscape of Mangalore, and describing the
language of the region he says:
 137

The language of Mangalore is called Tulu, and it is

one of the five siblings of the Dravidian family of
languages: it is rich in folk traditions and oral
literature, but it does not possess a script of its own
and is usually transcribed in Kannada. It is this
language that has given the area around Mangalore
its name, Tulunad: like so many other parts of the
subcontinent, it forms a cultural area which is
distinctive and singular, while being at the same
time closely enmeshed with its neighbours in an
intricate network of differences, [p. 244]

However, with the advent of the colonial power these local histories
and cultures of Tulunad and of India in general “come to lose virtually every
trace of its extraordinary past” [p. 245]. Ghosh calls or refers the ‘antique
civilization’ of India and Egypt - both which have suffered the blunt of
colonialism - as postcolonial, and the West as colonial. He feels that India has
lost its antique culture of the medieval world be it in its rich folk traditions,
myths, and religious tolerance or its prosperous maritime trade across the
Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf. In the same way, Egypt
has virtually lost everything, extending from its rich cosmopolitan maritime
trade to the field of knowledge of medicinal herbs and remedies. Here, Ghosh
brings a unique example in the person of Zaghloul and says:

“[Zaghloul] is very knowledgeable about plants and

herbs and things like that” . . . Those leaves and
powders don’t work anymore,” he [Zaghloul] said,
“Nowadays everyone goes to the clinic and gets an
injection, and that’s the end of it.” [p. 142]

This is a perfect example of the dominating power of the West in the field of
science and technology. With this we come to know that “almost all have
 138

virtually succumbed to the dominating power of colonization and the modem

day development of science and technology. The knowledgeable Imam
Ibrahim (Zoughloul) turns to be a pathetic creature despite its profundity and
experience about herbal medicines.’00

Egypt, in the medieval period, was a flourishing nation - a symbol of

peace, prosperity and harmony with the rich cosmopolitan nature of tolerance
and motherly adoption of all that came to her. Masr was the mother of all. It
assimilated all the peoples and religions from various parts of the world and
accommodated them, producing a culture o f its own. This very essence could
also be seen in Ghosh’s description of the Malabar region and especially
Tulunad with its intricate culture. In this regard, Ghosh comments:

In the geography of human history no culture is an

island. In effect Tulunad was a region in the sense
of the word desa, or the French pays - ‘country’ is
too loaded a term to use - an area . . . not
‘independent’ but distinctive and singular, and
precisely because of that, enmashed with its
neighbours in an intricate network of differences.51

Another feature of In an Antique Land is that it is an archaelogy of a great

mercantile civilization that flourished about tenth century to the sixteenth
century A.D. in South Asia and the Middle East across the vast tracts of water
and turmoil. Mangalore was a flourishing port and trade was brisk with Aden
and the Middle East. The spice trade especially in pepper, cardamom and
areca nut must have been lucrative. During the time, means of trade and
communication were very simple, few and far between. Still the culture
flourished and was quite cosmopolitan. In this regard, Ghosh quotes Prof.
 139

S.D. Goitein's account:

As far as the information provided by the Geniza

letters is concerned, the Indian trade was an
extension and a branch o f the commerce uniting the
countries of the Mediterranean. The traders who left
us their writing were, of course all, Arabic-speaking
Jews although Hindus are mentioned as close and
reliable ‘Brothers’ and Abyssinians and other
Christians as business friends, [p. 175]

There was high regard for Indian merchants in the eyes of the
Egyptians and Arab traders. They mingled freely and did their business
transaction. The borders that divided countries were more porous than we
imagined, and there was ‘trust’ and ‘hospitality’ in all. The modem notion of a
rigid state with its more rigid border under the characterization of the West
was not prevalent during the time. As Clifford Geertz observed:

. . . in this mobile, polyglot and virtually borderless

region, which no one owned and no one dominated,
Arabs, Jews, Iberians, Greeks, Indians, various
sorts of Italians and Africans pursued trade and
learning, private lives and public fortunes, bumping
up against one another . . . but more or less getting
along, or getting by, within broad and general rules
for communication, propriety and the conduct of
business. It was, we might say, a sort of
multicultural bazaar. Today this part of the world is
divided, like the rest of the globe, into singular and
separated national States.52

The interesting point is that these traders had established a tradition of

peaceful co-existence among them as they participated in the Indian Ocean
trade. We can call it a black day in India's maritime history when “Vasco-da-
 140

Gama landed, on his first voyage to India, on 17th May 1498 - some three
hundred and fifty years after Ben Yiju left Mangalore” [p. 286]. However we
think we have made advances in modem world, so far, we are not able to
achieve this feat back. Therefore, it is no surprise that Ghosh laments over the
loss of that which was precious and in an elegiac note he expresses the
following words:

Within a few years of that day the knell had been

struck for the world that had brought Bomma, Ben
Yiju and Ashu together, and another age had begun
in which the crossing of their paths would seem so
unlikely that its very possibility would all but
disappear from human memory, [p. 286]

How perspective and points of view differ when one is looking at the
situation from different cultural vantage points! How the Western or
Eurocentric historiographical record looks at the unarmed character of the
Indian Ocean is interesting and diagonally opposite to the Indian perspective.
Western history often represented Indian Ocean trade, as Ghosh points out,
“as a lack, or failure, one that invited the intervention of Europe, with its
increasing proficiency in war” [p. 287]. Ghosh laments over the loss inflicted
upon the human relations that flourished in the pre-colonial times.
Consumerism complements violence in the Oriental admiration of Western
‘science’, and tanks and missiles come with the colour of TVs and washing
machines. History that defines nations, cultures and people only in totality
doesn't define the local or individual. Nabeel's dreams are fulfilled (as he
earned money in Iraq) and his poverty removed. But there has to be a
compensation for it and helplessly they watch the sad and moving culmination
of Nabeel's tragedy during the Gulf war:
 141

We were crowded around the TV set, watching

carefully, minutely, looking at every face we could
see. There was nothing to be seen except crowds:
Nabeel had vanished into the anonymity of History.
[p. 353]

And it is the same history and its strange interventions that retrieved the story
of Bomma who was also someone like Nabeel.

Locating the dislocated and scattered characters of the past and the
present, we come to know that “Bomma's story ends in Philadelphia” [p. 348].
Amitav Ghosh's adventurous rendezvous with ‘history’ in In an Antique
Land is a supreme intellectual synthesis. His re-discovering o f the ancient and
the contemporary, of the dead and the living, makes him a distinguished
anthropologist and a unique story teller who never pays heed when historians
accuse “anthropologists of nauncemanship, of wallowing in the details of the
obscure and unimportant and when anthropologists accuse historians of
schematicism, of being out of touch with the immediacies . . . of actual life.”53
Ghosh has succeeded in retrieving a lost history and made the subaltern heard.
He has succeeded in finding out the existence of harmony among Muslims,
Jews and Hindus. Through the historical narration, Ghosh has demonstrated
that the cultural and religious mixing prompted by globalization does not have
to result in the hatred and mistrust we see too often today. He has shown that
the voice of lamentation o f the subaltern will not be repressed.
 142

SECTION - IV
The Calcutta Chromosome’.
Fictionalization of a Scientific Discovery

Amitav Ghosh’s fourth novel, The Calcutta Chromosome holds

a distinct position in Indian writing in English. In the style of Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle, the novel reads like a detective fiction or rather a modem
science fiction. Ghosh’s narrative is such that the reader is held at a thrall by
the pulse setting medical case history like fictionalization of the novel and
gets absorbed till the end of the story. Considered as a medical thriller, it won
the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Science Fiction Award in 1996. Satisfied
with his achievement, Ghosh tells an interviewer, Paul Kincaid that he was a
keen reader of science fiction as a boy. His reading includes Satyajit Ray
whom he regards as a science fiction writer. However, he thinks that he is the
first Indian to win such a prestigious award. It is a fiction whose setting
includes both the colonial world of the nineteenth century and the post­
colonial modem civilization of the twentieth century where Ghosh freely uses
vernacular languages of computer technology and medical science.

Ghosh’s narrative tries to portray Ronald Ross, the late Victorian

medical researcher in mi altogether new face. He says:

[Ross’s] real achievement lay in translating folk

knowledge into the language of science. . . . Ross
made a major breakthrough in science based upon a
 143

very partial acquaintance with folk knowledge. It

follows, surely, that someone who was better
acquainted with that knowledge would do even
better.. .54

According to him, a native scientist or biologist with a sound knowledge of

the local folk would have done better than Ross. Just as Murugan, the
principal character in the novel, passes the Ronald Ross memorial in Calcutta,
Ghosh had passed it many times a week. Not only that, Ghosh had also
survived a malaria attack and reflecting the experience, he says:

It had a profound effect on [his] thinking about the

human body and its relationship with disease.
Malaria was a strange and hallucinatory experience,
but not at all frightening. In fact it was in an odd
way veiy comforting.55

It is a strange and extraordinary response from a person who had suffered

from malaria. It seems as if Ghosh was observing it by coming out of his own
body. Whatever it is, malaria set him on a long trail of observation o f its
attack on people in India and elsewhere around the world. He came to the
conclusion that malaria is the single most deadly disease claiming the largest
number of victims every year in the world. After that, he chose to write a
novel with malaria as its centrepiece and the result is The Calcutta
Chromosome.

The novel, The Calcutta Chromosome begins in the early twenty-first

century in New York but moves with equal ease to Antar’s childhood in
Egypt, or to Murugan’s “global childhood spent wandering between the
world’s capitals with his technocrat father. . . old American TV serials - “the
 144

only constant, as for so many, in a peripatetic, internationalized coming of -

age.”56 In other words, the novel begins in the future but very soon we are
taken to a date in the past —21 August 1995, better known as World Mosquito
Day. On this very day, Murugan, an old colleague of Antar and our researcher
had mysteriously disappeared from Calcutta. Antar is an Egyptian computer
programmer and system analyst in New York who suddenly finds the ID card
of Murugan, flashed on his computer screen in the early years of the twenty-
first century.

Murugan was a man obsessed with the early history of malaria research
and especially with the career of Ronald Ross, a British scientist, who was
ultimately awarded the 1902 Nobel Prize for Medicine for his discovery of the
life-cycle of the malarial parasite. Murugan cannot understand how Ross, a
less than brilliant clinician, could have made this eye-opening discovery
working in a very basic field laboratory in India in 1898. He senses certain
discrepancies in Ronald Ross’s account of ‘Plasmodium B’ and he is unable
to free himself from the idea of something being foul in the medical history of
malaria. He is preparing an article, ‘An Alternative Interpretation of Late 19th
Century Malaria Research. Is There A Secret History?’ Long back when
Murugan was in New York he had written a summary of his research in an
article entitled, ‘Certain Systematic Discrepancies in Ronald Ross’s Account
of Plasmodium B.’ Murugan was shocked to receive a very hostile response
from the scientific community. All scientific journals rejected the paper and
his doubt in Ross’s greatness costs him the membership of Science Society.
He was called a crank and an eccentric but he became more and more
obsessed and erratic. His curiosity and rationality forced him to pursue his
research of what actually happened and how it happened.
 145

The tale switches back and forth disorientatingly. From 1995 we move,
through Murugan’s recapitulating the details of Ross’s research, into an earlier
century —almost a hundred years ago to 1895-98. On the face of it, this book
is about malaria. It is an attempt to rewrite the story of Ronald Ross’s
discovery of the life cycle of malaria mosquito and how it causes the disease
to human beings. Murugan’s conviction was that there was an “Other Mind”
[p. 31], some person or persons who had guided Ross towards his discoveries
and away from other avenues of thought. After all, records show that Ross had
never been academically inclined or research-oriented, and had started on his
quest for the malaria vector only after Dr. Patrick Manson had urged him to
test his [Manson’s] ideas about how the world’s oldest and most widespread
disease is transmitted. All Ross’s discoveries were in fact serendipitous, and
were always made, by a strange coincidence, only when Lutchman, a helpful
‘dhooley-bearer’, was present. The inevitable conclusion, believed Murugan,
was that Ross “thinks he’s doing experiments on the malaria parasite. And all
the time it’s he who is the experiment” [p. 67] conducted by poor illiterate
natives of a colonized country - a reversal of conventional wisdom about
scientific thought and progress and an ironic glance at the popular Western
images of Oriental inscrutability and menace in Fu Manchu and his ilk. He
had uncovered that there is one Mangala who with her handy-man Lutchman
was carrying out the experiment through an indigenous method.

Mangala had been a mystery figure in the eyes of Murugan and he is

determined to solve the mystery. It leads him to further research and produce
his own hypothesis regarding the malarial research of Ronald Ross, and the
scientific community’s rejection of the hypothesis as well as cancellation of
his membership. Greatly annoyed but more determined, Murugan sets out for
 146

Calcutta, his birthplace and the place of Ross’s malarial discovery. In

Calcutta, Murugan is searching for truth. Ghosh juxtaposes Murugan s search
with different times and places all over the globe, and sets interplay of
searches: Antar searches for Murugan through his computer; Murugan
searches for the truth behind Ross’s research; and Ross had searched for the
malaria parasite a century ahead. Ghosh’s description of the various searches
so cleverly mingles facts with fiction that readers tend to overlook it. Dealing
with the hypotheses of anti-science, anti-matter and immortality it is a
“broader enquiry about life.”57 In this enquiry, Ghosh subverts the superiority
of the Western scientific investigation through the story-line. He also proves
that not only were they far-behind the scientific progress made by India but
here, it had been spearheaded by a woman. In this regard, we may quote the
following lines of Madhumalati Adhikari:

If “matter” and “science” were the stronghold of

the occidental world “anti-matter” and “counter
science” was controlled by the oriental. It is a
suggested conquest by the East of the West - a
typical post-colonial framework. It is also an
example of the defeat of the patriarchy and a
victory of matriarchy. The search for “immortality”
is carried on by Mangala and Lutchman. Ghosh has
granted them great liberty and decolonized the
members of the lowest social strata - the sweepers
of the scavenger class.5*

The novel is subtitled as ‘O f Fevers, Delirium & Discovery’. These

terms suggest the evocation of a self-proclaimed “age of discovery” where,
given the geographical and physical nature of many of the “discoveries”, fever
and delirium went hand in hand with exploration and medical breakthroughs.
Ghosh turns around the myth of European discovery and science - using in
 147

particular the figure of the “state scientist” (Ronald Ross), a concept that
“emerged in the colonies.”59 Giving an ironic suggestion that the three -
discovery, fever and delirium —are the same tiling for better or worse, Tabish
Khair remarks:

More complicatedly, though, one can see

‘discovery’ as a word very closely related to
‘Science’, and ‘fever’ and ‘delirium’ - especially
given their associations with un/sub-consciousness
and trance-like states - with ‘Magic’. At first
glance, then, it appears to be easy to situate the
narrative of The Calcutta Chromosome on the
weather-beaten axis of Science vs Magic/
Mysticism, with the former often standing for the
‘West’ and the latter for ‘All the Rest’.60

But, Ghosh sets up a conceptual division - not essentialist in a Manichean

tradition but, discursive and at times symbolic - between what Murugan calls
‘Science’ and ‘Counter-Science’.

The novel is divided into two sections - ‘August 20: Mosquito Day’
and ‘The Day After’. The first section is devoted to the recollection of certain
scientific facts but in a very ‘thriller’ mode of fiction. The novel begins with a
puzzle when Antar sees, all of a sudden, a ‘scrap of paper’ which is the
remnant of an ID card on the screen o f his computer Ava. In the beginning he
is a bit confused and, therefore, uncertain about identifying the clue, but
gradually the past reminiscences unfold much to his knowledge to be the only
authority on Ross and his discovery and the secret force that might have been
a parallel undercurrent stimulating the scientist to go for scientific
conclusions. Ghosh, being a student of social anthropology, uses his
 148

knowledge to unravel layer by layer the enigma related to the discovery by

Ronald Ross of the malarial parasite.

Indeed, Ghosh blends the world of science and counter science,

European rationality and Indian beliefs against the background of the actual
topography of Calcutta streets, markets, monuments and the milieu giving an
impression of rational analysis of the world known despite the experience
being quite improbable. Babli Gupta is of the view that “the two worlds of
science and counter-science, European rationality and Indian mythos are
brought together against the backdrop o f Calcutta’s streets, markets and
monuments.”61 Just as Murugan discovers the Ronald Ross memorial
monument in Calcutta, Ghosh had also come across it earlier. The monument
bears the inscription of Ross’ three verses, which Murugan reads:

This day relenting God

Hath placed within my hand
A wondrous thing; and God
Be praised. At His Command,

Seeking His secret deeds

With tears and toiling breath,
I find thy cunning seeds,
O million-murdering Death.

I know this little thing

A myriad men will save.
O death where is thy sting?
The victory O grave? [p. 35]

With this poem, Ghosh sets an ominous and thrilling atmosphere for the
narrative. After reading the poem, Murugan ponders over the high sounding
 149

self celebration of Ross’ poem and mocks how his discovery had little to do
with millions of dying men around the world. Afterwards, Murugan disclaims
Ross’ achievement with a mocking parody in a stentorian voice:

Half stunned I look around

And see a land of death -
Dead bones that walk the ground
And dead bones underneath;

A race of wreathes caught

Between the palms of need
And rubbed to utter nought,
The chaff of human seed. [p. 35]

It is questionable here that the disinterested service of science is so much for

the benefit of mankind. Murugan argues that the European interest in a cure
for malaria was initiated by a need to protect the soldiers employed in colonial
expansion in the virgin territories where the disease was common and that it
had nothing to do with a general goodwill. He tells Antar:

The mid-nineteenth century was when the scientific

community began to wake up to malaria.
Remember this was the century when old Mother
Europe was settling all the Last Unknowns: Africa,
Asia, Australia, the Americas even uncolonized
parts of herself, [p. 47]

When Ava projects the holographic projection of the man to whom the
card belonged, Antar immediately recognizes him as L. Murugan and starts
his search on Ava and he gets the details through the small screen of his
computer. The subsequent events in the novel are attempts to trace out the
adventure of Murugan and the queer truth of what in fact took place on those
 150

fateful days of August 1995. This system of the future is described minutely
by Ghosh in the following way:

Anything she didn’t recognize she’d take apart on­

screen, producing microscopic structural analysis,
spinning the images around and around, tumbling
them over, resting them on their side, producing
ever greater refinements of detail. . . she had been
programmed to hunt out real-time information, and
that was what she was determined to get. Once
she’d wrung the last, meaningless detail out of him,
she’d give the object on her screen a final spin, with
a bizarrely human smugness, before propelling it
into tiie horizonless limbo of her memory, [p. 4]

This provides explanations for all sorts of details made known to Antar by
Murugan, about the events that happened in 1995 in Calcutta as also some
hundred years ago in Calcutta and Hyderabad. Murugan explains the
experiments of Ronald Ross and says that Ross’s actual research took just
three years which was spent entirely in India. Explaining Ross’s research on
malaria in India Murugan says:

He kicked off in the summer of 1895, in a little

hole-in-the-wall army camp in a place called
Secunderabad and ran the last few yards in Calcutta
in the summer of 1898. And for only about half that
time was he actually in the lab. The rest went into
cleaning up epidemics, playing tennis and polo,
going on holidays in the hills, that kind of stuff. . .
he spent about five hundred days altogether
working on malaria, [pp. 43-44]

Teams of research-joumalists re-record the details from the past - the

historical facts about malaria and the scientist Sir Ronald Ross when the head-
 151

lines in newspapers, periodicals and scientific journals is ‘Malaria Strikes

Back’. This makes the creative artist set off into the jungle of science-
laboratories, scientific vocabulary, the methods of investigation and the
scientists. In The Calcutta Chromosome, Amitav Ghosh takes up this issue of
the malarial fever colouring it with mysticism and mystery, supernatural and
superstition, calling it the theory of science and counter-science. Murugan’s
obsession with the early history of malaria the career of Ronald Ross, the
Nobel Laureate and above all the undercurrent of the belief that some external
force initiated the idea regarding the cause of malaria in the mind of Ross,
continue as a very significant part of the main theme. The mystery does not
cause its impact here; it enlarges its spell when Murugan tells Antar:

Let me put it like this . . . You know all about

matter and anti-matter, right? And rooms and
anterooms and Christ and anti-Christ and so on?
Now, let’s say there was something like science and
counter-science? Thinking of it in the abstract,
wouldn’t you say that the first principle of a
functioning counter-science would have to be
secrecy? The way I see it, it wouldn’t just have to
be secretive about what it did (it couldn’t hope to
beat the scientists at that game anyway); it would
also have to be secretive in what it did. It would
have to use secrecy as a technique or procedure. It
would in principle have to refuse all direct
communication, straight off the bat, because to
communicate, to put ideas into language would be
to establish a claim to know - which is the first
thing that a counter-science would dispute, [p. 88]

Murugan further explains the complexity of knowledge and its acceptability in

relation to science and he arrives at the working hypotheses:
 152

If it’s true that to know something is to change it,

then it follows that one way of changing something
- of effecting a mutation - is to attempt to know it,
or aspects of i t . . . [p. 88]

With this Amitav Ghosh emphasizes secrecy, mystery and self-

contradictory knowledge and confronts what he calls conventional science
with the ingenious knowledge and method of the uneducated Indians. How far
Ghosh is successful in synthesizing the main theme with many other
intricacies is in itself an enigma; but one thing is quite obvious that the puzzle
either is left to the discretion of the reader for acceptance or it is mystified
deeper still. Phulboni’s observation is a step further in intensifying this
mystery:

Mistaken are those who imagine that silence is

without life; that it is inanimate, without either
spirit or voice. It is not: indeed the word is to this
silence what the shadow is to the foreshadowed,
what the veil is to the eyes, what the mind is to
truth, what language is to life. [p. 24]

This section attempts to examine the historical facts of Ronald Ross’s

discovery about malarial fever. It also tries to examine how this theory of
science and counter-science is presented and with what purpose. The novel’s
historical sections, in fact, stick very closely to the actual facts of Ross’s
record of his experimentation.

The Calcutta Chromosome offers a part-fictive, alternative history of

medicine, one that is traditionally eclipsed in the official narrative of Ronald
Ross’s romance with the Anopheles mosquito. Ghosh constructs a secret
 153

history of medical research conducted by Sir Ronald Ross on malarial

parasite. It appears that Sir Ronald Ross had been manipulated all along to
make the necessary deductions, while the actual guiding spirit operating
behind the scene was a low-born scavenger woman called Mangala who
possessed a supernatural power. Mangala, who was found by Dr. Cunningham
at Sealdah station, was trained as a laboratory assistant by him. She was a
victim of hereditary syphilis. She is a character shrouded in mystery with a
great deal more knowledge of malaria than Dr. D. D. Cunningham. Her secret
investigation regarding the syphilitic patient, in Cunningham’s laboratory and
the observations how certain chromosomes were found in the non-generating
tissue, the brain and could be transmitted through malaria are as Murugan
calls them ‘The Calcutta Chromosome’. She had been hand-picked and
trained as an assistant by Ross’s predecessor Dr. D. D. Cunningham to help
him in his laboratory. She appears to be both the high priestess of a secret
medical cult offering a cure for syphilis and the brain behind the discoveries
that will eventually lead to Ross’s winning of the Nobel Prize. So, Ghosh’s
narrative discredits the Western scientist and instates an Indian female
subaltern in his place.

The malarial trail is actually bizarre. American Elizah Monroe Farley

left for India in October 1893. By 1894 this young reverend is in charge of a
clinic in a small village at the foothills of the Himalayas. Farley meets
Surgeon-Colonel Lawrie of the Indian Medical Service whose colleague D.D.
Cunningham runs a laboratory in Calcutta. At the time, malaria is a major
killer among the troops and indigenous people of India, so it is hardly
surprising that both Farley and Cunningham are investigating how the disease
 154

is contracted. Farley arranges a visit to Cunningham’s laboratory to discuss

the veracity of opposing theories about malaria held at the time.

At Cunningham’s laboratory, Farley meets two assistants —Mangala

and Laakhan. Farley observes that Mangala is extremely deft with the blood
sample slides and appears to know more about malaria than Cunningham.
Laakhan is from Mangala’s home village of Renupur. In Murugan’s view,
Lutchman is the one who suggests to Ross that it is only a particular kind of
mosquito, the anopheles, which is actually important to the transmission of
malaria. “As I see it,” says Murugan, “[Lutchman] was all over the map,
changing names, switching identities” [p. 87]. One physical characteristic that
identifies him, and that seems to pop up in other individuals over several
generations, is his left hand, which has its four fingers, but no thumb. There
was, for example, a ‘Lakhan’ who had helped one of the nineteenth-century
researchers, and who had disappeared into the night when his identity was
looked into too closely. He shared the physical characteristics. In fact, the
discovery may have been made by these two Indians, with Sir Ronald Ross
later snatching international acclaim from their unscientific hands. In support
of this fact we may quote the following lines of Babli Gupta:

Ghosh makes an elaborate case for those forgotten

underlings who do the spade work for all those
grand discoveries, which are then credited to their
superior masters. The author goes into intricate
details of medical history to make a credible case
for the illiterate Mangala accomplishing the
impossible. This is not so far fetched as it seems at
first glance. The author is in fact relying on current
trends in the field of social medicine as more and
more scientists, and social workers are coming
 155

around to the view that scientific investigations,

specially those related to social medicine, health,
hygiene and control of epidemics can be conducted
with more economy and efficiency by those who
are bom and brought up indigenously rather than by
those experimenting in remote, sanitized
laboratories with little knowledge of the nitty-gritty
of actual conditions.62

Murugan’s research leads him to the conclusion that Mangala and her
associates are hindering Cunningham’s research so that he will be replaced by
Ross, whom they can use as a vessel for their discoveries. These discoveries
are, however, concerned with far more than a malaria cure. They involve a
counter-epistemology, which promises a form of immortality through the
erosion of Western conceptions of discrete subjectivity through the
dismantling of the shadow-lines that construct notions of autonomous
selfhood. Mangala’s discovery of the means by which malaria is transmitted
has come about as a by-product of her real research interest. Working outside
the straitjacket of Western empirical methodologies, she has been attempting
to evolve “a technique for interpersonal transference” [p. 10], a means of
transmitting knowledge “chromosomally from body to body” [p. 107]. The
counter-science cult led by Mangala can only operate through silence. Silence
is a thick discourse in the novel, and it transforms those who answer to it.
Phulboni, the greatest living writer of Bengal is the chief exponent of this cult
of silence. He imagines silence to be a material thing, a “creature” that haunts
the bowels of the city:

But here our city, where all law, natural and human,
is held in capricious suspension, that which is
hidden has no need of words to give it life; like a
creature that lives in a perverse element, it mutates
 156

to discover sustenance precisely where it appears to

be most starkly withheld? In this case, silence, [p.
121]

Amitav Ghosh goes ahead to argue against all scientific

conceptualization instead of forwarding an alternative theory of silence. It can
be seen clearly from Murugan’s words on Mangala that theory itself becomes
the main stumbling block to knowledge:

We’re talking about microscopy which was still an

artisanal kind of skill at that time. Real talent could
take you a long way in i t . . . she wasn’t hampered
by the sort of stuff that might slow down someone
who was conveniently trained: she wasn’t carrying
a shit-Ioad of theory in her head, she didn’t have to
write papers or construct proofs. Unlike Ross she
didn’t need to read a zoological study to see that
there was a difference between Culex and
Anopheles: she’d have seen it like you or I can see
the difference between a dachshund and a
doberman. [p. 203]

Mangala is portrayed as a goddess-like figure who had found a so-

called cure for syphilis but has also acquired knowledge of transmitting life
beyond life. She had perhaps noticed that malaria works on paresis through a
different route, the brain. Like syphilis, malaria can cause irreparable damage
to the brain, it can even cause hallucination. Perhaps that is why primitive
people thought of malaria as spirit-possession. Mangala sometime in 1893
performs certain rituals (recorded in a letter by Farley):

What he [Farley] saw was this: the woman was

seated at the far end of the room, on a low divan,
but alone and in an attitude of command, as though
 157

enthroned. By her side at the far end of the room

were several bamboo cages, each containing a
pigeon. . . they were slumped on the floors of their
cages, shivering, evidently near death . . . on the
floor by the divan, clustered around the woman’s
feet, were some half-dozen people in various
attitudes of supplication, some touching her feet,
others lying prostrate. Two or three others were
huddled against the wall, wrapped in blankets . . .
They were syphilitics, in final stages of the terrible
disease, [pp. 125-126]

This grisly scene where Mangala decapitates pigeons shivering with

artificially induced malaria as a last-ditch effort to cure or at least mitigate the
effects of syphilitic paresis tells only half the story. The other half concerns
the diabolic secret aspirations for a kind of immortality acquired through a
technology of interpersonal transference of intelligence through the chosen
people.

Farley, the Western scientist, understands this clearly and wants to

warn them not to waste their hopes on Mangala’s theory. He sits through
Mangala’s performance of rituals. Finally, he returns to his own experiment
and demands to see the slides smeared with the dying pigeon’s blood. Only
then, he saw Laveran’s rods with their pointed penetrating heads piercing the
blood miasma. This was to be the future invention of his team-mates.

But Elizah Farley disappeared during the journey as a guard had seen
him carrying his luggage. His glimpse into Mangala’s knowledge is the cause
for his disappearance, i.e. death. Even the letter he wrote from which
Murugan constructs the story of Farley’s and Mangala’s encounter, disappears
 158

and there is no scientific proof of Farley’s knowledge and experiment as also

about the existence of the letter.

Similarly, in 1995, Sonali goes on looking for Romen Haidar to the old
house at Robinson Street which Romen had shown her. Her observation and
experience of the rituals are recorded in the following manner:

She caught a glimpse of the tops of dozens of

heads, some male, some female, young and old,
packed in close together. Their faces were obscured
by the smoke and flickering firelight. . . . Then
there was a stir in the crowd and Sonali forced
herself to look down again. A figure had come out
of the shadows: it was a woman and she was
dressed very plainly - in a crisply-starched saree,
with a white scarf tied around her hair. Her figure
was short and matronly and Sonali took her to be in
late middle age___She had a cloth bog slung over
one shoulder, an ordinary cotton jhola, . . . In her
left hand she was carrying a bamboo bird-cage. She
seated herself by the fire and placed the bag and the
bird-cage beside her.. . . she took out two scalpels
and a pair of glass plates . . . Then she reached out,
placed her hands on whatever it was that was lying
before the fire and smiled. . . . Raising her voice,
the woman said to the crowd, in archaic rustic
Bengali: ‘The time is here,pray that all goes well
for our Laakhan, once again.’ . . . there was a flash
of bright metal and a necklace of blood flew up and
fell sizzling on the fire. [pp. 139-140]

Romen Haidar, who was to meet Sonali that evening, disappears

suddenly and inexplicably. The novelist does not explain his death or the
reason of his disappearance. In the case of Farley, it is his knowledge which is
to be kept secret that brings about his disappearance and death. In Haidar’s
 159

case, nothing is mentioned, except that in the Calcutta of 1995 such

mysterious rituals are performed in the name of some special knowledge of
transcendence.

The extraordinary female, Mangala had stumbled upon the unique

combination of genetic chromosomes and special intelligence which produce
the rare Calcutta Chromosome. The unique Chromosome makes it possible for
information to be transmitted chromosomatically from one body to another
thereby ensuring the preservation and continuity of their lineage from the pre-
Christian era into the future.

Recent developments in medical science with its new fields of

Microbiology and Cybematics help to stress the thematic relevance of
Ghosh’s novel. The narrative runs in parallel with the medical science history
of the twentieth century. In line with the history of medical science, Ghosh
informs us that the Austrian scientist Julius-Von Wagner was awarded the
Nobel Prize for his discovery about malaria and writes:

In fact, until antibiotics, the Wagner-Jauregg

process was pretty much a standard treatment:
every major VD hospital had its little incubating
room where it grew a flock of anopheles. Think
about it: hospitals cultivating disease! But on the
other hand, what could be more natural than
fighting fire with fire? . . . vaccines work on the
same sort of principle really, but what they do is
prime your immune system against themselves.
This is the only instance known to medicine of
using one disease to fight another, [p. 205]
 160

By bringing Mangala as the brain behind the secret research on malaria

parasite, Ghosh draws a comparative study of the native knowledge with
modem European dominated science. Mangala knows much more about
malaria than anybody else and she uses it for her own secret purpose. Just as
immunization is fighting a germ with another germ, Mangala devises to use
the malaria parasite for inter-personal transportation of the human mind and
thought without any physical union. It is a form of immortalization, at least, of
the person’s knowledge, thought and intelligence. With this, Ghosh is trying
to bridge the gap between the conscious and unconscious, known and
unknown depths of human mind in a technique of controlling the brain.

The novel documents a series of interrelated moments wherein each

character feverishly attempts to reach the core of his quest, his mission: Antar
the Egyptian computer clerk, sometime in the early twenty-first century,
struggles to trace the adventures and disappearance of L. Murugan;
Murugan’s search centres around the missing links of malaria research
conducted by Ross between 1895-1899; Ross becomes a symbol of scientific
research that happily culminates in a discoveiy; Urmila’s “little research” [p.
93] on Phulboni and his fictional character Laakhan guides her to reach the
eye of a greater mystery; Sonali’s quest for Romen Haidar ceases with the
unveiling of Laakhan’s mystery; Farley’s discovery of Mangala-Lutchman
mystery remains buried as he disappears in a “rarely used station: Renupur”
[p. 129]; Mangala’s experiment with counter-science through the principles of
“silence and secrecy” [p. 177] practised in India and Egypt is, of course, the
primary quest presented in the novel. The mysterious progress of her
experiment negates all “direct communication” [p. 90] of the discovery. The
truth has to be discovered by someone totally unrelated with the exercise.
 161

Ultimately, Urmila becomes the chosen person. Murugan enlightens her,

“Don’t you see?” he said. “You’re the one she’s chosen” [p. 264]. Having
performed her role successfully Mrs. Aratouman moves towards her final
destination, Renupur. Urmila takes on the role of Mangala and Mrs.
Aratounian.

There are a series of mysterious incidents that make the novel

interesting reading material, sans authenticity and logical conviction. The
most important one is the incident of the early morning when Urmila finds a
stranger standing at the gate asking her if she needed fish. The fish-seller
wrapped over the parcel to the lady. When she glanced at the papers out of
inquisitiveness, she realizes:

It was a large, legal size photocopy of a page of

very fine English newsprint. The typeface was
unfamiliar, old-fashioned: she knew at a glance that
the page wasn’t from any of the current English-
language papers printed in Calcutta. She made
space for it on a shelf and spread on it out. The
print was so fine she had trouble reading it___ The
masthead said, The Colonial Services Gazette, in
beautiful Gothic characters. Beside the name was a
dateline: ‘Calcutta, the twelfth of January, 1898.’ ..
. She was about to sweep it into the wastebin when
she noticed that one of the announcements had been
underlined, in ink. Squinting at the page she read:
‘Leave approved for Suigeon Colonel D.D.
Cunningham, Presidency General Hospital,
Calcutta, Januaiy 10-15 . . . ’ [pp. 147-148]

The whole incident, covering Urmila’s visit to Mr. Haidar’s and the
facts revealed there, looks like day-dreaming and leaves everyone baffled.
 162

The taxi-drive of L. Murugan and Urmila to Presidency General Hospital, the

showing of the ID card, and the marble plaque with inscription, “In the small
Laboratory seventy yards to the south east of this gate Surgeon Major Ronald
Ross, IMS, in 1898 discovered the manner in which malaria is conveyed by
mosquitoes” [pp. 162-163], deepen the mystery. And this is how Murugan
sets the reel of the past open step by step. Murugan’s details of Mme
Salminen deepen the curiosity on the one hand and stretch the range of the
multicoloured canvas of the novel. Murugan makes the situation more
plausible by connecting Ross’s attempts with the American Missionary doctor
called Elijah Farley and his meeting with a boy at Seaidah station and
Mangala: “Farley saw things happening in the lab that left him in no doubt
that she knew a whole lot more about malaria than Cunningham could ever
have taught her . . [p. 202]. Ghosh puts an analogy of the similar incident
quoting Ramanujan to make it more convincing:

Think of Ramanujan, the mathematician, down in

Madras. He went ahead and re-invented a fair hunk
of modem mathematics just because nobody had
told him that it had already been done. And with
Mangala we’re not talking about mathematics;
we’re talking about microscopy, which was still an
artisanal kind of skill at that time. [pp. 202-203]

The novelist combines here the attempt of a scientist and the world of make-
belief governed by Mangala. The unexpected results of Ross as well as
Mangala leave both o f them to certain uncertainties, as “neither she nor
Ronnie Ross nor any scientist of that time would have had a name for” [p.
206]. What Murugan is indirectly trying to hint at is that science is thus very
 163

much supported by non-science, though in this world of conviction and proof

it is veiy difficult to justify the veiy belief.

Again, Phulboni is a character that one way or the other co-relates the
different strings of the episodes. His visit to Renupur and subsequently the
incidents taking place, make the novel a thriller. The details of the station and
the surroundings, the dialogues with the station master, the cabin and lamp
make the reading full of excitement and awe. Phulboni’s stride towards the
rail tract and the feeling of the shaking and vibrating track to announce the
approaching train whereas in reality there was no train at all, make it all look
like a suspense film or serial. Even his shouts choked with fear were poorly
responded to. The stationmaster endorses the experiences of Phulboni and
calls the place queer in every respect:

The station is a terrible place. No one in any o f the

villages around here comes within a mile of this
station after dark. You couldn’t make them come if
you gave them all the gold that is hoarded in the
heavens. I tried to tell you but you would not listen.
[p. 231]

The story o f Laakhan, who had occupied the signal room once, and his
sudden disappearance, and later being found at Sealdah station by a woman,
intensifies the very suspense.

The last pages of the novel are a winding up process to interlink all the
episodes with Antar’s questioning Murugan: “But people have been looking
for you for years, where have you been?” [p. 255] The Calcutta Chromosome
 164

is indeed a new trend and Babli Gupta rightly evaluates it in the following
way:

This is a world of mysteries rather than rationality,

where Mangala’s real talents become those of a
magician rather than of an artisan. The counter­
sciences may have extraordinary powers to
overturn science but their motives like that of their
counterparts are self seeking rather than humane.

She further underlines the very intention of the novelist in writing this
novel as:

The desire to escape tyranny of knowledge and

yearning to experience the truth beyond knowledge
- through intuition, spiritualist seances, or
medically engineered dementia, found in foil
measure in this mystery tale is evidence of a
definite incline towards mysticism, with shades of
Neo-Platonism brought in to bind the ancient with
the modem.64

Amitav Ghosh scans the movement of civilization through the centuries

and comes up with a series of negations. In spite of material advance and
dazzling possibilities afforded by science and technology, the author seems to
say, mankind has not really added to the sum of wisdom and self-knowledge,
and still remains floundering in the dark of mental and moral ignorance.

Ghosh compels us to think about what is lacking in the world, which

creates this atmosphere of bewilderment and utter futility. It is the presence or
absence of human values which eventually undermines the worthiness of a
civilizational order. In its absence, human activity is reduced to meaningless
 165

bustle, with contrary impulses working to annul each other. Mankind, the
author seems to say, may have refined its abilities of manipulating the outer
layers of reality but inwardly it remains the same primitive being, self-seeking
in design and bestial in ways. Instead of a linear advance towardsa
progressively higher stage of civilization, we could be moving incircles,
ending more or less where we began, centuries ago.

The novel is indeed a quest through the world of superfluities to the

world of ideas. It is an attempt to bring together the past and the present with a
vision of the future. Indira Bhatt makes the following rational observation:

When one asks the questions of why and in what

direction the events lead to, one feels baffled. A
mystery novel would have clues that lead to the
solution. Here the novelist has wonderfully and
vividly createdthe mysterious happenings and has
attempted to relate them, only to arrive at
nothingness.65

The very mystery in the novel is that it allows the reader to dig deeper
to have new and many more new layers of meanings. To conclude, Ghosh’s
fictional universe is a microcosm of the real universe ordained, controlled and
guided by the Spirit (female in nature) that nurtures and destroys, symbolized
by the clay doll, a figurine with painted eyes, a pigeon on one side and
microscope in the other hand. In fact, this is not a “mystery thriller”66 but a
philosophical novel to entertain all and enlighten a few. Like Milkman of Toni
Morrison’s Song o f Solomon, we come to “realize that only by knowing the
past can [we] hope to have a future.”67 The Calcutta Chromosome, literally
 166

and figuratively rekindles our awareness of the rich Indian heritage to make
our future progress inevitable.
 167

SECTION - V
The Glass Palace:
Textualizing History as a Saga of Family
and Individual Lives

The Glass Palace is a saga of many families, their lives and their
connection with each other. The story begins with the arrival of British troops
in Mandalay in 1885 and ends in 1996, the action moving back and forth
between Burma, India, Malaya and Singapore. It spans the lives of three
generations and one hundred and twenty five years. The novel is partially
based upon the experiences of Ghosh’s uncle, Jagat Chandra Dutta, who had
been a timber merchant in Burma (Myanmar). In his 17 July 2000 interview
with Outlook, Ghosh mentioned that his father’s family had lived in Buraia
for several generations. His motivation in writing such a novel, therefore, is
first of all personal: it is an imaginative recollection of part of his family
history. He feels a great attraction to the country. But he is disturbed by its
recent history and describes it as essentially two countries. He had a great deal
of trouble trying to evade constant surveillance as he tried to research for his
novel.

Ghosh is not happy that the world knows so little about Burma. He is
not satisfied with much of the recorded history where he finds the British
occupation of India and Burma to have been acknowledged to have brought
 168

them into the modem world. He feels that many important incidents have been
omitted on the pages of history and says:

. . . it’s not been written about at all. . . It’s strange

- there were over half a million people on the Long
March, over 400,000 of them Indian, and there is
such a silence about i t . . . There was no need for
the Indians in Burma to flee when the Japanese
approached - many Indians did stay back. It makes
you realise the degree to which Indians felt
themselves to be the sheep of the British; the
delusions that governed their lives.68

These words indicate what Ghosh thinks of the British occupation, and make
the readers to ponder over the facts in recorded history.

The Glass Palace is set primarily in Burma and India and catalogues
the evolving history of those regions before and during the fraught years of
the Second World War and India’s independence struggle. It covers the better
part of the twentieth century, beginning with England’s invasion of Burma for
its precious teak forests and rubber plantations. England long since continued
to expand her colonial Indian empire. Many of the soldiers, who advanced on
Burma, were actually Indians, as were the workers sent abroad to Burmese
plantations. The Glass Palace is the epic story of three generations of Indo-
Burmese and Malaysian families, beginning with the fall of Mandalay to the
British and ending with a powerful but rather simplistic image of Aung San
Suu Kyi as a symbol of hope for future Burma. Ghosh has taken upon himself
the onerous task of mapping the history of Burma - a colony of the Britishers
- by interweaving the lives of the protagonists with the history of Burma. The
 169

history unfolds itself in the shape of events in the lives of the Burmese,
Indians., Malayans, and Anglo-Burmese characters.

The story of the novel starts in Chittagong, and then gradually spreads
over Burma, India and Malaya. Ghosh explores various dimensions of
scepticism of the Indian middle class regarding British colonialism, the
independence movements of India and Burma, and political loyalty. The
opening sentence of the novel conveys the impending English invasion of

Burma:

There was only one person in the food-stall who

knew exactly what that sound was that was rolling
in across the plain, along the silver curve of the
Irrawaddy, to the western wall of Mandalay’s fort.69

In fact the sound was that of English canons and the advancing British
artillery as part o f the great imperial design to make Burma a colony because
of its natural resources, particularly teak. The first person to know about the
impending British invasion was Rajkumar Raha, an Indian migrant to Burma,
who sees the British marching inside Burma, who is a witness to the sacking
of the Glass Palace of the king and the exile of the king and the queen to
India. Although the colonial masters of Burma and India were the same the
pre-colonial condition of Burma was different from that of India. The fact is
shown as the king ponders over his fate and that of the empire while on his
way to exile in India:

. . . there were more Indians than Burmese in

Rangoon. The British had brought them there, to
work in the docks and mills, to pull rickshaws and
empty the latrines. Apparently they couldn’t find
 170

local people to do these jobs. And indeed, why

would the Burmese do that kind of work? In Buraia
no one ever starved, everyone knew how to read
and write, and land was to be had of for the asking;
why should they pull rickshaws and carry nightsoil?
[pp. 49-50]

Adding more details to the above extract Tapas Chakrabarti remarks:

It also brings home another devastating aspect of

colonialism and that is transportation of human
beings from one country of origin to far-off places
for carrying out such works as colonizers would not
care to do. The Indians who were colonized much
before the Burmese were transplanted as labourers
and workers to places like Burma, Malaya, Fiji,
Thailand and the profit earned by their labour was
repatriated to the metropolitan centre of London.70

The awareness of the king o f the cultural difference between the

Burmese and their new rulers, i.e. the British is shown by the following
words:

And where would his own people go, now that they
were a part of this empire? It wouldn’t suit them, all
this moving about. They were not a portable
people, Ae Burmese; he knew this, veiy well, for
himself. He had never wanted to go anywhere. Yet
here he was, on his way to India, [p. 50]

Indeed, Ghosh’s rendering of British colonialism and its aftermath in the three
countries is an interplay of fact and fiction in an illusory place of imagination
to create an awareness of the experiential reality of the post-colonial worlds.
 171

The whole novel is an attempt to narrate the history of the colonization

of Burma from the viewpoint of a migrant Bengali who, right from his
childhood, adopts Burma as his homeland, his progress towards prosperity
during the First World War and his tribulations during the Second World War
and finally migration to India. The book assiduously parallels the history of
colonial India and British invasion of Burma. It depicts the country in a
centuiy of traumatic sub-continental histoiy through the independence in
1947, the assassination of General Aung San shortly before his assuming of
office after election and up to the present. It also encapsulates the struggle of
Rajkumar’s two sons, the take-over of Burma by the militaiy Junta after its
independence from the British and the eventual rise of Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi
as the charismatic leader of Burma fighting for the cause of democracy. The
whole novel captures more than a hundred years of tumultuous happenings in
Burma through the portrayal of Rajkumar and his family. To explain the
situation Ghosh notes the following in the early part of the novel:

This is how power is eclipsed: in a moment of vivid

realism, between the waning of one fantasy of
governance and its replacement by the next; in an
instant when the world springs free of its mooring
of dreams and reveals itself to be girdled in the
pathways of survival and self preservation, [pp. 41-
42]

We see this historical drama played out in the individual histories of these
interlocking families - some endure in the face of massive shifts in fate while
others succumb.
 172

The Glass Palace was selected as the Eurasian Regional Winner for the
prestigious 2001 Commonwealth Writers Prize and consequently a finalist.
But Ghosh rejected the nomination of his book for the Commonwealth
Writers Prize and, in the letter to Sandra Vince, Prizes Manager, writes that.

. . . the issue of how the past is to be remembered

lies at the heart of The Glass Palace and I feel that
I would be betraying the spirit of my book if I were
to allow it to be incorporated within that particular
memorialisation of Empire that passes under the
rubric of ‘the Commonwealth.’71

It gives a clear answer as to why he had written The Glass Palace. Unlike the
recorded history, he gives preference to every minute detail of the so called
insignificant individual whose past he chooses to record and put them against
the imperial power.

The Glass Palace is an attempt to locate in the history of time and

nations such a people, a beleaguered group of races inhabiting British
occupied territories in South East Asia. Ghosh also gives the bewildering and
often poignant accounts of a family scattered through post imperialist
dislocation in various parts of the Asian continent, as he charts the complex
sociological and political representations of such disbanding through the
experiences of loss, exile and the search for a homeland.

Rajkumar’s story in the novel is the story of struggle, survival and

success in the midst of the colonial turmoil. He was told to fend for himself by
the boat-owner as the sampan on which he worked needed repairs. Rajkumar
reaches the shop of Ma Cho and begins working there as her assistant and
 173

helper for three meals a day and a place to sleep in. Rajkumar is well-travelled
and worldly-wise. He is established as bold and remarkable. Once he lands in
Mandalay, his life long search for places and people begins and he is taken in
by the city. He is in an alien city with absolutely no acquaintances but soon he
develops his sense of belonging to the new place. He always remembers and
intends to follow what his dying mother had told him, “Beche thako,
Rajkumar. Live, my prince; hold on to your life” [p. 14].

Rajkumar earns his job at Saya John’s company with his integrity and
personality. He arrives in Mandalay just as the British are taking-over the
country. The British soldiers - mostly Indian sepoys - force the surrender of
the Burmese army and march up to the Glass Palace at the centre of the king’s
complex. This great hall is looted by British forces, then by Mandalay
residents who had until this day held the palace grounds in awe. Young
Rajkumar watches in shock as the unguarded palace is stripped of its
treasures:

Armed with a rock, a girl was knocking the

ornamental frets out o f a crocodile-shaped zither; a
man was using a meat cleaver to scrape the gilt
from the neck of a saung-gak harp and a woman
was chiselling furiously at the ruby eyes of a bronze
chinthe lion. [p. 33]

In the melee, Rajkumar has an extraordinary encounter with a young

girl, Dolly, one of Queen Supayalat’s maids. Rajkumar is so struck by her
beauty that he puts back into her hands the jewelled ivory box he had intended
to steal. He was so taken up with her that he seemed oblivious to all that was
going on around him. Even as the arrival of the soldiers forced him to flee he
 174

can only say, “I will see you again” [p. 36] even though Ma Cho calls him a
half-wit kaala to be staring at a girl when the soldiers are coming back.

While Rajkumar was working for Ma Cho, the war and subsequently
the exile of the Burmese royal family changed everything in Burma and the
change was on the expected lines as shown below:

The British occupation had changed everything:

Burma had been quickly integrated into the Empire,
forcibly converted into a province of British India.
. . The Mandalay Palace had been refurbished to
serve the conqueror’s recondite pictures: the west
wing had been converted into a British club; the
Queen’s Hall of Audience had now become a
billiard room---- [p. 66]

Before the British conquest, Burma was one of the richest kingdoms in Asia
but colonialism’s rapaciousness has reduced Burma to one of the poorest of
nations. This is what the queen thinks when the British overran Mandalay and
her thoughts were very prophetic indeed:

In our golden Burma where no one ever went

hungry and no one was too poor to write and read
all that will remain is destitution and ignorance,
famine and despair. We were the first to be
imprisoned in the name of their progress, millions
more will follow . . . A hundred years hence you
will read the indictment o f Europe’s greed in the
difference between the kingdom of Siam and the
state of our own enslaved realm, [p. 88]

Indeed, the unceremonious removal of the king and the pregnant queen
from Mandalay to distant Ratnagiri in the west coast of India was an astute
 175

move by the conquering British, successful in humiliating the royal couple

completely, also erasing them from public memory at home. Forgotten and
abandoned, the king and queen led a life of unfamiliar territory while their
country got depleted of its valuable natural resources —teak, ivory, petroleum.
The rapacity and greed inherent in the colonial process is seen concentrated in
what happened in Burma, and the author does not gloss over the fact that
Indians were willing collaborators in this British enterprise of depredation.
Not only did two-thirds of the British army consist o f Indians when Burma
was conquered, but also years later the Saya San rebellion was brutally
suppressed by deploying Indian soldiers. A small news item appeared in a
Calcutta newspaper with the gruesome picture of sixteen decapitated heads on
display but, in the thirties, the Indian public was too pre-occupied with its own
national movement to notice what was happening in Burma. Ghosh deeply
explores the complex nature of oppression as his huge story unfolds. About
the intention of the British, Ghosh frankly expresses:

They don’t want to be cruel; they don’t want any

martyrs; all they want is that the king should be lost
to memory like an old umbrella in a dusty
cupboard, [p. 136]

Meanwhile, Dolly who moved away to Ratnagiri along with the royal
family continues to care for the daughters of the exiled royal family while
Rajkumar continues to stay on in Burma because “he had seen too much in
Mandalay and acquired too many new ambitions” [p. 58]. Sheer grit and
determination and hard work combined with a series of favourable
circumstances like taking up a job with Saya John, the British occupation of
Burma which transformed Mandalay into a bustling commercial centre and
 176

the growing demand for teak - all these set Rajkumar on an upward mobility,
both socially and financially.

Rajkumar determines to become wealthy, and so hatches a scheme to

make money by importing workers from India for British oil fields. With this
money, and a bit more from Saya John, he buys a large teak forest and, after a
good number of years of hard work, establishes a profitable plantation. While
working with him, Rajkumar looks up to Saya John as a guide in all matters.
He considers him his mentor and was ready even to fight his battles. He
becomes quite skilful at negotiations and lands a plum contractwith the
company that is building a new railroad into various teak areas. At theage of
thirty, Rajkumar decides to visit Ratnagiri and look for Dolly.

At first Dolly rejects his proposal. It is Dolly’s most haunting obsession

that the Burma she had left behind is lost to her forever. Her displacement
from her native roots and her discomfort with her own changed identity is
clear when she vehemently declares to Uma, the Collector’s wife that she
could now never return home:

If I went to Burma now I would be a foreigner -

they would call me a kaala like they do Indians - a
trespasser, an outsider from across the sea. I’d find
that very hard I think. I’d never be able to rid
myself o f the idea that I would have to leave again
one day, just as I had to leave before. You would
understand if you knew what it was like when we
left. [p. 113]

Curiously, the phenomenon of such displaced location triggers off what seems
like a self-inflicted act of dispossession in Dolly, reiterating the thesis that
 177

colonized subjects suffer from a sense of unreal and imaginary homeland.

This is valid in the case of Dolly and Rajkumar, both of whom seek to
reascertain their rights over Indian and Burmese territories, appropriated as
homes. For Dolly, her life in Outram House at Ratnagiri is the only life she
knows: her moment in exile is also ironically her moment of greatest
assertion. After much hesitation, Dolly is ultimately convinced that
Rajkumar’s love for her is genuine. The two are married in a small ceremony,
presided over by Uma and her husband. Queen Supayalat, however, is
infuriated: she had wanted Dolly to work for her forever, and she now refuses
to see Dolly ever again.

Rajkumar’s only concern, pure and simple, is to defend himself and

provide for himself. It is a disadvantage but then it is an advantage as well. In
other words, Rajkumar takes this negative fact in his stride and makes good
use of it. It makes him practical and the fact is vividly shown in the following
words:

He reserved his trust and affection for those who

earned it by concrete example and proven good will
. . . But that there should exist a universe of
loyalties that was unrelated to himself and his own
immediate needs - this was very nearly
incomprehensible, [p. 47]

This attitude of Rajkumar leaves out all loyalties related to place, nationhood,
etc. The first job of Rajkumar is a sort of employment agent, transporting
Indian coolies by boat to Burma to work in the forests and plantations. This
influx of foreign opportunists ignites enmity between the native Burmese and
the Indian migrants, fuelling racism and unrest in England’s new colony. The
 178

story follows Rajkumar’s ascent to a wealthy landowner. In the beginning,

Rajkumar is presented as an enterprising Horatio Algeresque enterpreneur in
foreign Burma —a poor, orphaned Indian boy whose own cunning helps him
profit from the smallest opportunities to rise from rags to riches. But as the
novel progresses, Rajkumar begins to come off as a capitalist scoundrel, a
profiteer feeding off war and the suffering of others.

Turning the scene on the Indian side, a new District Collector comes in
Ratnagiri by the name of Beni Prasad Dey in 1905. Even though Ghosh writes
very little of Beni Prasad, he turns him into a tragic figure in the novel. Beni
Prasad is educated, intelligent and proud of his association with the English,
but in his heart there is an unseen struggle. He has to prove every time that he
is no less capable than any white man. The very thought of a slight mistake
committed in his duty to the English haunts him all the while. His wife, Uma
cannot bear a child. Intelligent and restless, she forms a strange friendship
with Dolly which lasts till the end. Meanwhile, the first princess becomes
pregnant and she is to be married to Sawant, the coachman and father of the
child. This incident does not take the royal family by so much surprise as it
does the Collector and the British government. The government is angry that
the Collector has proved inefficient in his duties to protect the royal blood and
he is demoted. Unaware of the news, Uma announces her decision to leave
him and live with her parents. Broken and unable to bear the strain, Beni
Prasad decides to take his own life, and rows a small boat out into the sea
where he gets drowned.

The death of her husband leaves Uma with lots of money and
allowances. With that she sets out for Europe and lives for a while in London
 179

where she joins hands with the Indian revolutionaries. Her travels in Europe
make her realize the dire poverty and injustice committed in India. She then
moves to America and settles in New York where she meets Matthew, Saya
John’s son. Due to her urges, Matthew returns along with Elsa Hofftnan, his
American wife, to his father in the Malaya to help him in his old age.

Uma had followed her husband’s lead and kept her silence while her
husband worked for the British. But after his death she definitely spoke her
protest loudly and clearly. She was, after all, only twenty eight when her
husband committed suicide. She had lived in his shadow, but had developed
strong opinions —of him, and of his role in the British Empire. After Prasad’s
death she remembers him mostly as a mimic man, a lackey of the colonizer.
Commenting on his character the novelist writes:

There seemed never to be a moment when he was

not haunted by the fear of being thought lacking by
his British colleagues. And yet it seemed to be
universally agreed that he was one of the most
successful Indians of his generation, a model for his
countrymen. Did this mean that one day all of India
would become a shadow o f what he had been?
Millions of people trying to live their lives in
conformity with incomprehensible rules? Better to
be what Dolly had been: a woman who had no
illusions about the nature of her condition; a
prisoner who knew the exact dimensions of her
cage and could look for contentment within those
confines, [pp. 186-187]

Uma becomes a revolutionary. Like her contemporary, Lala Hardayal, Uma

recognizes that “the conditions being created in their homeland were such as
to ensure that their descendants would enter the new epoch as cripples”, so
 180
that “they would truly become in the future what they had never been in the
past, a burden upon the world.” She, therefore, works to “change the angle of
their country’s entry into the future” [p. 222]. Surprisingly, in the new setting,
Uma’s virulent political thinking soon changes drastically. As the Burmese
rebellion fails, her thoughts turn to Gandhi’s non-violent methods against
colonialism and she volunteers her services to his cause.

The novel is able to achieve its ambitious span in time and space
through family networks. The family begun in Rangoon by Rajkumar and
Dolly is linked by long-time friendships, business and the lives of their sons,
Neel and Dinu to the Indian subcontinent and Malaya. The complexities of
lives constituted within the ageing British Empire are explored vividly linking
the pre-war years to events and chains o f significance going back to the Indian
Mutiny of 1857 and forward to the retreat of colonialism signalled by the
Second World War. Indeed, the colonial history entwines with personal
histories to destroy and recreate new histories and cultures.

The second and third generation of the story comprises - Arjun, Uma’s
nephew, Neel and Dinu, Rajkumar’s sons, Matthew and Elsa, Saya John’s son
and daughter-in-law, Alison and Timothy, Saya John’s grand-daughter and
grandson. In this story spanning more than a century in the history of the
subcontinent, people get involved in unexpected relationships across countries
and cultures, wars are fought, rebellions are quelled, political and ethical
issues are debated and fortunes are made and lost. The members of the three
families of Rajkumar, Uma and Saya John often move from Burma to India to
Malaysia by their own volition or circumstances. The relationships between
the families become denser through love, marriage and emotional
 181

involvements. Alison, Saya’s grand-daughter and Dinu, Rajkumar s younger

son fall in love in Malaysia; Neel, Rajkumar’s elder son marries Uma s niece,
Manju in Calcutta. The relationship between Saya and Rajkumar develops
into blood ties and the differences of class, race, language and religion as
creating division in society are thus done away.

The colonial conquest of Burma was completed with the help of Indian
soldiers who were colonial subjects of the British and earned out the orders of
their masters without thinking about the consequences of their deed. Aqun
Roy and Hardayal Singh are the two young officers in the 1/1 Jat Light
Infantry, commissioned just before the Second World War. Arjun, being the
first ever in his bhadralok family to join the army, takes pride in his
regiment’s achievements. But it is Hardayal, bom in a family which had
served the army for three generations, who is beset by doubt. The impact of
colonialism was for some a total mental stupor which took away their power
of judgement as Saya John says about the Indian soldiers who fight for the
British:

How do you fight an enemy who fight from neither

enmity nor anger, but in submission to orders from
superiors, without protest and without conscience?
[p. 30]

And the impact of colonialism could be seen in the psyche of Arjun and other
Indians working in the army because of their frequent contacts with British
officers:
 182

Indian officers were a band of the elect; they lived

in a proximity with Westerners that was all but
unknown to their compatriots, [p. 279]

There is a sense of elevation at being close to the colonizers, a sense of being

close to the superior which reinforces the master-slave paradigm. Ghosh
obliquely comments on the complete intellectual surrender of the army in the
initial stages of colonization. Ghosh also shows the complicity and ignorance
of the Indians who enlisted for prestigious British army posts, forgetting that
they were fighting for their own conquerors. The inscription at the Military
Academy at Dehradun had said:

The safety, honour and welfare of your country

come first, always and every time. [p. 330]

However, when the Indian officers are made to fight for the British
masters and not for their own country, they are faced with a moral crisis. For
instance, one Amreek Singh of the Indian Independence League signed on the
pamphlet which carried the following words:

Brothers, ask yourself what you are fighting for and

why you are here: do you really wish to sacrifice
your lives for an Empire that has kept your country
in slavery for two hundred years? [p. 391]

The moral crisis comes again in a forest hide-out in Burma where they lie
injured after a Japanese attack. Hardayal confesses that he cannot carry on
with his divided life here and the fact is shown by the followings words:

In the trenches . . . I had an eerie feeling. It was

strange to be sitting on one side of a battle line,
 183

knowing that you had to fight and knowing at the

same time that it wasn’t really your fight . . .
knowing that you risked everything to defend a way
of life that pushes you to the sidelines. It’s almost
as if you’re fighting against yourself, [p. 406]

Arjun’s code of honour will not permit him to think these thoughts and to him
the idea of joining the Japanese for the liberation of India would be a
senseless exchange of one set of rulers for another. The conflict is further
tangled by Aijun’s relationship on the one hand with his loyal batman Kishan
Singh who wants to know what the English word ‘mercenary’ means and
whether it can be applied to them, - and his admiration for and allegiance to
his British commanding officer. Arjun learns too late that he has lived a
thoughtless life by conforming to British ideals.

In fact, Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks defines the

colonized as those “in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by
the death and burial of its local and original culture.”72 This is what had
happened in the case of India in the realm of Education, Administration,
Army, etc. The Collector and Aijun thus consider themselves privileged
because they are products of colonial institutions without any knowledge of
the great Indian tradition. At the same time the distance between the colonizer
and the colonized does not get blurred as Aijun says:

. . . the British Indian army has always functioned

on the understanding that there was to be a
separation between Indians and Britishers, [p. 289]

A segment of the Indian officers forms the INA and with the INA’s defeat, the
moral crisis in the Indian soldiers who left the British army to join the Indian
 184

force, is replaced by a sense of defeatism and cynicism. In this regard, Arjun

tells Dinu:

We rebelled against an Empire that has shaped

everything in our lives; coloured everything in the
world as we know it. It is a huge, indelible stain
which has tainted all of us. We cannot destroy it
without destroying ourselves, [p. 518]

Aijun’s realization shakes Dinu as he begins to contemplate about the latter s

nihilism. Of course, towards the end of the novel Arjun questions his colonial
allegiance when Hardy reasons with him, and he joins the invading Japanese
forces on Malaya and ultimately dies fighting the same Britishers whom he
served enthusiastically.

The Japanese Imperial Army’s swift take-over of British, Malaya and

advance on Burma are evocatively rendered through the protagonist’s
disrupted lives in Rangoon, Calcutta and the environs o f Sungei Pattani,
Kedah. The war breaks the empire into parts, sundering connections that
depend on sea, road and rail transportation and ending the lives of key
characters. The Indians and Malaysians like Rajkumar and Saya John as
plantation merchants benefit initially with the expanding economy of teak and
rubber. Their tragedy begins with the Second World War, when the Japanese
bombing devastates the country and the exodus of Indians and Nepalis begins.
Rajkumar loses his elder son, Neel and daughter-in-law, Manju and his
property. He returns to Calcutta with Dolly and turns to Uma for shelter.
Rajkumar and Dolly themselves only decide to leave Burma when there is no
longer transportation to ferry them away. Rajkumar had been reluctant to
leave, despite the rise of anti-Indian politics and the nearing war. Rajkumar’s
 185

momentous confession to Dolly, when he seems to be losing his grip on the

plantation he owns and becomes aware of his slipping identity in foreign
shores, is as difficult as perhaps the author’s own circumlocuted and cautious
awareness of his divided location:

Yes. But it’s hard Dolly - it’s hard to think of

leaving: Burma has given me everything I have.
The boys have grown up here; they’ve never known
any other home . . . despite everything that’s
happened recently, I don’t think I could ever love
another place in the same way. But if there’s one
thing I’ve learned in my life, Dolly, it is that there
is no certainty about these things. My father was
from Chittagong and ended up in the Arakan; I
ended up in Rangoon; you went from Mandalay to
Ratnagiri and now you’re here too . . . There are
people who have the luck to end their lives where
they began them. But this is not something that is
owed to us . . . [pp. 309-310]

The vacillations and often contradictory positions assumed by Ghosh’s

protagonists register in the novel a theory of resistance which refutes the
notion that the idea of representation always connotes further subjection in the
colonial exercise. Therefore, Ghosh’s sense of native history and time is
inseparable from the long years of dominion, and the multinational hybrid
whose acculturation allows effortless identification with the world of the
colonizer.

In the novel, Ghosh brings an encounter between the old colonizer

(England) and the young upstart Japanese trying to be a new-colonizer. The
result is the same - the innumerable suffering and death of the colonized. The
Japanese attack leads Alison, Dinu and Saya John to fly for their lives. Illongo,
 186

Dinu’s half brother arranges for them to leave by train, but they are left on
their own as non-Europeans are not allowed to board the train, that too,
guarded by Indian soldiers. Helpless, they head back to their plantation. Later,
Alison tries to leave Again with old Saya John by her car, but the car breaks
down on the way. So, they sleep for a while. She wakes up to realize that Saya
John was missing. She comes out in his search and ends up seeing the
Japanese soldiers questioning and threatening the old man. Trying to save
him3 she fires her revolver but it only makes the soldiers kill Saya John
immediately. She manages to shoot a couple of Japanese soldiers but
ultimately, she shoots herself to escape being shot by the Japanese.

A scene of mob violence occurs at least twice in the novel

foregrounding the helplessness of individuals during collective fremy. The
novel deals with much human tragedy, wars, deaths, devastations and
dislocation. Actually the solidarity between Indians and Burmese turns to
animosity because of the relative prosperity of the Indians in Burma. In this
regard, Dolly’s words may be quoted:

Indian money lenders have taken all the farmland;

Indians run most of the shops; people say the rich
Indians live like colonialists, lording it over the
Burmese, [p. 240]

Ironically, it is because of economic disparities that racial antagonism

between Burmese and Indians build up. Inter-marriages between the two
communities are also condemned. Women like Dolly are in her own words
seen as ‘traitors to their own people.’ Burmese hostility against Indians is
reinforced in the macabre image of the Indian rickshaw-puller who is chased
 187
by a mob of bloodthirsty Burmese who behead him. Riots break out all over
Burma and the unquestioning harmony between Burmese and Indians turn to
hatred and bloodshed:

The riots lasted several days and the casualties

numbered in the hundreds. The toll would have
been higher still, if it had not been for the many
Burmese who had rescued Indians from the mob
and sheltered them in their homes, [p. 245]

Even Dolly and her family become the targets of attack because she has
married an Indian. Again it is the war which is being fought by the British that
leads to Rajkumar’s personal tragedy. In an air raid on Rangoon, the elephants
carrying timber from Rajkumar’s timberyard panic with the result that the logs
begin to topple down crushing his favourite son, Neel, to death. Rajkumar
realized that he had lost all that he worked for: a life-time’s accumulation of
labour was lost in one stroke. All this would have been acceptable if only Neel
had survived. With Neel’s death, there is no turning back. Crushed in body
and spirit and defeated by this cruel tragedy, Rajkumar, Dolly, Neel’s widow
Manju and their daughter Jaya join some thirty thousand refugees to return to
India. When they are trying to cross the river, Manju, in her own despair at the
loss of Neel drowns herself and another member of the family is lost to
despair.

Dolly and Rajkumar stay with Uma in her flat for the next six years in
Calcutta and Jaya is brought up by her grandparents. Thus, animosity and
aggression between different nationalities affect individual and family life in
ways that are emotionally shattering and irrevocable so that it is hard to
 188

rebuild the old life. The price of nationality and war has to be paid by the
individual and it is the price of life itself.

Later Dolly travels to Rangoon hoping to locate Dinu. Rajkumar never

sees her again In 1948, she finds Dinu, stays with him for a while, and then
spends her last days in a nunnery.

The fates of nearly all the protagonists are caught in a similar quest for
their points of origin. Rajkumar lives the life of a “near-destitute refugee’ in
Uma’s Calcutta home and for all his wanderings dies with the conviction that
the “Ganges could never be the same as the Irrawaddy” [p. 544]. Dolly’s final
mission in Burma brings her life full circles from beginnings as a slave girl
behind the palace walls of Mandalay to her voluntary submission to the
cloistered life in the nunnery at Sagaing, where she quietly passes away.

Dinu emerges as a nameless infantry of the freedom struggle of Burma.

He stays in the gaol for three years like Aung San Suu Kyi. He cannot return
to Bangladesh or India even after the end of colonial rule. He remains in his
childhood Burma, and now it is his job to preserve its past through the
pictures from the studio that he opened in Rangoon named after Emperor
Thibaw’s palace, ‘The Glass Palace’.

Ultimately the two surviving members of the families in Calcutta and

Burma meet through their common bond of photography. The last three pages
of the novel encapsulate past and present, evoking a mood of reconciliation
and peace through a startling and bizarre image. At the end of The Glass
Palace, Rajkumar bemoans the new military dictators who blame Burma’s
 189

isolation and economic ruin on the British legacy. Dinu romanticizes British
rule but his wife, Ma Thin Thin Aye, a writer corrects him in this way:

To use the past to justify the present is bad enough

- but it’s just as bad to use the present to justify the
past. [p. 537]

Dinu asks his writer wife why she writes her stories in standard Burmese
instead of many languages of all the many peoples of Burma:

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if your stories could

contain each language, each dialect? [p. 533]

His wife responds in artistic rather than political terms. She says when her
readers read her stories, they will hear the dialects in their heads and to each
reader they will sound different. Her answer may just as well be the only
realistic answer in a culture as diverse as Burma’s. In Dinu’s intense, if
suppressed, protest against imperial rule he is once more a witness to the
dramatic events and reversals of Burma’s long histoiy of colonial struggle.
General Aung San, his Rangoon acquaintance and leader of the large student
movement, is able to drive the Japanese out of Burmese territory but leaves
Dinu, himself a democrat, a disillusioned man. Dinu’s compassionate concern
for his Burmese fellowmen is not fired by rebellion and he leads a subdued
life in post-coup Rangoon under the stem shadow of the Junta.

Readers find different meanings in The Glass Palace, and Meenakshi

Mukheijee calls it “the most scathing critique of British colonialism [she had]
ever come across in fiction.”73 When Michelle Caswell reminded Ghosh of
the remark in an interview, he simply replied that “if this is true, then it would
 190

have to be said, surely, that colonialism has had a pretty easy ride. Looking
from another angle, Brinda Bose sees the book as a diasporic writing of an
anti-colonial Indian and writes:

The novel is, in some senses, an elegy for the

diasporic condition that is a product of history . . .
the diasporic condition that Ghosh mourns. It is the
condition that tears one apart, that pits uneven -
perhaps incomparable - forces against one another,
and then actually makes one choose.75

But the choice is not easy. Comparing the choice in the olden days with the
modem times, Makarand Paranjape sees the increasing difficulty, and
remarks:

The older generation could never return to the

mother land, since travel was difficult, expensive,
time-consuming, and this led to a greater
rootedness in the new country. Younger generations
though, since they were more cosmopolitan, could
“indulge” in a sense of double consciousness,
nurtured by trips to the mother land. Ironically, that
younger generation might have the greater anxiety
regarding choice, since it was pressed by elements
in both the old and the new place of residence.76

The Glass Palace is indeed a novel brimming over with ideas,

exploring the ways we co-operate with our own oppression, the nature of
exploitation, the dehumanizing effects of racism and dispossession, and the
miraculous way in which a change of consciousness as with Uma and Arjun
can eventually alter the course o f history. In this context, we may quote
Rukmini Bhaya Nair’s words:
 191

Ghosh’s The Glass Palace is important because it

reopens old ones so effectively. Burma at the
present time is near inaccessible territory; yet
Ghosh’s book manages to hold up before a global
community of readers a historically authentic
‘golden’ Burma as it was - and could be again. At a
time of millennial doom, when we are having to
radically reconfigure our dimly remembered pasts
in order to understand their effects on our
chaotically disturbed present, that is the novel’s
signal postcolonial virtue - elephants, teak, pagodas
and all.77

To conclude, Ghosh has succeeded in bringing into light many events

in the history of Burma and India which, otherwise, would have been
unknown or ignorant to the world. His careful portraiture of the family saga
has shown to the world that history is not just the story of Kings and Empires
but of every single individual that lives in the society, and that every twist and
turn in the fate of a king or government and its politics has a profound impact
on the society at large and individuals in particular.
 192

SECTION - VI
The Hungry Tide:
The Ebb and Flow of History

Amitav Ghosh’s sixth novel, The Hungry Tide is set against the
Sunderbans, a swampy archipelago in the Bay of Bengal where mangrove
swamps are infested with snakes, crocodiles and tigers. Nothing is certain in
the Sunderbans as the tide changes the environment daily and everything in
life is a shade of grey. It is a place where tigers kill hundreds of people a year,
but since they are a protected species, killing of a tiger that has been preying
on a village brings in the government authorities to mete out with punishment.
It is an environment where life is fragile and the essence of any person is
broken down to its core. Amitav Ghosh lets the tide country break down the
barriers of society and his characters.

The island is far away from the prettified world of Seattle and is never
an easy place for the people who are condemned to live and die there. The
setting of the novel suggests vivid possibilities. The tidal surge from the sea
can cover three hundred kilometres, constantly reshaping or devouring
islands, with just the tops of the jungles often visible at high tide. At the
beginning of the twentieth century, Sir Daniel Hamilton decided to create a
utopian society there, offering free land to those willing to work and accept
the others as equals, regardless of caste or ethnicity. It’s a difficult life that
leaves most women widowed at a young age and land barely farmable if the
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saltwater of the hungry tide can not be kept from flooding their fields. The
tide comes in twice daily, resulting in a constant reshaping of the land and an
uprooting of anything permanent. Fresh and salty channels cut into each other,
creating a diverse natural habitat. The only permanent thing is the water
whose violent power is described by Ghosh in the following words:

The currents are so powerful as to reshape the

islands almost daily - some days the water tears
away entire promontories and peninsulas; at other
times it throws up new shelves and sandbanks
where there were none before.78

Whatever is human has to pick its spots among the inconstant islands.

The Hungry Tide is about the struggle for each inhabitant to find their
place in the world. Amitav Ghosh keeps the pages turning with the history of
the tide country, the stories of the local deities, scientific information, the back
stories for each character, and Nirmal’s journal of what happened to Kusum
and her son. Through the novel, Ghosh shares his concern for the individual.
The novel has two parts - ‘The Ebb, Bhata’ and ‘The Flood, Jowar’. The
entire action takes place in the largest delta in the world - the Sunderbans.
Famous for its dense mangrove forests and tides, the delta is equally notorious
for its royal Bengal tiger, a unique species of the big cat that loves the human
flesh. As histoiy shows, the Bengal tiger has ended the lives of many
thousands of people and the inhabitants o f the islands have also killed many of
them in their encounter with the big cat which is a preserved species. The
result is that there had been many confrontations of the government with the
local inhabitants, and it is such conflicts that Ghosh has set at the background
of the novel. The narration moves in and out of past and present in a
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cinematographic technique and he does not stop his method of mingling facts
with fiction. The tide comes twice daily and uproots everything on its way. It
tries to destroy everything that is permanent. It is against this natural force
that the tide people struggle to create a foothold. Giving a symbolic comment
on the natural course of life in this region John C. Hawley remarks:

. . . just as the natural tides of the area tend to

obliterate the sense of permanent division between
land and sea, Ghosh’s characters gradually learn to
recognize the transient nature of the divisions
between individuals - of whatever social class.79

The Hungry Tide was awarded the Hutch Crossword Award for 2004.
It homes in on the human and natural ecosystems of a small, isolated and
highly particular area of India. But at the same time, it imports the wider
world through cosmopolitan outsiders - albeit of Bengali origin - hailing
from Delhi and the American West Coast. Ghosh focuses a magnifying lens
on a micro-culture within Bengali culture - namely, the ‘tide country’ made
up by the Sunderbans, the islets off Calcutta and just east o f the West Bengal-
Bangladesh border.

The story of The Hungry Tide centres on the two visitors to the
S underban community - Kanai Dutt and Piyali Roy, and their interaction with
that community and with each other. Kanai, a Bengali-born Delhi resident, in
his forties, is going there after a hiatus to meet his aunt Nilima who is
seventy-six years old. He has been forced to come as his late uncle Nirmal had
willed a journal to him and Nilima would not mail it to him. The journal had
been lost but found again after nearly twenty years o f Nirmal’s death. And it
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is the contents of the journal which will oblige him to delve deep into his
family history.

Piyali Roy, a Bengali-American scientist from Seattle in her late

twenties, irrupts into the Sunderban world as less a diasporic Indian than an
outsider pure and simple, ‘the American’. She was bom in Calcutta, but her
parents relocated to the United States when she was just one year old. She
does not know Bengali but she recalls that this was the language in which her
parents had argued. She is a woman used to the solitude and rigours of the life
of a scientist working in the field. Piya often works in areas where she knows
neither customs nor the language, and can survive for days on just energy bars
and Ovaltine as she studies river dolphins. She is now a graduate student in
cetology at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in California, and on this
trip is interested in observing the marine mammals that she thinks are unique
to the Sunderbans to find more of these rare species living in the rivers of the
tide country. In fact, her journey to the tide country is a part of her ongoing
research on dolphins (Orcaella brevirostris). Piya describes her proposed
multi-year project in the Sundarbans as:

. . . it would be as fine a piece of descriptive science

as any. It would be enough; as an alibi for a life, it
would do; she would not need to apologise for how
she had spent her time on this earth, [p. 127]

Kanai, who is a translator and interpreter by profession, is a proud and

arrogant man. He is not above using his status to get his own way. He tries to
be always in control of the relationships of his life. Nilima describes him as:
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. . . one of those men who likes to think of himself

as being irresistible to the other sex. Unfortunately,
the world doesn’t lack for women who’re foolish
enough to confirm such a man’s opinion of himself,
and Kanai seems always to be looking for them. [p.
251]

Kanai knows six languages —his native Bengali plus Hindi, Urdu, Arabic,
English and French. He runs a translation and interpretation agency, and
offers to act as an interpreter for Piya, who only knows English and has no
means of communication with the local Bengali speakers whose knowledge
and lore are vital for her research.

Another extremely dependable guide for Piya is a character called

Fokir, who is a competent boatman and fisherman. Piya’s trip to the tide
country doesn’t begin well. Taking advantage of her solitude and ignorance of
Bengali language, the government constable, along with her first guide, tries
to dominate her, and trying to escape, Piya is almost drowned in the silty
water. Luckily, Fokir saves her from drowning as well as the threatening men.
Fokir is perhaps the truest soul in the novel. Even though he is an illiterate
man, yet he possesses more knowledge o f the river and its wildlife than all the
outsiders who do not understand him. Piya feels an affinity for Fokir and his
life which matches the rhythms of his environment.

Fokir is illiterate. He does not understand English, and Piya has zero
knowledge of Bengali. Still, the two has a perfect understanding of each other
as far as Piya’s desire to see the Irrawaddy dolphins are concerned. So, Fokir
rows his boat to a spot in the river where, to her great delight, she discovers a
number of Irrawaddy dolphins. Naturally, she collects the desired data about
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their behaviour and choice of habitat keeping in view the flow and ebb of tide.
Piya, who feels closest to the animals she studies, needs Kanai s translation
skills, and Fokir’s local knowledge of the river and wildlife to do her research.

Actually, Piya has been sent to the Sunderbans for only a fortnight to
do a small survey on a meagre budget. But she comes to realize that the
universe of possibilities’ [p. 125] which the tidal ecology opens to her as a
cetologist may demand the whole of a lifetime. She has opted for her present
vocation as much for the life it offered as for its intellectual content because
of the following reason:

It allowed her to be on her own, to have no fixed

address, to be far from the familiar, while still being
a part o f a loyal but loose-knit community, [p. 126]

At this veiy moment, she thinks, almost involuntarily of such distinguished

field biologists as Jane Goodall and Helene Marsh. Jane Goodall worked in
the mountains of Kenya and Helene Marsh conducted her operations in the
swamps of Queensland. Unlike them, Piya has so far worked as a field
biologist only on a limited scale, in spite of all hardships and risks, with
courage and hope. And it is with this determination that she, along with Fokir
and his son Tutul, reaches Lusibari where once again, she meets Kanai Dutt
whom she met in the train.

In The Hungry Tide, Ghosh delineates a series of cultural features of

the tide country’s micro-community - o f its human ecosystem, placed in both
contemporary and conflictive relation to the natural ecosystem which is Piya’s
task to explore. Piya’s stay with Kanai at Lusibari Guest House for a few days
 arouses in him a keen interest, not really in her, but in her expedition. Kanai is
attracted to Piya and is envious of Fokir. He decides to accompany them on a
trip into the river to study the dolphins, in spite of his anxiety for his business
in New Delhi and his desire to go back there as soon as possible. The three of
them along with Horen Naskor and his grandson embark on a trip into the
heart of the tide country which will bring lasting change to all of their lives.
Fokir represents the bio-centric world-view in terms of a broadening human
conception of global community to include non-human life forms and the
physical environment.

Meanwhile, history intervenes in the particular areas of utopia and class

conflict. The alternation between Kanai’s here-and-now experiences and his
reading of his uncle’s journal brings past and present into a symbiotic
encounter. Nirmal Bose, originally from Dhaka, has been a college teacher of
F.nglish literature in Calcutta. He has the benefit of Western Education but is
irresistibly drawn to local causes. He is an embodiment of the romantic
idealist in whom the poet and die revolutionary scientist co-exist. The elitist
poet Rainer Maria Rilke and the revolutionary scientist Karl Marx attract him
equally. It is to ward off police action against Nirmal for his being a leftist
intellectual that he along with Nilima escapes to the tide country after their
marriage. Subsequently, Nirmal becomes the headmaster of Hamilton High
School where he serves for nearly three decades, retiring in 1978. He feels as
if his life was poorly spent because he never lived up to his revolutionary
ideals. Nilima is the practical side of their marriage, building a cooperative
trust which brings hope to many lives. She, however, is unwilling to do
anything that might upset the government whose favours she needs. Their
middle class upbringing and college education brings them no luxury, just the
 gratitude and respect from the locals in the tide country for the following
services they provide:

Within a few years of Nirmal and Nilima’s arrival

in Lusibari, zamindaris were abolished and large
landholdings were broken up by law . . . The union
Nilima had founded. . . continued to grow, drawing
in more and more members and offering an ever-
increasing number of services - medical, paralegal,
agricultural. At a certain point the movement grew
so large that it had to be reorganized, and that was
when the Badabon Development Trust was formed.
[p. 81]

Nirmal’s journal takes us to a world of social, political and cultural

turmoil. Nirmal writes whatever he has to say either about Kusum or about
Morichjhapi itself and completes his writing in one stretch on the morning of
15 May 1979, only two months before his death. This notebook, precariously
preserved and accidentally discovered, is meant solely for Kanai, and not at
ill for Nilima, first because Nirmal goes to Morichjhapi without his wife’s
Jiowledge during her brief absence from Lusibari, and lastly because she has
er own suspicions about her husband’s relations with Kusum. Moreover, he
id never spoken to Nilima about Morichjhapi before. The reason for this is
; following:

Perhaps, in my heart, I knew she would not share

my enthusiasm; perhaps I knew she would see my
excitement about their project as a betrayal of her
own efforts in Lusibari. [p. 189]

In the journal, Nirmal is reassessing his life, which he thinks is a

3, and reassessing his marriage, which he thinks has been overshadowed
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by his wife’s dedication to the Trust and her dismissal of his Leftist idealism
in favour of her own pragmatism. Ninnal had gone to Morichjhapi to find
Kusum. Morichjhapi has its own histoiy. Along with India’s partition in 1947
a large number of people from the erstwhile Pakistan cross over to India, and
similarly, during the 1971 war, leading finally to the creation ofJBangaladesh,
there is a heavy influx of people into India from across the border* A large
majority of these people —refugees or immigrants —are sent to Dandakaranya,
an area deep into the forests of Madhya Pradesh, for resettlement However,
these people find the whole region utterly uncongenial, and reach the island of
Morichjhapi, almost desperately by 1978 and get settled there. Morichjhapi is
a protected forest reserve, and even the Left Government of West Bengal,
with all its declared policy, wants these settlers to leave the territory. They
resent the attitude of the government and resist its move, with the result that in
1979 a large majority of them are massacred on the island.

Kusum is brought to Lusibari after her father is killed by a tiger and her
mother is whisked off to an unknown destination for the lure of money.
Though she is looked after by the local Women’s Union at Lusibari, she has to
leave the place in a huff for fear of being carried off, like her mother, to an
unknown place for prostitution. Ironically, it is Horen Naskor who brings her
to Lusibari for sustenance and, once again, it is the same Horen who sends her
off from there to pre-empt hot abduction. In a way, he covers Kusum’s life
from innocence to experience.

Kusum marries Rajen, a ghoogni vendor before her mother dies but
Rajen is killed in a train accident. Then, Kusum and her little son, Fokir,
journey back to Morichjhapi along with a large band of fellow travellers
 201

heading for this very island for their settlement there. And it is here that
Nirmal and Horen accidentally come across Kusum as they take shelter on
this island to escape the fiiry of a local storm. Nirmal had developed some
kind of obsession with Morichjhapi but Nilima knew that there was going to
be trouble and she just wanted to keep him from harm. But Nirmal and Kusum
find themselves drawn into the refugees’ struggle. Nirmal, in his journal, finds
a strong utopian strand in their endeavour, in this attempt by the dispossessed
to posses something of their own. The fact is explained by the following
words of the novelist:

. . . there had been many additions, many

improvements. Saltpans had been created, tubewells
had been planned, water had been dammed for the
rearing o f fish. . . It was an astonishing spectacle -
as though an entire civilization had sprouted
suddenly in the mud. {pp. 190-191]

However, the utopia cannot and does not last long. It is brutally
repressed by the government forces as:

. . . dozens of police boats had encircled the island,

tear gas and rubber bullets had been used, the
settlers had been forcibly prevented from bringing
rice or water to Morichjhapi, boats had been sunk,
people had been killed. . . it was as if war had
broken out in the quiet recesses of the tide country.
[p. 252]

In the aftermath, Kusum along with many people in the island are
massacred. Nirmal, whose journal ends at the moment of the repression,
having got mixed up in the events, loses his sanity and dies soon after.
Actually, he had gone to Morichjhapi to warn Kusum of the danger facing the
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Bangladeshi refugees who had recently fled to that island from the
resettlement camp in Central India to which they had been sent. It is again
Horen Naskor, who saves Fokir, Kusum’s five year old son and takes care of
him after Kusum’s death. Thus, Ghosh reconstructs the revolt of a group of
resettled refugees from the then East Pakistan, their creation of a short-lived
community in the Sunderbans with visible utopian-rationalist features, and the
bloody retaliation of the authorities. And all these, Ghosh does through
Kanai’s reading of his uncle’s journal.

As Kanai concludes reading the journal, he comes to learn more about

Fokir who is presently guiding them. Fokir is the son of Kusum, the spirit that
stirred the revolutionaiy heart of Nirmal that had remained dormant for long.
Reading about Kusum makes Kanai to compare her with Moyna. Like Kusum,
Moyna is also equally determined and strong-willed. Her love for further
study could not be stalled by ha* forced marriage to Fokir, who “could neither
read nor write and made his living by catching crabs” [p. 129]. But Moyna is
both ambitious and bright and her determination can be seen when Mashima
remarks:

But the remarkable tiling is that Moyna hasn’t

abandoned her dreams, she’s so determined to
qualify as a nurse that she made Fokir move to
Lusibari while she was in training, [p. 129]

When Kanai meets her for the first time in Lusibari, he is immediately
drawn towards her. O f course, he usually gets attracted to all sorts of women,
but Moyna is different. With her strong will and determination “so plainly
written on her face” [p. 135] Kanai immediately realizes his lost youth, his
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lost innocence and sees his childhood image on her face. He sees what he has
failed to learn in Moyna.

Moyna, on the contrary, does not understand this for her feminine
instinct has put her immediately on guard and sees Piya as a feminine
competitor trying to encroach upon her territory, i.e. Fokir. So, she cautions
Kanai to put an alert eye on both o f them. Meanwhile, Piya observes Moyna
and Kanai under the same scientific reasoning and concludes that Kanai is
drawn towards Moyna because she confirms the approach he has taken in his
life with her strong ambition and determination. As Piya observes:

It was important for him to believe that his values

were, at bottom, egalitarian, liberal, meritocratic, [p.
219]

Kanai and Moyna are both on the same line when compared on their
theory of life. They have drawn themselves up in society through their
ambition, hard work and will power, and Moyna is the immediate example.
Piya understands this and it only increases her affinity towards Fokir as she
thinks:

This was a looking-glass in which a man like Fokir

could never be anything other than a figure
glimpsed through a rear-view mirror, a rapidly
diminishing presence, a ghost from the perpetual
past that was Lusibari. [p. 220]

Although Fokir is illiterate and his presence is almost unnoticed by

people, Piya feels that this diminishing figure is much more practical than any

I
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one of them and that he lives in direct communion with nature which none of
them cannot do.

Meanwhile, Piya hires Fokir to take her out to observe the dolphins for
several days or weeks. Kanai volunteers as an interpreter and together they set
out in two boats —Horen’s larger boat pulling Fokir’s smaller one. As they
near an island, they see a big mob and later, after landing, they come to know
that a tiger had killed a new-born calf and the angry mob is frying to kill the
tiger. The mob could not kill it with spears. So, they bum the shed where it is
entrapped. Piya, with all her sense o f wildlife conservation, tries to stop them.
However, before the angry mob turns on her, Fokir and Horen drags her away
to the boat. She could “hear the flames cracking in the distance and she
smelled the reek of burning fur and flesh” [p. 295]. Here, Ghosh shows the
helplessness of an individual against a mob as he has shown in his earlier
novels. Ghosh’s way of showing a dangerous mob is repeated as ‘history
repeats itself.

Horen and Kanai who have accompanied Piya and Fokir go off on their
own as Kanai decides to return back to New Delhi. Actually, he is scared to
have faced the tiger alone in the island. Moreover, his leave is getting over
and he has to be back to his office otherwise tile staff will be worried. One
more reason for his leaving the place is what he says to Piya:

It’s also that I don’t really have much reason to stay

here, now that I’ve finished with my uncle’s
notebook. It’s not as if I’m of much use to you - 1
think you’ll be able to manage perfectly well
without a translator, [p. 333]
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Soon, Horen rows his boat back towards Lusibari as Kanai has decided
to go back. On their midway, they realize that something is strange -ail the
fishing boats are rowing back. Immediately, they sense a cyclone approaching
and Kanai is afraid that it might be too late to save Piya and Fokir who are
still unaware of it. At this, Horen consoles him saying that the storm won t
be on [them] until midday [the next day]” and that it “gives [them] plenty of
time” [p. 342], and they go back to Gaijontola.

But when they reach Gaijontola, no one is to be found. At that time,

Piya and Fokir are almost twenty kilometres south-east o f Gaijontola. Piya is
happy to see a pool of dolphins there and was observing them through her
binoculars. As the stonn approaches, Horen decides that he can wait for the
two of them no longer, and he and Kanai return to Lusibari. By the time Fokir
and Piya realizes the cyclone it is too late. A native instinct drives Fokir to
row the boat to the nearest island with the name of Bon Bibi on his lips and
shelter themselves by sitting on a branch of the highest mangrove tree, and
tied themselves to the trunk. The storm comes repeatedly upon them and they
are sometimes submerged under the water as big tidal waves sweep over the
island. At last, everything calms down but Piya sees that in spite of all efforts
and frantic struggles, Fokir has died in shielding her from the stonn. By the
time Horen and Kanai comes back for a possible rescue, Piya is already
rowing back to Lusibari all alone in Fokir’s small boat.

The novel reaches its climax in the death of Fokir and the subsequent
effect is an overall change in the characters of Piya and Kanai in the way they
perceive the tide country. Both are shocked but they get drawn closer to the
tide country with its strange natural phenomena. Piya and Kanai leave
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Lusibari with a heavy heart but not for long. Piya returns after a month in a
very high spirit. She had recorded all the ins and outs of her exploration with
Fokir in her Global Positioning System and plans to do further research. Not
only that, she has also set to raise money to help Moyna and Tutul, Fokir s
family, as well as draw Nilima’s Trust towards the conservation of the
dolphins. She no longer feels foreign to the tide country, and she is all set to
settle in this unlikely mud country. Meanwhile, Piya learns from Nilima that
Kanai has got a home in Calcutta. He is also returning to Lusibari to rewrite
Nirmal’s journal that he lost in the water. It is a home-coming for both.

In other words, both Piya and Kanai voluntarily undertake a

reconstruction of their experiences in the Sunderbans. The sea has claimed
both Kanai’s uncle’s journal and Piya’s cetological data-sheets but each is
willing to piece the text back together from memory. Beyond this, both return
to the Sunderbans surprisingly. Kanai shifts his residence from Delhi to
Calcutta to be nearer the tide country and visit often, thus “moving at least
halfway, towards a neo-Gandhian renunciation of cosmopolitan and
metropolitan India.”80 Commenting on Piya’s new-fangled psychological
ideas Christopher Rollason writes:

Piya goes further, electing to base herself and her

research in the Sunderbans themselves and to learn
Bengali, giving a surprising preference to the local
over the global, to her Indian roots over her
globalized - merican identity. A madeover, Bengali­
speaking Piya could indeed have greater
possibilities of communicating cross-eulturally with
the likes of Fokir than the “American” whom the
reader has accompanied across the book.
Meanwhile, whether the future will hold any
 207

convergence of a more affective nature between

Piya and Kanai is left open, but clearly their paths
will cross once more.81

Observing the criss-crossing of characters and mastery in weaving a novel out

of the resultant interaction, Sagarika Ghose makes the following remark:

Piya learns to love [Fokir] without language. Kanai,

the translator of cultures, finds himself stripped
down of all urban defences facing a tiger in a
swamp. Fokir, the unlettered fisherman, falls in love
with a woman who is an embodiment of science
[Piya]. A massive storm brings death and terminates
a potentially rich love. Nirmal falls in love with
Kusum and finally breaks with his armchair past.
Ghosh’s musings on language, on translatability, on
the forgotten massacre o f Morichjhapi, in which
dominant cultures forcibly wipe out movements
from below, are deftly worn into interactions
between the characters.82

Giving an appreciation of the mythical and mystical power of the tidal wave
to revolutionize human mind she further says:

Yet the most dominant theme is of a great sweep

away by water, the flood on land, the revolution in
the mind. As the reigning deity of the tide country
Bon Bibi, in Ghosh’s vision a plural syncretic local
cult, presides over this flood; she is a goddess of
hope but also of vengeance.83

Ghosh’s description of the cyclone sets all its destructive power against
the all preserving hybrid myth of Bon Bibi. The title of the novel itself gives a
demonic concept o f tidal cyclones. As the title suggests, the ‘Tide’ is always
hungry for more lives. It is both the ‘destroyer’ and ‘preserver’. It never
 208

ceases to destroy whatever comes its way - be it Fokir, Kusum s father, the
many boats and ships it had sunk, or any other casualty as it is seen in the
novel. The hungry tide is also a ‘preserver’ in the sense that it preserves the
very essence of the Sunderbans. In other words, the tide is symbolic of the
cult of Bon Bibi that dwells in the heart of the many dwellers of the tide
country in it’s strangely hybrid faith.

As usual, Ghosh is never tired o f creating the story o f the marginal and
neglected individuals. In The Hungry Tide, through the incident of the
Morichjhapi massacre, Ghosh has brought to limelight an incident in Indian
History which otherwise might have been ignorant to the world. His blending
of ‘fiction’ and ‘history’ is something that cannot be ignored with a nudge.
The islands with its daily tides have borders more porous than the one he has
created in In an Antique Land's Middle Age trading nations. The Middle
Age maritime trade with its porous borders comes to an end with the arrival of
the Europeans. In The Hungry Tide the more porous borders of Morichjhapi
island with its hybrid of castes and creed, refugees and farmers also suffer a
death blow, but not in the hands o f a foreign nation. It receives the blow from
its own government, the Leftist Government of West Bengal with all its
propaganda for the people. Here, Ghosh poses a difficult question to the
readers - should a government allow clearing of forests and jungles for human
settlement at the price of losing wild animals or stop such settlements at the
cost of human beings? And the answer is left open to the reader.

Through the novel Ghosh has put a microcosm of the endless struggle
of individuals to build a stronghold in a place as changing and illusive as the
tide country. Histories are made and wiped out with no trace of it by the ever
 209

constant water with its regular tides and cyclones, and the struggle of the
people is always to fight —to survive with the flow of the water. It is the ebb
and flow of history of these people of the tide country that Ghosh has painted
so skilfully in the novel.
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Notes:

1 R. K. Dhawan, ed., The Novels o f Amitav Ghosh (New Delhi: Prestige

Books, 1999), p. 14.

2 Walter Allen, Reading a Novel (London: Phoenix House, 1940), pp. 18-
19.

3 Ralph J. Crane, “The Chutnifieation of History,” Inventing India: A

History o f India in English Language Fiction (London: Macmillan,
1992), p. 171.

4 As quoted by R. K. Dhawan in The Novels o f Amitav Ghosh, ed. R. K.

Dhawan (New Delhi: Prestige Books, 1999), p. 15.

5‘ Salman Rushdie, interview by Gordon Wise, Gentleman, Feb. 1984, p. 59.

6 William Walsh, “Natraj and the Packet of Saffron Readings,”

Commonwealth Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 57.

7 K. R. S. Iyenger, Indian Writing in English (Delhi: Sterling Publishers,

1962), p. 320.

8 K. R. S. Iyengar, op. cit., p. 324.

9 A.V. Krishna Rao, The Indo-Anglian Novel and the Changing Tradition
(Mysore: Rao and Raghvan, 1973), p. 21.

10' Sushila Singh, “Double Self in Amitav Ghosh’s TJte Shadow L /in ett”
Quest fo r Identity in Indian Writing, Part 1, Fiction, ed. R. S. Pathak
(New Delhi: Bahri, 1992), p. 135.

11 Rukun Advani, “Novelists in Residence,” Seminar, 384 (August, 1991), p.

16.

12‘ Harish Trivedi, “The St. Stephen’s Factor,” Indian Literature, No. 145
(Sept. - Oct. 1991), p. 187.
 211

13 Amitav Ghosh, The Circle o f Reason (New Delhi: Ravi Dayal Publishers,
1986), p. 17. All the subsequent page references in this section (Section I)
are to this edition.

14 M. K. Naik and Shyamala A. Narayan, Indian English Literature, 1980 -

2000: A Critical Survey (New Delhi: Pencraft International), p. 47.

15 As quoted in “Historicizing Scientific Reason in Amitav Ghose’s The

C ircle q f R eason ” by Claire Chambers in Amitav Ghosh: A Critical
Companion, ed. Tabish Khair (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2005), p. 37.

16 Richard H. Popkin and Avrum Stroll, Philosophy (Oxford: Made Simple,

1993), p. 239.

17 Tapan Raychaudhuri, “The Pursuit o f Reason in Nineteenth Century

Bengal,” Mind, Body and Society: Life and Mentality in Colonial
Bengal, ed. Rajat Kanta Ray (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1995), p.
47.

18 Michael Foucault, an interview cited in Politics, Philosophy, Culture:

Interviews and Other Writings, 1977 -1 9 8 4 , ed. and intro. Lawrence D.
Kritzman, trans. Alan Sheridan and others (New York: Routledge, 1988),
p. 37.

19 _____________ , The Archaeology o f Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan

Smith (London: Tavistock Publications, 1972), p. 68.

20 Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery o f India, ed. Robert Crane (Garden City,
NY: Anchor Books, 1960), p. 17.

21 Anthony Burgess, Review o f T h e C ircle q f R eason , The New York

Times Book Review (6 July 1986), p. 6.

22 Shubha Tiwari, Amitav Ghosh: A Critical Study (New Delhi: Atlantic

Publishers and Distributors, 2003), p. 17.

23 Ibid., p. 18.

24 Karl Marx, quoted by Robert C. Tucker in Philosophy and Myth in Karl

Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 20.
 212

25 Stephen Jay Gould, The M ismeasure o f Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin,

1981), p. 74.

26 Amitav Ghosh, “The Ghosts o f Mrs. Gandhi,” The Imam and the Indian:
Prose Pieces (New Delhi: Ravi Dayal Publishers, 2002), p. 60.

27 ____________, The Shadow Lines (New Delhi: Ravi Dayal Publishers,

1988), p. 208. All the subsequent page references in this section (Section
II) are to this edition.

28 Bertrand Russell, Education and the Social Order (London: Unwind

Paperbacks, 1967), p. 88.

29 As quoted in Am itav Ghosh's T h e S h adow Lanes : Critical

Perspectives, ed. Novy Kapadia (New Delhi: Asia Book Club, 2001), p.
72.

30 Novy Kapadia, “Imagination and Politics in Amitav Ghosh’s The

S h adow Ldnett,” The New Indian Novel in English: A Stuffy o f the
1980s, ed. Viney Kirpal (New Delhi: Allied, 1990), p. 208.

31 Bapsi Sidhwa, Ice-Candy-Man (London: William Heinemann, 1988), p.

96.

32 Sumit Sarkar, Modern India 1885 — 1947 (Madras: Macmillan India,

1983), p. 181.

33 As quoted by Alpana Neogy in “The Shadow Lines Between Freedom and

Violence” in Am itav Ghosh's T h e S h a d o w T dnes : Critical Essays, ed.
Arvind Chowdhary (New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors,
2002), pp. 80-81.

34 Girish Kamad, “World Within Worlds: Book Review of The S h adow

IA n e sIn d ia n Express M agazine, 18 December 1988, p. 5.

35 D. K. Pabby, “Theme of Partition and Freedom in Khushwant Singh’s

T ra in to P a k ista n and Amitav Ghosh’s T he S h adow L dne#”
Amitav Ghosh's T he S h a d o w L in e*: Critical Perspectives, ed. Novy
Kapadia (New Delhi: Asia Book Club, 2001), p. 141.
 213

36 Murari Prasad, “T he S h adow Lines'. A Quest of Individual Sanity,”

The Novels o f Amitav Ghosh, ed. R. K. Dhawan (New Delhi: Prestige
Books, 1999), p. 94.

37 G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy o f World History, trans. H.B.

Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 197.

38 M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, ed. Anthony J. Parel

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p.89.

39 Ibid., p. 89.

40 Jason Cowley, “Portrait: V. S. Naipaul,” Prospect 31 (London, June 1998),

p. 51.

41 Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land (New Delhi: Ravi Dayal Publisher,

1992), pp. 236-237. All the subsequent page references in this section
(Section HI) are to this edition.

42 Ranajit Guha, An Indian Historiography o f India: A Nineteenth-Century

Agenda and Its Implications, G. S. Deuskao Lectures on Indian History
(Centre for Studies in Social Sciences: Calcutta, 1987), p. 21.

43 Padmini Mongia, “Medieval Travel in postcolonial Times: Amitav

Ghosh’s I n a n A n tiq u e L a n d , ” Amitav Ghosh: A Critical
Companion, ed. Tabish Khair (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), p. 76.

44 Reena Kothari, “A Traveller’s Tale: In an J ln tiq u e L a n d ”, The

Fiction o f Amitav Ghosh, eds. Indira Bhatt and Indira Nityanandam (New
Delhi: Creative Books, 2001), p.109.

45 Ibid., p. 137.

46 Nilanjana Gupta, “/#* an A n tiq u e Land'. A Counter-Narrative of

Coloniality,” The Novels o f Amitav Ghosh, ed. R. K. Dhawan (New
Delhi: Prestige Books, 1999), p. 195.
 214
47 Pradeep Trikha, “In a n J ln tiq u e L and'. A Traveller’s Tale,” The
Novels o f Am itav Ghosh, ed. R. K. Dhawan (New Delhi: Prestige Books,
1999), p. 188.

48 Ibid., p. 190.

49 Robert Dixon, “Travelling in the West: The Writing o f Amitav Ghosh,”

Amitav Ghosh: A Critical Companion, ed. Tabish Khair (Delhi:
Permanent Black, 2003), p. 27.

50 Uday Shankar Ojha, “Amitav Ghosh’s In an J ln tiq u e L a n d : A Post-

Modernist’s Rendezvous with History,” Indian English Literature: A
Post Colonial Response, eds. Gajendra Kumar and Uday Shankar Ojha
(Delhi: Sarup & Sons, 2005), p. 64.

51 Amitav Ghosh, “The Slave o f MS.H.6,” Subaltern Studies, Vol. VII.

(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 175-176.

52 Clifford Geertz, “Review of Amitav Ghosh’s In an J in tiq u e L a n d \ ”

The Australian, 25 August 1993, p. 30.

53 ____________, “History and Anthropology,” New Literary History 21.2,

1990, pp. 321-322.

54 Amitav Ghosh, in an interview with Paul Kincaid, conducted in July 1997.

Accessed 21 February 2007. <http://www.rcn.com/singhvan/SamitBasu.
html>.

55 Ibid.

56 Amitav Ghosh, The Calcutta Chromosome (New Delhi: Ravi Dayal

Publishers, 1996), p. 30. All the subsequent page references in this section
(Section IV) are to this edition.

57 Meenakshi Mukherjee, “Spine Chiller,” India Today, 15 May 1996, p.

163.

58 Madhumalati Adhikari, “The C a lcu tta C hrom osom e: A Post Colonial

Novel,” The Fiction o f Amitav Ghosh, eds. Indira Bhatt and Indira
Nityanandam (New Delhi: Creative Books, 2001), p. 180.
 215

59 Deepak Kumar, Science and the Raj, 1857 - 1905 (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1997), p. 229.

60 Tabish Khair, “The Question o f Subaltern Agency,” Amitav Ghosh: A

Critical Companion, ed. Tabish Khair (New Delhi: Permanent Black,
2005), p. 147.

61 Babli Gupta, “Enigma as Ontology in The C alcu tta C hrom osom e”

The Novels o f Am itav Ghosh, ed. R. K. Dhawan (New Delhi: Prestige
Books, 1999), p. 207.

62 Ibid., pp. 208-209.

63 Babli Gupta, op. cii., p. 209.

64 Ibid., p. 211.

65 Indira Bhatt, “Disappearance and Discovery: The C alcu tta

C hrom osom e” The Novels o f Amitav Ghosh, ed. R. K. Dhawan (New
Delhi: Prestige Books, 1999), p. 239.

66- Meenakshi Mukheijee, op. cit., p. 163.

67 Toni Morrison, Song o f Solomon (New York: Knopf, 1977), p. 93.

68 Interview with Amitav Ghosh, Outlook, 17 July 2000.

69 Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace (New Delhi: Ravi Dayal Publishers,
2000), p. 3. All the subsequent page references in this section (Section V)
are to this edition.

70 Tapas Chakrabarti, "The G la ss P a ta e e : As a Decolonizing Text,”

Decolonisation: A Search fo r Alternatives, eds. Adesh Pal, Anupam
Nagar and Tapas Chakrabarti (New Delhi: Creative Bodes, 2001), p. 281.

71 Amitav Ghosh, “Ghosh’s Letter to Commonwealth Writers Prize,” 18

March 2001. Accessed 25 January 2005. <http://www.amitavghosh.com/
cwprize.html#letter>.
 216

72 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. C. L. Markmann {New

Delhi: Grive Press, 1967), p. 18.

73 As quoted by John C. Hawley in Contemporary Indian Writers in

English: Am itav Ghosh (New Delhi: Foundation Books, 2005), p. 123.

74 Ibid., p. 123.

75 Brinda Bose, Am itav Ghosh: Critical Perspectives (Delhi: Pencraft

International, 2003), pp. 23-24.

76 John C. Hawley, op cit., p. 124.

77 Rukmini Bhaya Nair, “The Road from Mandalay: Reflections on Amitav

Ghosh’s T h e G la ss P a la c e A m ita v Ghosh: A Critical Companion,
ed. Tabish Khair (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2005), p. 174.

78 Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2005), p. 7.

All the subsequent page references in this section (Section VI) are to this
edition.

79 John C. Hawley, op. c it, p. 132.

80 Christopher Rollason, “In our Translated World: Transcultural

Communication in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide” Accessed 4 May
2005. <http://www.seikilos.com.ar/ghosh.pdf>.

81 Ibid.

82 Sagarika Ghose, “The Shadow Links: Review o f T h e H u n g ry T ide,”

The Indian Express, 27 June 2004. Quoted in John C. Hawley,
Contemporary Indian Writers in English: Amitav Ghosh (New Delhi:
Foundation Bodes, 2005), p. 134.

83 Ibid., p. 134.