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
