Amitav_Ghosh

CHAPTER – 1 INDIAN ENGLISH FICTION - ORIGIN AND GROWTH Indian Writing in English has contributed in the field of both English fiction and poetry. In the recent years, Indian fiction writers have been widely recognized by the West. Writers like Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Shashi Tharoor, Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai, Jhumpa Laheri have either won the prestigious literary Prizes or they have been short listed for it. Most of them have been praised for their creative English. Indian Writing in English has come quite a long way from the mere use of English language to the authentic tool for expressing one’s ideas, thoughts, concepts and imagination. It has attained maturity, but it is not that it suddenly emerged from nowhere. It has had its phases of development. Indian writers in English have made the most significant contribution to the field of the novel. Ever since the publication of Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s Rajmohan’s Wife in 1864, Indian novel has grown considerably in bulk, variety and maturity. What began as a small plant has now attained a luxuriant growth and branched off in various directions.. The development of Indian novel follows certain definite patterns, and it is not difficult to trace its gradual progression from the imitative stage to the realistic to psychological to the experimental stage. In the thirties the “Big Three” of Indian Writing in English arrived on the scene, and they were the founders of true Indo-English novel, though almost all the time they inevitably portrayed the village life and the concomitant effect of freedom movement. They could not keep themselves away from  the Gandhian philosophy, which consciously or unconsciously entered their creative writing. But it is in this phase that we come across excellent novels for the   first time, as is evident from Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (1935), R.K. Narayan’s Swami and Friends (1935) and Raja Rao’s Kanthapura (1938). It was R.K. Narayan who first portrayed a purely Indian sensibility. He is India’s most revered and prolific novelist. In the words of K .R. Srinivas Iyengar, He is one of the   few writers in India who take their craft seriously, constantly striving to improve the instrument, pursuing with a sense of dedication what may often seem to be the mirage of technical perfection. There is a norm of excellence below which Narayan cannot possibly lower himself. (1962: P.359) Though R.K. Narayan was not  radical as Raja Rao in his appropriation of English, Narayan is part of the process, which in his own word is an ‘Indianisation’ of English. Mulk Raj Anand showed to the West that there was more in the orient than could be inferred from Omar Khayyam, Tagore or Kipling. When he started writing fiction, he decided that he would prefer the familiar to the fancied. He had first seen his heroes as pieces of trembling humanity and loved them before he sought to put them into his books. Raja Rao was a child of the Gandhian age, and reveals in his work his sensitive awareness of the forces let loose by the Gandhian revolution as also of the thwarting or  steadying pulls of past tradition. But as a user of a foreign language he also confesses his limitation in a ‘Forward’ given by himself in his first novel Kanthapura. He writes, English is the language of our intellectual make up whereas our mother tongue is the language of our emotional make up. (1938: P.8) Such was the creative genius of these “Big Three” that they discovered a whole new world in Indo- English fiction. They examined minutely the Indian sensibility and exposed the foibles of the Indian way of life. In the forties, G.V. Desani’s All About H. Hatterr (1948) made a major breakthrough in formal experimentation and became a masterpiece of remarkable artistry. Hatterr’s dazzling, puzzling, leaping prose is the first genius effort to go beyond the Englishness of the English language. It created indelible impression in the minds of the readers by its highly evocative narrative technique and the language unparalleled in the history of Indo- Anglian fiction. After the 1950’s, however, Indian novelists interest moved from the public to private sphere. They began to delineate in their works the individual’s quest for the self in all varied complex forms along with his problems. Most of them in their eagerness to find new themes “renounced the larger world in favour of the inner man” and engaged themselves in “a search for the essence of human living”. Novelists like Anita Desai, Arun Joshi and Nayantara Sahgal changed through their works the face of Indian English novel and their works contain seeds of future development.  Anita Desai is  one of India’s leading authors. Most of Desai’s novels reveal the break down of relationship. She deals with the psychological aspects of her characters. Anita Desai explored the inner climate, the climate of sensibility in her novels and added a new dimension to the achievement of Indian women writers in English fiction. A striking feature of Arun Joshi’s fiction is his experimentation with different narrative techniques. While the trios are still creatively alive, the novelist of second generation keeps on bringing out remarkable novels from time to time. The contribution of Kamala Markandanya, Manohar Malgaonkar and others has already been recognized in and outside India. Beginning with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, known for engaging comedies of North Indian Urban middle class life, the women novelists have displayed not only authenticity but also brought a freshness to their works whereas  Kamala Markandaya takes us to the heart of a South Indian village where life has apparently not changed for centuries. She depicted rustic and urban realism in her work. Another writer Nayantara Sahgal, with her work Rich Like Us (1985), has shown a very charming way of story telling, and Kamala Das with her autobiographical and bold works treaded the paths hitherto unknown for Indo-Anglian novelists. Among the contemporary writers, Amitav Ghosh has shown his genius in the Indian English fiction. His two novels – The Circle of Reason (1986) and The Shadow Lines (1988) established Ghosh as “the finest writer who were born out of the post Midnight’s Children revolution in Indo-Anglian fiction. Vikram Seth attained a dizzy height of success with The Golden Gate (1986) and A Suitable Boy (1993). He stunned the literary world with his novel A Suitable Boy. In its forbidding size, the novel can be compared with Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace or Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Upamanyu Chatterjee, with his novel English August (1988), got great success. His tone was ironic and he hit all the foibles of the Indian bureaucracy. Chatterjee brilliantly uses Indianised English in the novel. His contemporary Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel (1989) is one of the greatest achievements of Indian English fiction. In the 1990s, Rohinton Mistry has emerged as a significant novelist. His Such a long Journey (1991) is his maiden attempt in the genre in which he deals with the predicament of modern life. Arundhati Roy is one such talented writer of the post- Midnight’s Children era who shows real psychological depth while conveying the realities of culture and history. Her novel The God of Small Things has earned much critical attention all over the world and fetched her  Booker Prize. Undoubtedly, Roy has managed to free her from the shackles of conventional writing. She successfully experimented with the language, and has been duly rewarded for that. As with Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai’s work also manages to explore the post-colonial chaos and despair. Her first novel Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard satirizes society at large. Her novel The Inheritance of Loss (2006) spans continents, generations, cultures, religions, and races. She handles all these with ease like a master craftsman. Her narrative style, creative use of language and handling of plot put her among the leading Indian English fiction writers. And this is acknowledged by the Booker Prize she got for the novel. Indian fiction in English has come a long way from the triumvirates of the thirties to the modern recent English fiction writers. The language which was once treated as a language of the foreigner or the language of the elite class is viewed differently. As the number of readers Indian English fiction has increased. So the quality of writing has also improved. The writers are now no longer active users of English but they have English as their first language (Lingua franca). They express themselves with native proficiency. They are the writers who think and write in one language, which is English. They have travelled in various continents and they have something substantial to tell their readers. Indian English fiction is now a world literature. It has struggled, endured indifferences of the west and now finally emerged as a clear winner among the recent fiction writers. Recent years have witnessed a good number of Indian English fiction writers who have stunned the literary world with their works. Their works have enriched the world literature, and they have been awarded with accolades and prizes in the field of literature. But a careful study of their development makes it clear that there are two kinds of writers who contributed to the genre of novel: The first group of writers focused on the various social problem of India like poverty, class discrimination, social dogmas, rigid religious norms etc. which has an appeal to the West. The second group of writers includes those who are global Indians, who are Indian by birth but they have lived abroad, so they see Indian realities objectively. They are at ease with the English language and have enriched English language with their creativity. Even though handling Indian sensibility these writers are no longer the slavish imitators of English. They have used English so creatively that the freshness becomes a prominent feature in their language. They have experimented with the language and fused Indian spirit in the foreign language. They have coined new words and idiomatic expressions in English and added a new flavour in English language. Some of these terms are now accepted as English words.  The West relished it with zest and they have their permanent place in the world literature. There was a time when the West used to recognize the ‘Third World’ writers with a sense obligation rather than genuine acceptance.  It is often argued that if one wants to be noticed in the west, one should present the East in unfavorable light. Often the Indian writers who present India, its culture in the unfavorable light are considered for the awards. The west has a typical notion about the third world, where their eyes only see poverty, wretchedness, terrorism, lack of system, failure of democracy and so forth. And the writers, voicing one of these are sure to be recognized by the West. But in the last few years, the scenario has changed. The Indian writers are major contributors to the English fiction and they are no longer a ‘sympathy seekers’. They have their English and their genuine experience to share. Apart from this, yet another reason for which Indian writers are also recognized is their innovative experiments in the genre. These writers, who have created a new form, have been handsomely rewarded. It can be a narrative innovation or linguistic experimentation.  Such writers have native-like proficiency of the English language; they know how to handle English creatively. So for them form and style are equally important in their story. Often we find autobiographical elements in their works. These writers have reached the height from where they can tell their own tale in the language suitable for their native set. Such writers are often awarded for their linguistic experimentation and genuine tale. The Age of Amitav Ghosh and the Influence of Amitav Ghosh as an Artist If we go back to the list of Indian Booker Prize Winners, we see that the writers of the Indian origin like Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai and the recent winner Arvind Adiga have one thing common in their writings – they are not traditional Indian English writers. All the three are at ease with the English language, rather English is their first language. So medium is not at all a problem for them. They can use English as naturally as they breathe. And what is more important is that these writers have lived abroad for major part of their life, so they have imbibed and assimilated the Western trends and it lends them the distance to have an objective view on India and Indians. These writers have come across many Englishes of the world and showed the world their English. Amitav Ghosh is a popular and highly respected Indian author. In his novels and essays, he draws heavily upon the character, traditions, and dichotomies of his native land, yet Ghosh's protagonists and themes often extend beyond India's actual boundaries, most notably toward the Middle East and Great Britain. Through this discourse, Ghosh's works expose the cross-cultural ties between India and its former colonial ruler as well as with its kindred neighbors. Ghosh 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. Amitav Ghosh was born on July 11, 1956, in Calcutta, India, to Shailendra Chandra, a diplomat, and Ansali Ghosh, a homemaker. He traveled frequently in his youth, living in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), Sri Lanka, Iran, and India. Ghosh attended Delhi University and received his B.A. with honors in history in 1976 and his M.A. in sociology in 1978. In 1978, he began studies at Oxford University in social anthropology. While at Oxford, Ghosh studied archives of documents from twelfth-century Egypt and was granted a scholarship that allowed him to travel to a small Egyptian village in 1980 to further his research. The village was located in the delta of the Nile River and Ghosh lived among the fellaheen, or Egyptian peasants. He graduated from Oxford earning a Ph.D. in social anthropology in 1982. From 1983 to 1987, Ghosh worked in the Department of Sociology at Delhi University. In 1986, Ghosh's first English-language novel, The Circle of Reason, was published and was awarded France's Prix Medici Etrangère. In 1988 and 1990, Ghosh returned to the Egyptian village he visited previously to continue his research. His third book, In an Antique Land (1992)—which is both a travel-memoir and a historical study—resulted from Ghosh's continuing interest in twelfth-century Egyptian culture. Ghosh has won numerous awards, including the Annual Prize from the Indian Academy of Letters in 1990. In 2001, Ghosh declined a nomination for a regional Commonwealth Writers Prize. Ghosh has served as a visiting professor at several universities, including the University of Virginia, Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania, and American University in Cairo. Ghosh has also held the title of distinguished professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Queens College, City University of New York, and has worked as a contributing writer to Indian Express, Granta, and New Republic. The majority of Ghosh's writing focuses on exploring geographical and social boundaries. His first novel, The Circle of Reason, is a complex tale of a young Indian boy, Alu, and his adventures in India and abroad. The novel was inspired by Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. Alu becomes an apprentice weaver and, after a tragic event, flees across the ocean to the Middle East, eventually traveling to North Africa. In his travels, Alu encounters a myriad of eccentric characters of varied nationalities. It is in this atmosphere that Ghosh provides commentary on the nomadic proclivities of southern Asian and Middle Eastern societies. The work is divided into three sections, comprising the three main phases of Alu's life. Each of these phases also parallels a trio of concepts—reason, passion, and death—characteristic of ancient Indian literature and philosophy. In The Shadow Lines (1988), Ghosh juxtaposes the lives of two different yet intertwined families—one Indian and one English—to question the boundaries between their cultural and geographical settings. The title alludes to the blurring of the lines between nations and families, as well as the blurred lines 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. In an Antique Land is based on the historical and anthropological research that Ghosh conducted in Egypt during the 1980s. In the twelfth century, Jewish settlers in and around Cairo were reluctant to discard written documents for fear that the name of God might be contained within and they would therefore be desecrated if the paper was soiled. The synagogue created a geniza, or cellar, where people could dispose of written material without fear of desecration. For seven centuries, local Jews deposited everything from shopping lists, letters, religious texts, and legal documents into the Cairo Geniza. At the end of the nineteenth century, Western scholars discovered the geniza, appropriated its contents, and its wealth of history was divided among the Western scholarly communities. While studying at Oxford, Ghosh discovered records of these documents and noticed a reference to a slave named Bomma. Ghosh traveled to Egypt in an effort to uncover more information about the slave and the time period in which he lived. In an Antique Land recounts both Ghosh's research and his experiences while living in a small Egyptian village. His descriptions of his adjustment to the rural Egyptian way of life, and the curiosity with which his neighbors viewed him, form a large portion of the work. The Calcutta Chromosome (1996) is a science-fiction thriller set in three different time periods—late nineteenth century, 1995, and the near future—and three different locales—Calcutta, London, and New York. The mystery novel centers around the research for a cure for malaria. The narrative switches back and forth between time periods, revealing more and more clues to the puzzle. In The Glass Palace (2001), Ghosh revisits his recurring themes of displacement and the examination of boundaries. The novel begins with a young Indian boy, Raj, who witnesses the expulsion of the Burmese royal family by the British. The story follows both the forced exile of the royal family in India as seen through the eyes of Dolly, their loyal maid, and Raj's adolescence and success in capital ventures. As a prosperous young businessman, Raj travels to India and asks Dolly to marry him. She accepts and they move to Burma together. The novel recounts the lives of their family as they struggle to define their place in the world. One of their sons, Arjun, enlists in the British Army and transforms his lifestyle with an almost zealous energy—by eating taboo foods, dressing in Western style, and speaking British slang. He believes that, by becoming like the English, he is making himself a more ideal specimen of man. His blind faith in the British Empire quickly dissolves during the Japanese invasion of Malaya. Arjun discovers that, as an Indian, he has become a pawn to be used by the Empire, and he eventually rediscovers the beauty in the Indian ideology and culture. The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, The Calcutta Chromosome, and The Glass Palace all received sharply mixed assessments from reviewers. Some critics argued that the narratives—particularly in Ghosh's first two novels—lacked unity and suffered from the presence of too many characters and distracting digressions. Nevertheless, Ghosh has received overwhelmingly positive reviews for his arresting language and original prose style. Several critics have commented on the similarities between Ghosh's narrative style and traditional Indian and Arabic folk tales. Ghosh's work has also been favorably compared to the work of fellow Indian expatriate writer Salman Rushdie. The critical response to his nonfiction work In an Antique Land has been largely positive. Commentators have found his anthropologic comparisons between twelfth- and twentieth-century Egyptians to be interesting, well-researched, and thought provoking. His descriptions of his social interactions with the Egyptian villagers have also been commended for their insight and wit. Critics have noted Ghosh's strong affinity for the people and places he writes about and have argued that his empathy adds a warm, almost protective personality to his work. Life and the Works of Amitav Ghosh Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria and is the author of The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, and Sea of Poppies, which is the first volume of a projected series of novels, The Ibis Trilogy. The Circle of Reason was awarded France’s Prix Médicis in 1990, and The Shadow Lines won two presitigious Indian prizes the same year, the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Ananda Puraskar. The Calcutta Chromosome won the Arthur C. Clarke award for 1997 and The Glass Palace won the International e-Book Award at the Frankfurt book fair in 2001. In January 2005 The Hungry Tide was awarded the Crossword Book Prize, a major Indian award. His novel, Sea of Poppies (2008) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, 2008 and was awarded the Crossword Book Prize and the IndiaPlaza Golden Quill Award. Amitav Ghosh’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages and he has served on the Jury of the Locarno Film Festival (Switzerland) and the Venice Film Festival (2001). Amitav Ghosh’s essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New Republic and The New York Times. His essays have been published by Penguin India (The Imam and the Indian) and Houghton Mifflin USA (Incendiary Circumstances). He has taught in many universities in India and the USA, including Delhi University, Columbia, Queens College and Harvard.  In January 2007 he was awarded the Padma Shri, one of India’s highest honours, by the President of India. In 2010, Amitav Ghosh was awarded honorary doctorates by Queens College, New York, and the Sorbonne, Paris. Along with Margaret Atwood, he was also a joint winner of a Dan David Award for 2010. His recent novel, River of Smoke, is from John Murray (UK) in June 2011; Penguin India (July, 2011) and Farrar, Strauss & Giroux (US) in October 2011.