Amitav Ghosh is my kind of writer. He doesn’t have the masterful genius of a Rushdie or a Naipaul nor perhaps the eccentric erudition of a Seth, nor the poignancy of Lahiri in detailing little everyday experiences. He writes with an anthropologist’s precision, taking care to situate his characters and themes in a well-defined historical context. He loves to dwell in those little-explored spaces where cultures intersect and identities emerge, classes collide and languages melt into each other, and equipped with his gift for lucid prose and power to relate in a way that is at once modest and deep, comes away as being extremely convincing for his pains. What’s more he has written consistently over twenty years and seems to improve with almost every book, and manages to remain fashionable in academia, and attractive to the lay reader, at the same time. These are no mean achievements in today’s bustling world of Indo-Anglian writing.
When you read the likes of Orwell there are moments when you jump up and say “Yess! that’s exactly what I feel too”. With a clever little narrative device, the author has articulated a little piece of your Weltanschaung, perhaps better than you yourself could have ever put it . Such literary resonances oftentimes happen with Ghosh too, not least the “compass on an atlas” episode from “The Shadow Lines” where the narrator picks up an old atlas and with a compass centered on Khulna draws out an arc through Srinagar. It flashes upon him that Chengdu and Chiang Mai, places one would have barely heard of, are closer to Calcutta than Kashmir is, and yet happenings in the Hazratbal shrine in that faraway valley could set off riots in Bangladesh, to be symmetrically reflected in Calcutta. This “yess” moment in one broad sweep ( like the compass’s swinging arc), ponders on the ironies of borders, on the meaning of identity, on the problematics of nation-states and expresses an aspiration towards a certain universal humanism. Read the rest of this entry »
বা ঙা ল না মা 
