Ghosh, Amitav 1956–

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Ghosh, Amitav 1956–

PERSONAL: Born July 11, 1956, in Calcutta, Bengal, India; son of Shailendra Chandra (a diplomat) and Ansali (a homemaker) Ghosh; married Deborah Ann Baker. Education: Delhi University, B.A. (with honors), 1976, M.A., 1978; Oxford University, Ph.D., 1982; received diploma from Institut Bourgui des Langues Vivantes Tunis.

ADDRESSES: Home—Brooklyn, NY. Agent—Barney Karpfinger Agency, 357 W. 20th St., New York, NY 10011. E-mail—[email protected];[email protected].

CAREER: Indian Express, India, reporter and editor; Department of Sociology, Delhi University, Delhi, India, lecturer, beginning 1983; Queens College, City Univer-sity of New York, Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature, beginning 1999; Columbia University, New York, NY, faculty member. Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, visiting professor, c. 2006.

AWARDS, HONORS: Sahitya Akademi Award (India), 1990, for The Shadow Lines; Prix Médicis Etrangère, 1990, for The Circle of Reason; Arthur C. Clarke Award, 1997, for The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium and Discovery; Pushcart Prize, 1999, for essay "The March of the Novel through History: The Testimony of My Grandfather's Bookcase"; Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book (declined) and Grand Prize for Fiction, Frankfurt International e-Book Awards, both 2001, both for The Glass Palace; Hutch Crossword Book Prize, 2005, for The Hungry Tide.

WRITINGS:

Bisvabidyara ananda-prangane Rabindranatha, Bisvabiba (Calcutta, India), 1986.

The Circle of Reason (novel), Viking (New York, NY), 1986.

The Shadow Lines (novel), Bloomsbury Publishing (London, England), 1988, Viking (New York, NY), 1989.

In an Antique Land (novel), Ravi Dayal Publisher (New Delhi, India), 1992, Knopf (New York, NY), 1993.

The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium and Discovery, Ravi Dayal Publisher (New Delhi, India), 1996, Avon Books (New York, NY), 1997.

Dancing in Cambodia [and] At Large in Burma (nonfiction), Ravi Dayal Publishers (New Delhi, India), 1998.

Countdown, Ravi Dayal Publishers (New Delhi, India), 1999.

The Glass Palace (novel), Random House (New York, NY), 2000.

The Imam and the Indian (nonfiction), Ravi Dayal Publishers (New Delhi, India), 2002.

The Hungry Tide (novel), HarperCollins (London, England), 2004, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 2005.

Incendiary Circumstances: A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times (essays), Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 2005.

Author of foreword, Irrawaddy Tango, by Wendy Law-Yone, Triquarterly, 2003; and Other Routes: 1500 Years of African and Asian Travel Writing, edited by Tabish Khair, Martin Leer, Justin D. Edwards, and Hanna Ziadeh, Indiana University Press, 2006. Contributor to periodicals, including Indian Express, Granta, Cultural Anthropology, Wilson Quarterly, New Yorker, and New Republic.

SIDELIGHTS: Indian-born novelist Amitav Ghosh's works draw heavily upon the character, traditions, and dichotomies of his native land, yet his protagonists and themes often extend beyond India's actual boundaries, most notably toward the Middle East and Great Britain. Through this discourse the works expose the cross-cultural ties between India and her former colonial ruler as well as with her kindred neighbors. Ghosh, who has traveled abroad extensively, has been hailed by critics as one of a new generation of cosmopolitan Indian intellectuals writing in English who are forging a contemporary literary metier. His first two novels have been compared to the work of fellow Indian expatriate writer Salman Rushdie, while other scholars have commented on the similarities between Ghosh's narrative style and Indian and Arabic folktales.

The Circle of Reason is Ghosh's first English-language novel. The work, which Ghosh described as inspired by Herman Melville's nineteenth-century classic Moby Dick, is the complex tale of a young Indian boy and his adventures both in India and abroad. The work is divided into three sections, which relate the three main phases of the protagonist's life. These phases also parallel a trio of concepts—reason, passion, and death—characteristic of ancient Indian literature and philosophy. The novel begins as the orphaned Alu, who possesses an extraordinarily large and misshapen head, begins a new life with his aunt and uncle in the town of Lalpukur. Ghosh weaves into the narrative the uncle's eccentricities and fascination with scientific experimentation as well as the minor transgressions of other inhabitants of Alu's new village. The boy becomes an apprentice weaver, a device which also mirrors the extravagant storytelling within the work—Ghosh embarks upon secondary story lines which are developed and later woven back into the main plot.

As the second stage of The Circle of Reason begins, Alu, now a fugitive after a tragic event, flees Lalpukur to a Saharan city across the ocean, all the while pursued by an amateur-ornithologist/policeman. The city, Al-Ghazira, is a newly constructed infrastructural jumble devised to house the throngs of Indian, Arabic, and African migrant workers who have come to work in the oil fields. Through this atmosphere Ghosh provides a commentary on the nomadic proclivities of southern Asian and Middle Eastern peoples. Here Alu meets up with even more eccentric characters, including a full-figured mentor/brothel keeper by the name of Zindi, before disappearing under the collapsed rubble of a shoddily constructed building. In true fable nature, however, a transformed Alu reappears later in the narrative and begins to exhibit his uncle's same maniacal passion for science. The third segment of Ghosh's novel lands Alu in North Africa, where the disparate characters and themes of The Circle of Reason reach their finale.

Many reviewers commented on the exhaustive nature of the complex narrative and plethora of characters in The Circle of Reason. New Statesman writer Liz Heron, for one, felt that the novel's "length and mega-ambitions overwhelm the skills and experience of its author." Playwright Hanif Kureishi, assessing the work for the New Republic, remarked that Ghosh's "style is multidimensional, ironic, a mixture of the bizarre and the ordinary," but that while the "pot swills with life and parts of the stew are delicious, it is not cooked all the way through." In the New York Times Book Review, Anthony Burgess hailed this first effort as well as Ghosh's command of language. He asserted that "when we read some of the fictional output of America and Britain these days, we despair of the future of the English language. The subcontinent, on the evidence of this and some other Indian novelists, is a preserve of unassailable syntax and elegant force."

Ghosh's next work of fiction is The Shadow Lines. The story line juxtaposes the lives of two different yet intertwined families—one Indian, one English—and uses this structure to question the boundaries between both peoples and the geographical settings they inhabit. The story, which shifts from London to Calcutta to Dhaka, is told through the point of view of a contemporary Indian male, although the real luminaries of the plot are the young man's grandmother and his cousin Tridib. The anonymous narrator recounts in flashback the people and places Tridib had described to him twenty years before, and the heady life of modern London that signified the center of their universe. Inhabiting that world more specifically is the quirky yet congenial Price clan, whose ties to both India and the narrator's family stretch back decades. Another plot element also related in flashback is the grandmother's return to her native Dhaka, accompanied by Tridib and his lover May Price. The journey takes place during a period of sectarian strife between Muslim and Hindu elements after part of India had been partitioned off to become Bangladesh. The tragic fate that befalls Tridib on this trek is the mystery that the narrator eventually unravels.

The title of The Shadow Lines refers to the blurred lines between nations, lands, and families, as well as within one's own self-identity. Ghosh depicts the characters of the novel as caught between two worlds, and the struggle to come to terms with both their present lives as well as their past, forms the core of the narrative. May Price, for instance, is an upper-class Anglo by birth yet also a woman keenly attuned to the conditions under which most of the world's population exists—she sleeps on a thin mattress on a floor and fasts one day a week because "it occurred to me a few years ago that it might not be an entirely bad idea to go without something every once in a while." Another example is the narrator's cousin Ila, whose upbringing abroad as the daughter of a diplomat has given her a cultural identity crisis as an adult. Ghosh's tale dramatizes the inner conflicts of the juxtaposition of dissimilar yet related cultures, as well as the outward conflicts between friends and families that have been inflicted by geopolitical discord.

Critical reaction to The Shadow Lines was more favorable than for Ghosh's prior novel. Maria Couto remarked in the Times Literary Supplement that "Ghosh has found his own distinctive voice—polished and profound," and deemed the work "a compelling novel, wistful in its tone, assured in its achieved vision." In a review of the volume for the Washington Post Book World, S.P. Somtow faulted the dizzying aspect of the complex narrative, maintaining "the novel often disintegrates into a kind of meandering, pseudo-poetic blather." New York Times Book Review critic Edward Hower lauded Ghosh's characterizations, noting that "what is finally most impressive is the eloquence of the author's perceptions about his characters," and concluded that with The Shadow Lines "Ghosh establishes himself as an accomplished artist, a master of style and insight."

Ghosh's follow-up to the first two novels is the unusually structured work In an Antique Land, published first in India in 1992 and abroad the following year. The volume is loosely based on the author's sojourn in Egypt in an attempt both to learn Arabic and to undertake historical research on a group of twelfth-century Jewish Tunisians who had left behind a wealth of records of their trade with India. Ghosh discovered these archives while studying at Oxford, where they had been transferred in the 1890s, and became fascinated by a letter dated 1139 written to one of the merchants, Abraham Ben Yiju. To aid him in further unraveling the lives of Ben Yiju and his contemporaries, Ghosh journeyed to a small village in the Nile delta in 1980 and lived among the fellaheen, or Egyptian peasants. His recounting of the adjustment to the rural Egyptian way of life, in addition to the curiosity with which his neighbors viewed him, form the basis of the work. Yet a secondary theme, based on the Ghosh's research, reconstructs what might have been Ben Yiju's existence and participation in the medieval commerce between North Africa and India. In an Antique Land attempts to lend insight into both the ancient and modern convergences of the trio of cultures—Jewish, Arabic, and Hindu—on the history of the region.

Ghosh returned to the village in 1988, and in his book relates his shock at the metamorphoses only eight years had wrought. In this span of time much had radically altered an ancient existence, most significantly the material wealth brought in by the sons of the region who had become part of the new roaming class of migrant labor in the Middle East. Ghosh also charts the changes that Islamic fundamentalism had imposed on the area over the decade. Times Literary Supplement critic Ahdaf Soueif remarked that while the volume's "heart is in the right place … In an Antique Land leaves behind it a feeling of incompleteness." However, the reviewer lauded the "lively and authentic scenes" that Ghosh recounted from his first sojourn. Pico Iyer, writing in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, disparaged the fictional reconstruction of Ben Yiju's life as "a contrivance," but praised the scope of the tome for capturing the essence of being an outsider. Iyer stated that "Ghosh seems less an observer than a participant, and makes us feel as if we are seeing the village from the inside out."

The winner of the 1997 Arthur C. Clarke Award, The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium and Discovery "explores the social, technological, and economic structures of the city that enable colonized characters to subvert the binary of colonizer and colonized," according to Barbara Romanik in Mosaic. The story is a complex narrative revolving around two key characters and a remarkable medical discovery. Antar is an Egyptian-American monitoring computer records in Manhattan when he discovers an identification card by a man named Murugan. Murugan was on a scientific quest to uncover the facts about Ronald Ross, the 1902 Nobel laureate who was credited with discovering how malaria was carried by a certain species of mosquito. But Murugan suspected that it was actually Indian researchers who should have been credited with the discovery, for they led Ross to his findings for an interesting purpose: it seems that the disease is the key not only to a cure for syphilis, but also, in a strange spiritual twist, to a chromosomal mutation that is vital to the reincarnation of personalities. "Probing the nature of discovery, Ghosh makes the leap from the question of how malaria is transmitted to the questions of how stories, knowledge, and the self are transmitted," explained Sandee Brawarsky in the Lancet. Critics particularly praised Ghosh's writing skills, which one Publishers Weekly contributor maintained outweighed the confusing plot: "The evocations of place and character are so eloquent that the reader is able to forgive … all nagging, basic confusions about the plot." Sudeep Sen concluded in World Literature Today: "Cleverly constructed and beautifully written, The Calcutta Chromosome infects both the imagination and emotion of the reader hauntingly and convincingly."

Continuing his theme of the complexities of national identity in British-colonized Asia with The Glass Palace, Ghosh attempted an epic tale of nineteenth-century Burma (now Myanmar). Featuring multiple characters and viewpoints over the span of 115 years, the novel begins with the exile of Burma's last monarch, King Thebaw, then continues through the time of the Japanese invasion, independence, and into modern times. Along the way, the subject affords Ghosh many opportunities to criticize European colonialism and third-world, repressive regimes. Several critics felt that the author was overly ambitious in his attempt to cover so much history, prompting Frederick Luis Aldama to remark in World Literature Today that "Ghosh tries too hard to fit too much information about too many characters into what feels like too little space." Nevertheless, the author's writing skills save the day, in the opinion of reviewers, including Aldama, who concluded: "Ghosh's multiply mirrored, dazzling cast of characters manage to buff and shine much of this prosaic dullness back to splendor." A Publishers Weekly contributor similarly felt that "there is almost too much here for one book," but added that Ghosh is an "endlessly resourceful storyteller."

Reviewers of Ghosh's next novel, The Hungry Tide, also found some problems with the narrative, though they consistently praise the author's use of language and ability to convey a sense of place. Set in the Sundarbans of the Ganges delta, a region consisting of thousands of tiny islands, where the geography is constantly shifting and natives' lives are threatened by tigers and crocodiles, the novel is "tinged with a melancholic and fragile beauty," according to an Economist reviewer. The main characters are Piya Roy, an American biologist of Indian descent who is researching freshwater dolphins; Kanai Dutt, a businessman from Delhi who comes to the area to visit his aunt, who possesses a dangerous letter from her late husband about a massacre perpetrated by Indian authorities; and Fokir, an illiterate but wise fisherman who helps Piya in her quest. Together, these diverse personalities allow the author to comment on "how social behaviors in India are still molded by the legacy of its caste system," as Mary Ann Gwinn observed in a Seattle Times review. Philip Graham, writing in New Leader, regretfully felt that the novel "is marred by numerous beginner's errors, unworthy of a writer of Ghosh's stature," including "clichés," "dialogue … frequently loaded with unmediated information," and "narrative threads too easily tied up into neatly packaged little moral lessons." The author redeems himself somewhat, however, through the "brilliance" of his prose, Graham added. Gwinn similarly observed that the novel is "a bit melodramatic" and the author can be "too neatly prophetic" in his plotting, but she asserted that "Ghosh is an exceedingly acute chronicler of people and possessed of an exquisite sense of place."

Critics suggest Ghosh's ability to convey a sense of place so well comes from his intimate familiarity with the countries he writes about. Not only has he lived in places like India, Sri Lanka, and Egypt, but he still travels there often, despite now being a professor in America. In both his fiction and nonfiction, an ongoing theme in his work, commented Iyer in Time International, is this: "How to be true to one's divided inheritance." He is also pensive about the "disappearance of seeming paradises," Iyer pointed out. This latter theme comes from the fact that Ghosh has been a witness to so much destruction, including civil war in Sri Lanka and the terrorist attacks in New York City on September 11, 2001. Among his nonfiction works, his Incendiary Circumstances: A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times comments on all the destruction wreaked by humanity. Even when he writes about natural disasters, such as the tsunami that struck Southeast Asia in 2004, humans cause much of the misery that follows, as Ghosh points out when he discusses the unhelpful bureaucrats in India who did nothing while victims were left to fend for themselves. Other tragedies are also discussed, too, including the ongoing fighting in Kashmir between Pakistanis and Indians, even though the land there is neither strategically nor economically important. "Thoughtful, sometimes mournful essays on the state of the world, with little good news in sight" is how a Kirkus Reviews critic described the resulting book, while Iyer declared it a "sober and highly dignified book."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 44, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1986.

Contemporary Novelists, 6th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Ghosh, Amitav, The Shadow Lines, Viking (New York, NY), 1989.

PERIODICALS

Ariel, April-July, 2003, Nivedita Majumdar, "Shadows of the Nation: Amitav Ghosh and the Critique of Nationalism," p. 237.

Economist, July 17, 2004, "Ebbs and Floods on the Ganges: To Come," review of The Hungry Tide, p. 81.

Kirkus Reviews, November 1, 2005, review of Incendiary Circumstances: A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times, p. 1171.

Lancet, December 21, 1996, Sandee Brawarsky, review of The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium and Discovery, p. 1717.

Library Journal, February 1, 2001, David W. Henderson, review of The Glass Palace, p. 125.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 11, 1993, Pico Iyer, review of In an Antique Land, p. 2.

Mosaic, September, 2005, Barbara Romanik, "Transforming the Colonial City: Science and the Practice of Dwelling in The Calcutta Chromosome," p. 41.

Nation, September 29, 1997, Amitava Kumar, review of The Calcutta Chromosome, p. 36.

New Leader, May-June, 2005, Philip Graham, "Taming Unruly Lands," review of The Hungry Tide, p. 45.

New Republic, August 4, 1986, Hanif Kureishi, review of The Circle of Reason, pp. 40-41.

New Statesman, February 28, 1986, Liz Heron, review of The Circle of Reason, p. 27; September 6, 1996, Shirley Chew, review of The Calcutta Chromosome, p. 47.

New York Times Book Review, July 6, 1986, Anthony Burgess, review of The Circle of Reason, pp. 6-7; July 2, 1989, Edward Hower, review of The Shadow Lines, p. 10.

O, The Oprah Magazine, May, 2005, Vince Passaro, "Tigers in the Night: A Sprawling, Stormy, Magnificent Novel of India Untamed," review of The Hungry Tide, p. 236.

Publishers Weekly, August 11, 1997, review of The Calcutta Chromosome, p. 383; November 13, 2000, review of The Glass Palace, p. 82; September 26, 2005, review of Incendiary Circumstances, p. 71.

Seattle Times, May 18, 2005, Mary Ann Gwinn, "'The Hungry Tide': In Nature's Maw."

Time International, January 16, 2006, Pico Iyer, "Within the Chaos: In His Dispatches from Troubled Countries, Amitav Ghosh Is a Participant, Not Just an Observer," p. 48.

Times Literary Supplement, October 28, 1988, Maria Couto, review of The Shadow Lines, p. 1212; January 15, 1993, Ahdaf Soueif, review of In an Antique Land, p. 7.

UN Chronicle, December, 2005, Hasan Ferdous and Horst Rutsch, "The Hungry Tide," interview with Amitav Ghosh, p. 48.

Washington Post Book World, July 16, 1989, S.P. Somtow, review of The Shadow Lines, p. 9.

World Literature Today, winter, 1997, Sudeep Sen, review of The Calcutta Chromosome, p. 221; summer-autumn, 2001, Frederick Luis Aldama, review of The Glass Palace, p. 132; March-April, 2006, Alan Cheuse, review of The Hungry Tide, p. 22.