Amitav Ghosh, living between worlds

By DAVID GILCHRIST

"One thing I have come to realise is that, in any important sense, I'm really an Indian novelist. I mean my ideas, my engagements, are all very much with India."

The author of successful novel The Glass Palace, new novel The Hungry Tide and an assortment of non-fiction and fiction, Amitav Ghosh is almost thinking aloud as he tries to explain who he is.

The 48-year-old author continues his answer by folding himself into what amounts to the diaspora of Indian literati. That is because Ghosh, for at least part of the year, lives not in India but in Brooklyn, a largely African-American borough of New York.

Ghosh certainly knows what it is like to have a feeling of displacement. Born in Calcutta, his father's work for the Indian Foreign Ministry saw the family move to Bangladesh, or East Pakistan as it was then.

When Ghosh was 9, his family moved to Sri Lanka. At 11, his parents sent him to boarding school in northern India while they moved on to work in Iran.

Eventually, Ghosh graduated from the University of Delhi then studied social anthropology at Oxford. About a decade ago, he moved to the United States with his wife to raise his family and now shares time between Brooklyn and Kolkata (Calcutta).

Ghosh says his family history of living away from India inspires his writing. "I have always been writing about people who are like me in a sense — I mean Indians who have been displaced and are living in another place with long histories of displacement and dislocation."

He has continued that idea in The Hungry Tide, in which he also compares those living on the fringes against life in the mainstream. He achieved this by using the backdrop of the tidal lands of the Indian Sundarbans in the Bay of Bengal, an area of contrasting beauty and incredible poverty.

Curiously, the story is based in part on research Ghosh did with a New Zealand scientist studying river dolphins in Cambodia (in the novel, an American-domiciled Indian biologist comes to the Sundarbans to track rare river dolphins).

His research also involved time with the Indians of the Sundarbans. Ghosh's voice is urgent as he explains how that research led him to witness "the absolute deprivation in which people subsist there" — something he found incredibly confronting.

Although denying he is an activist, Ghosh explains, "in the course of writing this book I became drawn deeper and deeper into the issues of the environment. As far as the Sundarbans is concerned, it became clear to me that this is a profoundly endangered environment and this environment is going to be destroyed very soon, most likely by human action."

The author, who produces sensitivity in his writing, hopes for a world "in which there is not the kind of ferocious hunger we see in the Sundarbans" — a hunger and an environmental threat he sees born from poverty.

Perhaps that thought tells the most about Amitav Ghosh.
In the end, the Indian author shows his real heart is not in Kolkata or Brooklyn but in the hope that "if individuals think about the little things we can do to help each other ... things could change for the better".

An evening with Amitav Ghosh

Thursday October 7, 6pm

Unity Books, 19 High St, Central Auckland

For bookings or more information go to Unity Books or call (09) 3070731.