So much in the unsaid
The Hindu : Let me not pretend to say anything new. Amitav Ghosh, with his large body of fiction and non-fiction, has attracted the attention of critics and academicians.Any attempt to talk about his writings, and you’re hardly sure it hasn’t been articulated earlier. Share the feeling with the unpresumptuous writer and he, looking rather bashful says, “Oh, yeah… a lot has been written about my works…”.Speak about the tedious nature of these analyses and he’ll quickly add, “They scare me too… I don’t understand most of what is said, so I’ve stopped reading these theoretical pieces.”Amitav Ghosh’s writing is about the unsaid, undiscovered stories of history. In most of his fictional works one finds him negotiating with the past even as he reconstructs the present. This can be extended to his non-fiction too. In his essay on the Moghul emperor Babur, a man with remarkable literary and language sensibilities, he quotes a poem that Babur wrote while fleeing from the Uzbeks.“Like us many have spoken over this spring, but they were gone in the twinkling of an eye,/We conquered the world with bravery and might, but we did not take it with us to the grave.”Calling it a unique literary work, he says, “Its tone is disarmingly open and trusting, and in self-revelation it yields nothing to the confessional memoir of the 1990s.”He adds: “The Muslim fundamentalists of contemporary Afghanistan would do well to read ‘The Baburnama’: they would find that the past they want to return to is not quite what they imagine it to be.”Excerpts from an interview with the writer who was in the city for a Toto Fund for The Arts event:Many writers have a marked literary territory. Faulkner, Hardy, James Joyce, Pamuk… Calcutta becomes an indispensable geographical location in most of your writings. Even when we talk of colliding worlds, do specific physical locations anchor a sense of rootedness, and become embodiment…More
