East-West (Purbo-Paschim) Part I by Sunil Gangopadhyay

                East-West is a Bengali novel set against the backdrop of the biggest exodus in human history—the 1947 partition of India. That a newly born country could exist as two geographically separated units was also an unheard of event. But the inevitable had to happen. Culturally and linguistically dissimilar, East and West Pakistan had to forge their different destinies.

             This novel is a record of those tumultuous times in East Pakistan as well as in Indian Bengal. But their problems were vastly different. The story, revolving around two college friends, both Bengali though one Hindu and the other Muslim soon takes into its expanding orbit other characters, families, issues. The two friends drift apart, separated by the political division, then each is caught up in his own problem. There is no sentimental reunion, in fact the novel precariously poised, steers clear of sentimentality. There is the unspoken and inescapable bitter conclusion— perhaps the twain can never meet. Under the deceptively simple surface are hidden deeper and more complex human issues. East and west were initially a demarcation on the map but soon west recedes further as younger people from the east migrate to the US and the UK leaving the aging parents at home. Sunrise and sunset are two other symbols spun into the fabric of the novel, pointing to the evolution of human life, the movement from birth to death. Thus from a partition novel set at a particular place and time, it rises to the level of the universal, encompassing the entire gamut of human emotions and cultural encounters.

             

Bengali original: Download here: 1 + 2.

The Imam and the Indian by Amitav Ghosh

Over the past two decades or so, Amitav Ghosh has enthralled readers with novels and travelogues that have acquired the status of modern classics: The Shadow Lines, In an Antique Land, The Circle of Reason, The Calcutta Chromosome, and The Glass Palace.

Much less known is the fact that, simultaneously, over all these years, Amitav Ghosh has been writing non-fictional prose — reflective essays, activist pieces, political commentary, book reviews, autobiographical articles, academic expositions, translations from Bengali, and literary anthropology.

Here, for the first time, is as complete a collection as can be made of the prose which reveals that relatively unknown Amitav Ghosh: the novelist as thinker, the man of ideas as a writer of luminous, illuminating non-fiction.

This considerable and distinguished body of writing has appeared sporadically and been scattered within periodicals and magazines, learned journals and academic books. It has never been available as a single body of ideas, as the large and singular bedrock upon which Amitav Ghosh’s fictional imagination has drawn. Readers of these wonderful essays will discover that — to quote the novelist himself — ‘despite the difference in form and diction, they share with my fiction certain characteristic subjects and concerns.’

Ghosh’s concerns here, as in his novels, are with exploring the connection between past and present, between events and memories, and between people, cultures and countries that have shared a past. India and Egypt, Islam and Hinduism, the Mughal Emperor Babur and the would-be empress Indira Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore's Bengal and Agha Shahid Ali’s Kashmir, the novel and history, fundamentalism and cosmopolitanism, migration and diaspora—all these themes come alive in the essays of one of the most lucid and captivating writers of modern times.

Contents

1 The Imam and the Indian

2 Tibetan Dinner

3 Four Corners

4 An Egyptian in Baghdad

5 The Ghosts of Mrs Gandhi

6 The Human Comedy in Cairo

7 Petrofiction: The Oil Encounter and the Novel

8 Empire and Soul: a review of The Baburnama

9 The Relations of Envy in an Egyptian Village

10 Categories of Labour and the Orientation of the Fellah Economy

11 The Slave of MS. H.6

12 The Diaspora in Indian Culture

13 The Global Reservation:Notes toward an Ethnography of International Peacekeeping

14 The Fundamentalist Challenge

15 The March of the Novel through History: the Testimony of my Grandfather’s Bookcase (Winner, Pushcart Prize, 1999)

16 The Greatest Sorrow: Times of Joy Recalled in Wretchedness

17 The Hunger of Stones (a translation of 'Kshudhita Pâshân' by Rabindranath Tagore)

18 ‘The Ghat of the Only World': Agha Shahid Ali in Brooklyn