1

The Glass Palace 3

Minna Proctor on The Glass Palace 4

Anirvan Sen on The Glass Palace 4

Subhajit Ghosh on The Glass Palace 6

Ahdaf Soueif on The Glass Palace 7

Meenakshi Mukherjee on The Glass Palace 7

Ruth Scurr on The Glass Palace 10

Ira Pande on The Glass Palace 11

The Shadow Lines 14

E-Zine The Reviewer on The Shadow Lines 15

(The review appeared first in the E-Zine, "The Reviewer" On 26

September 1999) 15
Anastasia Guha on The Shadow Lines 17

The Hungry Tide 19

Supriya Choudhury on The Hungry Tide 20

The Calcutta Chromosome 24

Robert Asprin on The Calcutta Chromosome 25

Dancing In Cambodia, At Large In Burma 26

Salil Tripathi on Dancing In Cambodia, At Large In Burma 27

( First published in the Far Eastern Economic Review) 29

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The Glass Palace

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Minna Proctor on The Glass Palace

When you heave your final sigh and turn the last page of Amitav Ghosh's new novel, The
Glass Palace, you feel as if you've travelled for 100 years on foot, through the most distant
and lush lands on the globe. The Glass Palace is as close as a person tucked cozily into an
armchair on a rainy day can get to the rubber plantations of Malaysia, the teak forests of
Burma, and the bustling city streets of Rangoon and Singapore, bearing witness to the
demise of the Burmese monarchy and the rise and fall of the British Empire. A stately and
vibrantly detailed family saga set in south-central Asia against the tumultuous backdrop of
the 20th century, The Glass Palace is the story of Rajkumar, an Indian shop boy orphaned in
Mandalay, who, on the eve of the 1885 British invasion, falls in love with Dolly, a beautiful
handmaiden to the Queen of Burma. The conquering British send Burma's King Thebaw
and his loyal court, including the young handmaiden, into exile in remote India. Rajkumar,
left behind in Burma, is adept at working the new colonial system, and he manages to build
a thriving lumber business in the growing teak trade. Elegantly dressed in English clothes,
Rajkumar sets off to India to find Dolly, the only woman he has ever loved. The long years
in exile have devastated the royal family, leaving Dolly as their only servant. Through the
wiles of the colonial administrator's wife, Uma Dey, Rajkumar wins an audience with Dolly
and convinces her to return to Burma and marry him. She agrees, and shortly after her
departure everything falls apart.

The royal family is embroiled in scandal, the administrator commits suicide, and Uma,
grieving more over the absence of her dear friend Dolly than over her husband's death,
eschews the traditional life of an Indian widow and goes abroad, where she becomes a
revered leader of India's burgeoning independence movement. And this is only the
beginning. The story of Uma, Dolly, Rajkumar and their children, nieces, and nephews --
and their children's children, nieces, and nephews -- takes us from the rubber boom of the
industrial age to the front lines of World War II, from India's struggle for independence to
Burma's fall and its transformation into Myanmar under a military dictatorship.

"In the five years it took me to write The Glass Palace," recounts Ghosh, "I read hundreds of
books, memoirs, travelogues, gazetteers, articles and notebooks, published and unpublished;
I travelled thousands of miles, visiting and re-visiting, so far as possible, all the settings and
locations that figure in this novel; I sought out scores of people in India, Malaysia,
Myanmar and Thailand." Inspired by the legends of his own ancestry, Ghosh's massive
research makes for a wealth of detail. The Glass Palace is at once a gargantuan history, a
family saga, and an adventure story. It is so richly and compassionately rendered you come
to feel you are somehow part of its vast extended family whose story finds its humble
origins in two orphans standing innocently on the threshold of the 20th century.

Anirvan Sen on The Glass Palace

Only a handful of people in this world have the capacity to interweave history with travel to
make a story and one of them definitely is Amitav Ghosh. After his excellent work on Egypt

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(In An Antique Land), the author has used his craftsmanship to narrate a story from the Raj
days. The Indian author has introduced the subtle cultural differences with extreme finesse
and sensitivity in his latest work, The Glass Palace. Based in the East, in the land which was
known as British India, the story starts from Burma (Myanmar) and traverses through pre-
independent India, parts of Bangladesh, Malaysia and Singapore. The story touches upon
various aspects of the Raj days. Indian soldiers donning the British uniform, the subtle
racism, which existed between the locals and the foreigners, between the yellow and white,
between the yellow and the brown. The story of The Glass Palace is based on two human
groups: one stemming from the Burmese Royal family from Mandalay and the other
individual, an orphan called Raj Kumar. The story starts with Raj Kumar, an orphan looking
for a job and landing up in Mandalay.

The early parts of the book cast a light on the life of local people, when the British had just
started to make their mark in that part of the world. Before the arrival of the British, the life
in those parts existed in equilibrium. The trading mostly used to happen between
neighbouring countries and a little volume would be traded outside the circle. With the
growth of the British dominance, the scenario changed forever. "There was only one person
in the food stall who knew exactly what that sound was, that was rolling in across the plain,
along the silver curve of the Irrawaddy, to the western wall of Mandalays fort. His name
was Rajkumar, and he was an Indian, a boy of twelve - not an authority to be relied upon.

"The pleasure about reading Amitav's work comes, not only from the story but the
descriptions of the lifestyle, behaviour of people, the subtlety of the cultural impact and of
course, the details of the day to day life.

"The swellings had grown to pineapple size and the elephants hide had begun to crack and
break apart. As the hours passed the lesions grew yet larger and the cracks deepened. Soon
the pustules began to leak a whitish ooze. Within a short while the animals hide was wet
with discharge. Rivulets of blood-streaked pus began to drip to the ground. The soil around
the animals feet turned into sludge churned with blood and ooze." Amitav has an eye for
detail and that can be explained from the descriptions, he talks about a disease called
Anthrax (which is also used as a biological war weapon in the present day). By dramatizing
the effects of the disease, the impact on the readers mind is astounding. Amitav writes his
description with the precision of a medical practitioner."The King walked out of the
pavilion, flanked by Queen Supayalat and her mother. The procession passed slowly
through the long corridors for the palace, and across the mirrored walls of the Hall of
Audience, past the shouldered guns of he guard of honour and the snapped-off salutes of the
English officers.

Two carriages were waiting by the east gate. Just as he was about to step in, the King
noticed that the ceremonial canopy had seven tiers, the number allotted to a nobleman, not
the nine due to a king." One of the most interesting facts about the Amitavs writing is his
ease of using details of culture and customs which are not his native custom. He picks up
the details and writes with such finesse, that people can be mistaken for thinking about the

5
descriptions being written by a local. All in all, this book can definitely be classified as one
of the best-written novels describing that period of history for that part of the world.

Subhajit Ghosh on The Glass Palace

Magnificent. There's no other word for it. It's a well-researched book and thoroughly
enjoying. Spanning a period of about sixty years, it's a tale about three generations of a
family and similar in some respects to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of
Solitude. Human emotions make the novel engaging. Love, betrayal, treachery, racism,
friendship & sacrifice pervade the unfolding of events. Romance mingles with vivid
description of a war as the principal characters move from Rangoon and Mandalay in
Burma to Malaya, and from Ratnagiri, Calcutta and Madras in India to the United States. It's
a story about an Indian man, RajKumar Raha who lands up in Burma in a state of penury
owing to a shipwreck. From his humble beginning as a sailor boy, he rises to become an
extremely affluent influential timber trader in Burma. This 550 page fictional work with
Burmese history woven into the narrative chronciles his family's experiences, their ups and
downs, the hatred that exist in Burma for Indo-Burmese family (Rajkumar marries a
Burmese lady Dolly ) providing us in between with a wealth of information about Burma,
the timber trade, killer diseases like antharax which attack and kill elephants etcetera
without becoming dry and boring.

Reading through the novel one is convinced about the tremendous research the writer must
have done for this work while dealing with a subject that won't come naturally to any writer.
A Bengali who grew up in various places, Amitav Ghosh writes about Burmese life with an
authority and a flair that a good Burmese writer would have been proud of. His description
is awesome and he's as precise about military life as he is when he is handling erotic
sequences or the make of a foreign car. Amitav's prose is captivating. Below are just two
beautiful extracts from the book."Everything he owned was in that place, all that he ever
worked for; a lifetime's accumulation of labour stored as a single cache of wood. He thought
of the elephants and the bombs falling around them; the flames leaping from a well-stacked
wood; the explosions, the trumpeting.

It was he who has concentrated all his holdings in this one place -- that too was part of the
plan -- and now the bombs have claimed it all. But it didn't matter; nothing mattered so long
as Neel was unharmed. The rest were just things, possessions. But Neel ..... " The second
extract. "They came across a lady one day, dressed in a beautiful silk sari, a peacock-green
Kanjeevaram. She looked to be from a wealthy family but she too had run out of food. She
was trying to bargain with a group of people who were sitting by a fire. Suddenly she began
to undress and when she'd stripped off her sari they saw she had others on underneath,
beautiful, rich silks, worth hundreds of rupees. She offered up one of these, hoping to
exchange it for a handful of food. But no one had any use for it; they asked instead for
kindling and wood.They saw her arguing vainly with them -- and then perhaps recognising

6
finally the worthlessness of her treasured possession, she rolled he sari into a ball and put in
on the fire; the silk burnt with a crackling sound, sending out leaping flames.

"Flashback techniques has been used in several places. Scenes from Burmese rebellion are a
recurring motif. These images are terribly disturbing and continues to haunt and those
who've seen John Boorman's hard-hitting film BEYOND RANGOON on the atrocities by
Burmese military Govt. on its citizens will be convinced that this resourceful land, called
the Golden Land, rich in precious stones, rubber among other items is/was truly in the grip
of anarchy for a long time. In the last pages, havoc caused by a Japanese invasion in Burma
and its effect on the Army officers and the people have been penned quite forcefully. It's
undoubtedly one of the best books I have read in recent times.

Ahdaf Soueif on The Glass Palace

Rajkumar Raha is 12 when he is orphaned on a sampan tethered in a mangrove-lined

estuary on the way to Chittagong. He makes his way to Mandalay just ahead of the British
arriving to depose King Thebaw. On the eve of the Royal Family's departure into exile,
Raha sees, in the Glass Palace, Dolly, the Queen's 10-year-old handmaid. This - in fine
Romantic tradition - is obsession at first sight. Almost 20 years later, having made his
fortune in timber, Raha seeks out Dolly in her exile in Ratnagiri. Throughout the novel, the
Empire expands and then retracts, fortunes are won and lost, the face of the world changes.
The novel follows Raha's family through 3 generations and many cities. It teems with
servants of the British Empire and with their colonial subjects. This is the East as seen by its
own people, described by a writer whose allegiance is simply to the human. Ghosh is one of
the most sympathetic post-colonial voices to be heard today. He looks at love and loyalty,
and examines questions of Empire and responsibility, of tradition and modernity. A funny,
sad, entertaining, wise and - ultimately - a hopeful book. I loved it.

Meenakshi Mukherjee on The Glass Palace

There was a fabled hall called the Glass Palace in Mandalay before the British annexed
Burma in 1885.Its walls of shining crystal and mirrored ceiling "shimmered with sparks of
golden light" when the lamps were lit. Situated in the spacious garden of the fort where the
Burmese royal family lived, it was a dazzling emblem of the country's elegance and self-
sufficiency until devastated by foreign rule. Towards the beginning of the novel the readers
are given a brief glimpse of the palace through the awe-struck eyes of an eleven year old
urchin as it was being sacked and plundered by the local people before the British troops
arrived to take possession. After that, for nearly five hundred pages there is no mention of
the building which gives the novel its title. Just before the novel ends, the Glass Palace is
mentioned twice,: we find a young research student of Rangoon University writing a
dissertation on a famous nineteenth century history of Burma called The Glass Palace
Chronicles; later, one of the few survivors in this vast saga of intertwining families,
7
rediscovered in the final chapter, is seen to be running a modest photo studio called The
Glass Palace where young people, stifled by the military dictatorship of present day Burma,
gather to open their minds, to discuss books, pictures and ideas. Without labouring a
symbolic point, in retrospect the author is able to imbue the title with images of loss as well
as hope. This is how most of the novel works. There are so many issues, so many events and
so many people involved that the author rarely ever pauses to create special effects or
heavily underline an idea.

The story spans more than a century in the history of the subcontinent, people get involved
in unexpected relationships across countries and cultures, wars are fought, rebellions
quelled, political and ethical issues are debated, fortunes are made and lost. The writer
reports everything accurately, thoughtfully - his precision backed up by meticulous research.
Military manoeuvres, models of automobile and aircraft, drilling of oil, timber trade,food,
clothing, every detail is historically specified. No one is directly indicted in the novel, not a
single person idealised. Yet casually mentioned details get linked across space and time to
form haunting patterns, their cumulative effect staying with the reader long after the novel is
over. For all its vividness of description and range of human experiences, The Glass Palace
will remain for me memorable mainly as the most scathing critique of British colonialism I
have ever come across in fiction. The novel begins and ends in Burma, a country physically
so close to us yet about which our ignorance and indifference have been abysmal. In our
childhood we occasionally heard of rich Indian families who had come back from Burma to
escape Japanese bombing. No school book taught us anything about the country's past
before it became part of the empire and I am embarrassed to admit that my first
acquaintance with Mandalay and emperor Thebaw was through a silly Rudyard Kipling
jingle about a British soldier and Burmese girl:

"Her petticoat was yellow and little coat was green. Her name was Supi-yaw-let, just the
same as Thebaw's queen".

Thebaw's proud queen, I am chastened to learn now from Amitav Ghosh's book, was
Supayalat, feared and admired blindly by the people of Burma. The unceremonious removal
of the king and the pregnant queen from Mandalay to distant Ratnagiri in the west coast of
India ( the reverse movement of Bahadur Shah Zafar's deportation to Rangoon a generation
ago ) was an astute move by the conquering British, successful in humiliating the royal
couple completely, also erasing them from public memory at home. Forgotten and
abandoned, the king and queen led a life of increasing shabbiness and obscurity in an
unfamiliar territory while their country got depleted of its valuable natural resources - teak,
ivory, petroleum. The rapacity and greed inherent in the colonial process is seen
concentrated in what happened in Burma, and the author does not gloss over the fact that
Indians were willing collaborators in this British enterprise of depredation. Not only did
two-thirds of the British army consist of Indians when Burma was conquered, years later the
Saya San rebellion was brutally suppressed by deploying Indians soldiers. A small news
item appeared in a Calcutta newspaper with the gruesome picture of sixteen decapitated
heads on display but in the thirties the Indian public was too pre-occupied with its own
national movement to notice what was happening in Burma. The novel also lays bare the
8
process by which Indian agents became rich by transporting indentured labourer to work in
the plantations.The actual protagonists in this novel are not kings and queens but ordinary
people - some of them orphaned or displaced - buffeted around by forces greater than
themselves. "There are people who have the luck to end their lives where they began. But
that is not something that is owed to us ", says one of them. As in other Amitav Ghosh
novels, human lives spill over national boundaries, refusing to stay contained in neat
compartments.

A person is remembered not as Burmese, Indian, Chinese,Malay or American - but merely

as Uma, Dolly, Saya John, Alison, Dinu, Neel or Daw Thin Thin Aye. That Dinu is also
called Tun Pe and Neel's other name is Sein Win further destabilises nation-based identities.
Yet, paradoxically, nationalism is a major concern in this novel. Two of the most crucial
debates in are predicated upon this. These debates are not ancillary to the narrative, one
cannot skip them in order to get on with the story. As in a classic Indian novel about nation
and identity written early in the century - Gora (1909) whose plot progressed through
discussion of ideas - in The Glass Palace too - meaning lies not in individual utterances, but
in their dialogical negotiations, the emphasis being on the plurality of viewpoints. The
stances of most of the major figures get gradually modified during the course of the novel
through mutual interaction - theory and experience, duty and emotion often getting into each
other's way to complicate both polemics and praxis. Among the many debates ( e.g. about
colonialism and women, Gandhi and Ghadar party, Congress vs. anti-Fascist position on the
Second World War etc.) the one that reverberates most resonantly in the novel relates to the
ethical dilemma of the Indian officers in the British Army some of whom later deserted to
form the INA ( Indian National Army).

Prefigured in scattered episodes involving other characters, this debate gets finally
crystallised through two young officers in the Ist Jat Light Infantry, commissioned just
before the Second World War: Arjun Roy and Hardayal Singh. First ever in his bhadralok
family to join the army, Arjun is overwhelmed by its glamour, takes pride in the fact that his
regiment has received medals for "putting down the Arab rebellion in Mesopotamia" and
"fighting the Boxer rebels in China".But it is Hardayal, born in a family which had served
the army for three-generations who is beset by doubt. The inscription at the Military
Academy in Dehra Dun had said "The safety, honour and welfare of your country come
first, always and every time." Where was this country they were supposed to defend ? The
moral crisis comes to a head in a forest hide-out in Burma where they lie injured after a
Japanese attack. Hardayal confesses he cannot carry on with his divided life: " In the
trenches...I had an eerie feeling. It was strange to besitting on one side of a battle line,
knowing that you had to fight and knowing at the same time that it wasn't really your fight...
knowing that you risked everything to defend a way of life that pushes you to the sideline.
It's almost as if you're fighting against yourself." Arjun's code of honour will not permit him
to think these thoughts and to him the idea of joining the Japanese for the liberation of India
would be a senseless exchange of one set of rulers for another. The conflict is further
tangled by Arjun's relationship on the one hand with his loyal batman Kishan Singh who
wants to know what the English word `mercenary' means and whether it can be applied to
them, - and his admiration for and allegiance to his British commanding officer.
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Each of Amitav Ghosh's books, (except Countdown), invariably focuses on themes in
history and connections across geography that have seldom been explored before, and does
so with imagination supported by archival research, his narrative inventiveness matched by
his luminous prose. The Glass Palace, his most ambitious work so far, makes no effort to be
lyrical or evocative in style, the careful chronicling of an eventful century prioritised over
experiments with language and technique. Yet there are many moments of sheer
incandescence that seem to appear almost incidentally. For example, the description of
Alison waiting under the tin awning of a railway station "wearing sunglasses and a long
black dress. She looked limp, wilted, - a candlewick on whom grief burnt like a flame." Or
in another instance when the English soldiers marched towards Mandalay and people ran in
panic. "Rajkumar was swept along in the direction of the river. As he ran, he became aware
of a ripple in the ground beneath him, a kind of drumbeat in the earth, a rhythmic tremor
that travelled up his spine through the soles of his feet." In this clear lucid narrative, vividly
concretised characters, their desires, longings and ambitions are constantly swayed and
disrupted by the tide of history but the blending of the public and the personal spheres is
seamless. Some of the concerns of Ghosh run through several texts. A scene of mob
violence which was at the centre of The Shadow Lines reappears in different contexts at
least twice in The Glass Palace foregrounding the helplessness of individuals during
collective frenzy., an increasingly common feature of our time. The incubus-like military
regime in Burma today, which sucks its life from the rest of the country had been mentioned
Dancing in Cambodia.As I write this review, reports of further repressive measures by the
government in Myanmar on Aung San Suu Kyi and her followers appear in our newspapers,
almost as a sequel to the novel I have just finished reading.

One would have expected a sense of dejection at the end of a novel that deals with so much
human tragedy, wars, deaths, devastation and dislocation. But the last section of the novel is
electrifying. When the two surviving members of the families in Calcutta and Burma meet
through their common bond of photography - which incidentally is a running motif in the
novel - there is in a sense an opening up of doors. The most unexpected are the last three
pages which encapsulate past and present, evoking a mood of reconciliation and peace
through a startling and bizarre image. Each reader of The Glass Palace will pick out a
different strand from this weave of many stories. " A word on the page is like a string on an
instrument. My readers sound the music in their heads, and for each it sounds different",
says a writer in the novel, using a different metaphor. Whichever story or music one prefers,
no reader is likely to come out of the experience of reading this remarkable novel unscathed.

Ruth Scurr on The Glass Palace

There is something daunting about a novel of more than 500 pages (unless you are a speed
reader or infinitely leisured). And long historical novels raise a further question: why read
fiction instead of fact? Fortunately, Amitav Ghosh is such a fascinating and seductive writer
that any doubts have blown over by page 5 of The Glass Palace. The novel begins in
Mandalay on the eve of the Anglo-Burmese war in 1885. The British motivation was
10
commercial: control of a lucrative teak trade. The invading force was composed largely of
Indian recruits. Their contentious position inside the British Army was destined to become
still more confused on foreign ground. And Burma, at this time, was a courtly society, free
from abject poverty or illiteracy, ruled by a revered king and queen capable of legendary
cruelty. Some novelists let history rumble on discreetly in the background. But Ghosh sets
his sights high, aiming to reflect the broad sweep of historical change over three generations
and three countries: Burma, India and Malaya, from the end of the 19th century to the
aftermath of World War II.

His narrative follows a line of loosely connected characters, moving like shadows across a
panoramic picture. The effect is breathtaking. At the head of the line are two children,
Rajkumar and Dolly. Both are orphans, but their similarities end there. Rajkumar is an
Indian working on a food-stall in Mandalay and Dolly is one of the Burmese queen's trusted
courtiers, responsible for caring for the young princesses. When the royal family is exiled,
first to Madras, then to a remote coastal village between Bombay and Goa, Dolly is one of
the few servants to accompany them. Her striking beauty is spotted by Rajkumar as he loots
and grieves with the crowd. He grows up and makes a fortune in the teak trade, expanding
under British direction. He goes in search of Dolly, now in her thirties, living in squalor
with the languishing royal family. They marry and settle in Rangoon. Their sons grow up
with far-flung connections and interests in the rubber plantations of Malaya, the escalating
campaign for independence in India, the imploding British Army and the complex economy
and politics of Burma. Even more astonishing than his ambitious plot is Ghosh's technique
for executing it. The key to this is the pace. Characters meet and marry within sentences.
They become pregnant and give birth two pages later.

Power in Burma changes hands in a paragraph. World War I begins and ends in less than ten
pages. But if it is fast, The Glass Palace is also rigorously controlled. Ghosh is a deeply
serious writer, sure of his human and historical insights, and confident in his ability to
communicate them. I cannot think of another contemporary writer with whom it would be
this thrilling to go so far, so fast.

Ira Pande on The Glass Palace

BURMA, THE FORGOTTEN (or forbidden) land, has a new chronicler. Using the Glass
Palace, the derelict seat of the last King of Burma, Amitav Ghosh spins an enchanting web
that absorbs the reader so completely that the 550-odd pages can be read over a long
weekend. Spanning centuries and generations and straddling the space of three countries,
India, Burma and Malaysia, this is a saga that could have exhausted the skills of a lesser
writer. But in the hands of Ghosh, a historian by training, an adventurous traveller and a
sensitive writer of fiction, it becomes a confluence of all three. With remarkable sleight of
hand, Ghosh juggles history, fiction and travel writing to produce a story so absorbing that it
can be read variously as a history of Burma over the last two centuries, an enduring
romance between two families, and a travelogue about a forgotten Buddhist territory.

11
The book reminds one of a spider's web 9a still centre from where shimmering strands
radiate in various directions along structured paths that trace the same space over and over
again in ever-widening circles. In the architecture of such a work, the beginning and end
have no meaning, what matters is the delicate but tensile strength of the strands that cling to
your mind as cobwebs cling to your skin. Avoiding the media res beginning, much favoured
by writers of family sagas, Ghosh's book uses a dramatic moment to introduce one of its
central characters, an orphan Rajkumar Raha. Guns boom over Mandalay as the last King is
overthrown and the confused flight of the Royal Family is described by little Rajkumar with
the artless fidelity of a child reporting a spectacle. As the royal entourage is herded
unceremoniously from the Glass Palace, images are etched forever on his mind. First among
these is the face of Dolly, one of the maids accompanying the princesses.

Thus, one strand of history is woven dextrously with the beginning of another history 9the
saga of Rajkumar's life. The plot bobs along on the turbulent events of the succeeding years
and the first phase ends with the complete impoverishment of the King of Burma in faraway
Ratnagiri. Ironically, this is the same arc that makes Rajkumar, the destitute orphan, so rich
from trading in teak, that another "king" is born. Rajkumar travels from Burma to Ratnagiri,
marries Dolly and bears her triumphantly back to the land of her birth. Exile and return are
thus at once a tragedy and a romance. Throughout the book, Ghosh uses one end to signal
another beginning so that at one level, nothing changes and yet everything does. There is a
strong suggestion of Buddhist metaphysics in this technique. Life, death, success and failure
come in cycles and Ghosh uses the conceit of a pair of binoculars early in the book to
sensitise the reader to this perspective. Thebaw, the Burmese king, watches over the
Ratnagiri harbour with his binoculars, "predicting" the return of sailing vessels, and warning
the townspeople of impending disasters. What makes the tragedy of human life bearable is a
graceful acceptance of the inevitability of pain and suffering.

The King dwells on the word karuna, "the immanence of all living things in each other, for
the attraction of life for its likeness". The connotations of this are clear to Dolly in a manner
that is almost incomprehensible to Rajkumar, who cannot detach himself from pain and
suffering in the way she, or the Burmese king, can. Another impressive technique is the
manner in which the focus shifts between one country and another: Ghosh distributes the
major protagonists over Burma, India and Malaysia and then proceeds to knit them together.
The strand he uses here, unlike the motif of love that irradiates the first section, is history.
Against the giant screen that he erects over the stage of South Asia, he enacts a shadow play
with characters that bring alive the colonial history of this region. The spoils of the trade in
teak, rubber and slaves along with the lush tropical forests take the plot up to the point when
the first world war breaks out and everyone, and every country, is sucked into a macabre
dance of death. The violence of the war years brings sweeping changes in the lives of
characters and countries alike. Ghosh brings alive the ideology of the INA, dwelling as only
a historian can, on the irony of two sets of Indian soldiers locked in a battle on opposing
sides in alien territory. But by far the most moving account is the Long March from Burma
to India. Refugees displaced by war and hatred stumble along the sticky mud of the
Irrawady that clings and sucks. Ghosh prose mimics photography in describing individual
horror pictures.
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Word pictures are Ghosh¹s forte and he uses the character of Dinu, a dedicated photograher,
to imprint these on the text. The last movement of this long story brings the book up to the
gates of Aung San Suu Kyi¹s house and the final spotlight falls on " a slim, fine-featured
woman-'beautiful beyond belief." In 1996, as Suu Kyi addresses the thousands who gather
at her gates each weekend, there are two whose search through life has led them there. For
among the rapt crowd of listeners are Rajkumar¹s son Dinu, the last link with the original
cast of characters, and Bela (a historian like Ghosh) his niece from the India branch of the
family. Hope, reconciliation, affirmation and faith 9Suu Kyi¹s presence leads the wheel to
turn yet again. A perfect arc brings the book to a perfect end.

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The Shadow Lines

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E-Zine The Reviewer on The Shadow Lines

(The review appeared first in the E-Zine, "The Reviewer" On 26 September 1999)

Such moments are rare indeed these days when one takes a book in the hand and is
completely captivated by it after reading the first few pages. That happened to me recently
when I started reading "The Shadow Lines" by Amitav Ghosh. "The Shadow Lines,"
Ghosh's second novel, was published in 1988, four years after the sectarian violence that
shook New Delhi in the aftermath of the Prime minister, Indira Gandhi's assassination.
Written when the homes of the Sikhs were still smouldering, some of the most important
questions the novel probes are the various faces of violence and the extent to which its fiery
arms reach under the guise of fighting for freedom. Ghosh's treatment of violence in
Calcutta and in Dhaka is valid even today, more than ten years after its publication. What
has happened recently in Kosovo and in East Timor show that answers still evade the
questions which Ghosh poses about freedom, about the very real yet non-existing lines
which divide nations, people, and families.

Much has been written about Amitav Ghosh's novels. "The Novels of Amitav Ghosh",
edited by R. K. Dhawan was published this year by Prestige Books, New Delhi. If I find it
necessary to say something more about Ghosh's writing it is because this novel moved me
as none other did in the recent times. The Shadow Lines is the story of the family and
friends of the nameless narrator who for all his anonymity comes across as if he is the
person looking at you quietly from across the table by the time the story telling is over and
silence descends. Before that stage arrives the reader is catapulted to different places and
times at breath taking tempo. The past, present and future combine and melt together
erasing any kind of line of demarcation. Such lines are present mainly in the shadows they
cast. There is no point of reference to hold on to. Thus the going away - the title of the first
section of the novel - becomes coming home - the title of the second section. These two
titles could easily have been exchanged.

The narrator is very much like the chronicler Pimen in Pushkin's drama Boris Godonow. But
unlike Pushkin's Pimen this one is not a passive witness to all that happens in his presence,
and absence. The very soul of the happenings, he is the comma which separates yet
connects the various clauses of life lived in Calcuttta, London, Dhaka and elsewhere. The
story starts about thirteen years before the birth of the narrator and ends on the night
preceding his departure from London back to Delhi. He spends less than a year in London,
researching for his doctorate work, but it is a London he knew very well even before he puts
a step on its pavements.Two people have made London so very real to him - Tridib, the
second son of his father's aunt, his real mentor and inspirer, and Ila his beautiful cousin who
has travelled all over the world but has seen little compared to what the narrator has seen
through his mental eye. London is also a very real place because of Tridib's and Ila's friends
- Mrs. Price, her daughter May, and son Nick. Like London comes alive due to the stories
related by Ila and Tridib, Dhaka comes alive because of all the stories of her childhood told
to him by his incomparable grandmother who was born there. The tragedy is that though the
narrator spends almost a year in London and thus has ample opportunity to come to terms

15
with its role in his life, it is Dhaka which he never visits that affects him most by the violent
drama that takes place on its roads, taking Tridib away as one of its most unfortunate
victims. Violence has many faces in this novel - it is as much present in the marriage of Ila
to Nick doomed to failure even before the "yes" word was spoken, as it is present on the riot
torn streets of Calcutta or Dhaka. But the speciality of this novel is that this violence is very
subtle till almost the end. When violence is dealt with, the idea is not to describe it explicitly
like a voyeur but to look at it to comprehend its total senselessness.

Thus the way "violence" is brought into the pictueis extraordinarily sensitive: The narrator
says, talking of the day riots tore Calcutta apart in 1964, "I opened my mouth to answer and
found I had nothing to say. All I could have told them was of the sound of voices running
past the walls of my school, and of a glimpse of a mob in Park Circus." I have never
experienced such a sound, but God, how these sentences get under the skin, how easy it is to
hear that sound, how the heart beats faster on reading these sentences! There are many other
reasons why "The Shadow Lines" is so special a book. It has many of the characteristics that
elevate a book to the level of unforgettable literature.

First of all there is this simple language. These days when doing acrobatics with words and
language has become equivalent to paving new directions in the literary scene, it is heart
warming to read a book in which straight forward language is used to convey what the
author wants to say. And what messages are conveyed, what new ideas are unearthed! I am
one of those readers who likes reading because of the power inherent in words. Whenever I
read a new book, I always hope that the book contains sentences and words - at least a
couple of them - that illuminate the heart and mind for a long time after reading, sentences
which simply make life easier to live. There is a treasure of such sentences to be discovered
in "The Shadow Lines". For example, look at what Ghosh says about knowledge and
ignorance: "...he knew the clarity of that image in his mind was merely the seductive clarity
of ignorance; an illusion of knowledge created by a deceptive weight of remembered
detail." And there is this most beautiful of all sentences I have read for a long, long time -
"And yet, when I look at her (the grandmother), lying crumpled in front of me, her white
thinning hair matted with her invalid's sweat, my heart fills with love for her - love and that
other thing, which is not pity but something else, something the English language knows
only in its absence - ruth - a tenderness which is not merely pity and not only love." It is this
tenderness of feeling, this feeling of "ruth" of which the novel is so full of, which moves
me. For all the violence that plays the central role in the novel, it is this abundant feeling of
tenderness in the novel that the narrator feels for the people, for Tridib, for Ila, for the
grandmother, for May, for Robi, that has remained with me. Ghosh is also a humorous
writer. It is serious humour. Single words hide a wealth of meaning, for example, the way
Tridib's father is always referred to as Shaheb, Ila's mother as Queen Victoria, or the way
the grandmother's sister always remains Mayadebi without any suffix denoting the
relationship. Also look at this passage that describes how the grandmother reacts on
discovering that her old Jethamoshai is living with a Muslim family in Dhaka. "She
exchanged a look of amazement with Mayadebi. Do you know, she whispered to Robi, there
was a time when that old man was so orthodox that he wouldn't let a Muslim's shadow pass
within ten feet of his food? And look at him now, paying the price of his sins."
16
"Ten feet! Robi explained to May in hushed whisper, marvelling at the precision of the
measurement. How did he measure? he whispered back at my grandmother. Did he keep a
tape in his pocket when he ate?"

"No, no", my grandmother said impatiently. "In those days many people followed rules like
that; they had an instinct".

"Trignometry!", Robi cried in a triumphant aside to May. "They must have known
Trignometry. They probably worked it out like a sum: if the Muslim is standing under a
twenty-two foot bulding, how far is his shadow? You see, we're much cleverer than you: bet
your grandfather couldn't tell when a German's shadow was passing within ten feet of his
food."

As I read Robi's comments, I laughed, at first. Then I had to swallow hard at centuries old
injustice these words were trying to hint at. Finally, another important reason the novel
succeeds is because the main characters are very real, almost perfectly rounded. I specially
love the grandmother. She is the grandmother many of us recognise. In her fierce moral
standards, spartan outlook of life, intolerance of any nonsense - real and imagined, she is as
real as any patriarch or matriarch worth the name. And there is this very loveable character
of the narrator. It is that of a boy who warms your heart, it is that of a man who knows and
has lost love - more than once in his life - and thus makes you feel like hugging him close to
your heart. On all scores Amitav Ghosh's "The Shadow Lines" is a novel which must be
read and re-read, thought about and discussed upon. It is a book that stays with the reader
long after the last page has been turned and the light has been switched off.

Anastasia Guha on The Shadow Lines

A circle is the most perfect formation in nature and a straight line, the fastest way to get
from one specific point to another. If you employ these rules to navigate your world, then
this book is either going to be inscrutable or provide a fresh perspective depending on your
frame of reference. It starts with many a description of the narrator/ protagonist's eccentric,
ethereal but always brilliant cousin Tridib, who gives him worlds to travel in and eyes to see
them with, long before he leaves Calcutta. A wanderlust sets in which leaves him imagining
that he is seeing the first pointed arch in Cairo or touching the stones of the great pyramids
of Cheops. Ironic then, that for the woman he loves - his beautiful cousin Ila, who would
always break his heart - has been all around the world and lived in many places but has not
traveled at all. All she remembers of Cairo is the inconvenient location of the `ladies' at
airport. But that is part of her irresistible charm.

Ghosh weaves together personal lives of the characters who populate his novel with public
events of that time with a rare poignant humor, which evokes, in many cases
simultaneously, a smile and a sigh. Written in first person ensures that the reader is carried,
not strung along, within the frame of the author's thoughts. A unique position from which to
17
watch the boy growing as he finds himself sucked into history: his old grandmother stuck in
a family feud with members in Bengal and the soon to be `liberated' Bangladesh and all the
fears and uncertainties that lie within that premise. The relationship with England that took
Tridib and his parents to London, and many years later took the author down the same
streets and lanes that Tridib's indelible descriptions ensured he knew like the back of his
hand. Their English friends daughter May's love for Tridib with its hopeless spiral into
tragedy, ultimately provides the author with a glimpse of the final redemptive mystery.

Out of an intricate web of memories, relationships and images Ghosh builds his narrative.
And while it never quite takes the form of a story that a reader can recount, its greatest
achievement is perhaps best bought out by the distinguished poet A.K Ramanujan, who says
``He evokes things Indian with an inwardness which is lit and darkened by an intimacy with
Elsewhere.'' Stream of consciousness, is a genre which has housed some of literatures most
remarkable minds. With it constant forward and backward movement between different
times and realities, used to express associations that the author tends to make in different
situations at different points, Ghosh has paid his dues to join that club. I liked the book for
not trying to explain its eccentricities by being profound. For putting into words what, for
most of us, remains a nebulous knot of understanding or a half-idea. For being focused but
without the distressful need to tie loose threads up into a neat bow on the last page. In short
for not being a tired potboiler.

18
The Hungry Tide

19
Supriya Choudhury on The Hungry Tide

(Published in BIBLIO)

Amitav Ghosh's greatest gift as a writer may well be his sense of place. A landscape, a city,
a village on the edge of a desert: it is these images that we summon from his novels when
we are distanced from them in memory. Perhaps this is what makes him such a master of the
travel narrative, a form whose contours are shaped by places and their histories. His most
recent book, The Hungry Tide, is set in the Sundarbans, the vast, intermittently submerged
archipelago, largely covered by mangrove forests, that forms the delta of the Ganges as it
debouches into the Bay of Bengal. The region is supposed to derive its name from the
sundari tree, as the mangrove is locally called; in his book, Ghosh speculates on whether the
name may not more simply correspond to sundar ban, beautiful forest, as many prefer to
believe. Two-thirds of the Sundarbans are in Bangladesh, only one-third in India: it is a
region whose fishing folk easily traverse the imaginary boundaries of the modern nation-
state, crossing, as the wind and the tides take them, the mouths of the many river-channels
that set up a unique turbulence of fresh and salt water washing the islands of the
archipelago.

To this land discovered by the ebb-tide, bhatir desh, as Ghosh calls it in a remarkable and
poetic application of the term used in Mughal land-records, come a young cetologist from
the United States on the trail of a breed of freshwater dolphin, the Orcaella brevirostris, and
a middle-aged linguist who runs a translation bureau in Delhi. The two are thrown together
by chance, and for a time the male translator, Kanai Dutt, accompanies the female scientist,
Piya Roy, as an unofficial interpreter. But the novel is not really about their developing
acquaintance. Much more centrally and in a far more extended way, it is about the many
histories of the region they have come to. Kanai's aunt Nilima has lived in one of the islands
for years; she sends for him after the discovery of a diary belonging to her long-dead
husband Nirmal, a Marxist schoolteacher whose withdrawal from political activism had
brought them to settle in a Sundarbans village. As Kanai reads the diary, its narrative of past
events, hopes and disappointments (held together as much by the inexorable flow of
historical time as by Nirmal's constant evocation of lines from Rilke's Duino Elegies), is
interwoven with other stories. These include Kanai's own memories of a visit he paid his
uncle and aunt as a child, his present experiences as a guest at Nilima's hospital, and Piya's
search, aided by the fisherman Fokir, for the Orcaella.

At the heart of Nirmal's diary is an historical event: the eviction of refugee settlers from the
island of Morichjhapi in the Sunderbans by the Left Front government of West Bengal in
1979. For the old Communist in the novel, like many others at the time, this act of state
violence was a betrayal of everything left-wing politics in the post-Partition era had stood
for. It was these very leftists who had declared, in the face of Dr Bidhan Chandra Roy's
attempts to find land in neighbouring states for the successive waves of refugees who
crossed over from East Pakistan in the forties and fifties, that they would not consent to a
single one being resettled outside West Bengal. And indeed the conditions of such
resettlement were harsh and alien. In 1978 a group of refugees fled from the Dandakaranya
20
camp in Madhya Pradesh and came to the island of Morichjhapi in the Sundarbans with the
intention of settling there. They cleared the land for agriculture, and began to fish and farm.
But their presence there alarmed the Left Front ministry, who saw it as the first of a possibly
endless series of encroachments on protected forest land, and the settlers were evicted in a
brutal display of state power in May, 1979. Many, like the girl Kusum in Ghosh's novel,
Kanai's childhood playmate who becomes the repository of Nirmal's idealist hopes, were
killed. Nirmal, who stays with the settlers during those final hours, is later discovered
wandering in the port town of Canning; he is shattered by the event and never recovers. As
the last significant expression of the trauma of Bengal's Partition, the story of Morichjhapi
occupies a central place in the novel.

But it is only one of the histories - part fact, part fiction - that the Sundarbans of Ghosh's
novel enfolds. There are others: the life cycle of the Orcaella, the story of its identification
and the aquatic history of which it is part; the story of the port town of Canning, and the
folly of its foundation by the British; the storms, named cyclones by the shipping inspector
Henry Piddington, which ravage the region with irresistible ferocity; the visionary ambition
of Sir Daniel Hamilton, who bought ten thousand acres of land in the Sundarbans and set
out to build an ideal community; the tale of Bon Bibi and her worship, recounted in many
folk epics, fusing Muslim and Hindu faith; and of course the present histories of Kanai,
Nilima, Piya, Fokir, Fokir's wife Moyna and their son Tutul, among others. In a land
regularly obliterated, at least in part, by the flood tide or by the huge tidal waves dredged up
by cyclones (one of which marks the novel's climax), Ghosh makes us aware of the
sedimentation of human history, the layers of past knowledge, experience and memory that
constitute our human sense of place.

In our reading of such a work, characters may seem less important to us, appearing more as
aspects of the places they occupy. Yet this would not be a true reflection of Ghosh's project
in this novel. His sense of Bengali social history is, as always, unerring and profound. One
of the most moving things in the novel is the textual tenor, at once perceptive and self-
deceived, of Nirmal's diary, especially as it stands framed by the more robust and enduring
social activism of his wife Nilima, and by the common sense of his companion on his last
journey, the fisherman Horen Naskor. To some extent the two visitors to these islands, Piya
and Kanai, are thin-fleshed outsiders to the end, contributing much less by way of personal
depth to the complicated tangle of genealogies and emotional and sexual history that makes
up the plot. Yet their presence as focalizing centres is vital to the narrative: each, in her or
his own way at once egotistic and work-obsessed, offers an opportunity to the narrator
which Ghosh never fails to exploit.

Most remarkable is Ghosh's treatment of Kanai, a self-important, sometimes cocksure

individual who ultimately becomes the locus of some of the novel's central reflections on
language and on translation. It is through Kanai's translation, his mediating sensibility, that
Nirmal's personal record, the Rilke that he reads in Buddhadeva Bose's Bangla translation,
and the folk narrative of Bon Bibi that he writes down from Fokir's recitation, reach us, so
the novel seems to claim, in English prose and verse. Some Bengali reviewers of The
Hungry Tide have already asserted that their experience of reading it was like that of
21
reading a novel in Bangla. This claim seems to me mistaken. Rather, the novel seems to
push us into the crisis at the heart of translation, the paradox of representation itself. At one
level, everything in the novel is translated, in that it seeks to represent, in English, a life, a
culture, that is experienced principally through the medium of Bangla and its local variants.
At another, nothing is: if representation is always a form of translation, one language is at
any time as good as another - at most it may involve special difficulties that are also special
opportunities. The one moment at which Kanai is robbed of the language that is his
livelihood and his means of control is when, stranded on the mudbank, he sees the tiger.
"The sounds and signs that had served, in combination, as the sluices between his mind and
senses had collapsed: his mind was swamped by a flood of pure sensation.” The meeting
with the tiger, which may mean death or life, here as in the story of Dukhey and Dokkhin
Rai, lies at that boundary of language which representation seeks, but never succeeds in
containing.

Piya's scientific quest constitutes another pole of perception. Not that she is lacking a
background: she has a family history, which she recalls in moments of reflection, a present
involvement with Fokir and Kanai, and a future, which she calmly claims at the novel's
close. But it seems to me that her function in the novel is to represent the life she studies in
the mingled waters, salt and sweet, of the tidal pool at Garjontala; the always-threatened,
always-precious material of scientific enquiry which is also, in the fragile and immensely
overburdened ecosystem of the Sundarbans, nature itself. She is by no means the novel's
only conduit for reflections on the unique environment that affords her material for study.
Nirmal, thinking of the necessity that compels the refugees to clear the forest and till the
land on Morichjhãpi, as of the honey-collectors and woodcutters who go into the forest and
are eaten by tigers and crocodiles, also asks a question central to the novel's concerns:
whose is this land, nature's or man's? It is a question that cannot be answered, not even by
the idealizing solution of co-existence. Piya is ultimately too practical and obsessive to
bother with large answers; Nirmal is overcome by the very effort of posing the question.

It is the tone of the novel, alternately poetic, scientific and businesslike, that may suggest
the nature of Ghosh's own thoughts on this subject. Beside the manifest threats posed by
human settlement to the unique diversity of aquatic and terrestrial life in the mangrove
swamps of the Sundarbans, beside the constant depletion of aquatic species by fishing and
trawling, there are equal dangers for the human settlers. Not only does the forest take its
toll; the tides, too, exact their revenge. The constant erosion of dykes and embankments, the
silting up of channels, the flooding by storm-waters, make human life on the islands no
more, in the last analysis, than an accident or miracle. It was on such miracles that the hopes
of visionaries like Daniel Hamilton or the settlers of Morichjhapi were founded, and indeed
there is no reason why human beings, like the many other species that uniquely inhabit this
delta, should not serve to illustrate nature's capacity for survival. But the imminence of
disaster, whether natural or human, covers the world of this novel with a kind of film by
which "precious objects appear doomed and irrecoverable in the very moment of their
perception", as Freud said in his essay On Transience. Its mood is elegiac, like that of the
river novel in Bangla, as Bhaswati Chakravorty has named the form: but at the same time, it
embodies the practical hope that leads us as human beings to continue to struggle and build
22
on our doomed planet. Ghosh's critique of past and present mistakes, whether administrative
or political, is at all times muted and restrained.

In 1975, four years before the Morichjhapi eviction took place, I spent some time
unofficially assisting one of the furthest outreaches of the WHO's Smallpox Eradication
Programme, in the Sundarbans. We were based in Gosaba, staying in the Hamilton
bungalow, but apart from one or two officially arranged trips in the Forest Department's
motor-launch, we spent our days in a country boat much like Fokir's, navigating up the
narrowest of creeks and river-channels to conduct a house-to-house check of how far
inoculation had reached. We saw no tigers and escaped the more common scourges of
snakebite and diarrhoea. But I still have vivid memories of that time: the Christian
headman's wife in Gosaba, with her fabled remedy for snakebite; the honey-collector who
showed us the marks of a tiger's claws on his back; Manna, the boatman, cooking a hot
curry of shrimps and pumpkin for us in the steerage as the boat lay moored in a creek;
accounts of Bon Bibi's worship from sceptical government officials; the State Bank of India
'agent' in Gosaba, a grumpy, depressed individual who crossed with us in the steamer from
Basanti. This was my first acquaintance with the legacy of Sir Daniel Hamilton and his
ambitious plans for the development of the region, a map of which hung in the Hamilton
bungalow. Later, long after the Morichjhapi tragedy, I came to know more about Gosaba
and the Sundarbans from family connexions who had spent most of their lives there. I think
one of the greatest compliments one could pay Amitav Ghosh and his novel is to say that it
is true to many experiences not contained in it. It offers the sense of a place whose history,
partly known, partly guessed at, can illuminate the ways in which human beings have lived
on this earth and made use of its fruits.

23
The Calcutta Chromosome

24
Robert Asprin on The Calcutta Chromosome

It is really hard to define what kind of book this is, something like a Victorian science
fiction/fiction label might come somewhat close. The story jumps back and forth in time
and follows different characters, weaving everything together beautifully. In a future an
egyptuian clerk (named Antar) in New York City bumps into a lost ID card. It belongs to a
strange man that Antar met a long time ago. The man claimed to be the world authority on
Ronald Ross, the man that solved the mystery with malaria in Calcutta 1898. While Antar
digs up information about what really happend to the man, a mystery unravels and by the
time Antar finds himself involved into it, it's to late to get out.

I'm glad that I read this book, it was really a joy to read. Amitav Ghosh tells the story in a
way that you have a hard time putting the book down, you get completly caught up in the
book.

25
Dancing In Cambodia, At Large In Burma

26
Salil Tripathi on Dancing In Cambodia, At Large In Burma

In 1906, two years after succeeding his half-brother Norodom, King Sisowath of Cambodia
went on an extensive visit to Marseilles at the colonial exhibition, accompanied by the royal
ballet troupe. France responded warmly to the charming dancers and the king's entourage.
The sculptor Auguste Rodin was so enchanted by the dancers that he travelled with them
and made evocative sketches of their fluid, graceful movements. Lamenting their inevitable
departure, a moved Rodin said: "What an emptiness they left for me! I thought they had
taken away the beauty of the world. I followed them to Marseille (sic); I would have
followed them as far as Cairo." According to the chroniclers, one milestone of that visit was
the signing of the Franco-Siam treaty, which saw today's Thailand returning to Cambodia
the provinces of Battambang and Seam Reap, the latter being particularly meaningful for
Cambodia's self-image, as the Angkor Wat temples are in Seam Reap.

But as historian David Chandler has pointed out in "A History of Cambodia", Sisowath had
little to do with the return of the provinces to Cambodia. He was in France more as a
connoisseur. In fact, he was not vastly different from Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, the ruler of
Avadh in northern India known for his poetry and fine taste in art, who saw his kingdom
being swallowed by Lord Dalhousie's empire-building in the 1850s, but did not prevent that
by waging a foolhardy war. When Sisowath returned, he wrote a proclamation to his people,
in which he praised French planning and management which he said he wanted to use to
develop his country. The tone was humble and grateful, telling his people to emulate the
good that France has to offer, while hiding the anger he felt towards the French who sent
him a bill for the hospitality. Kings being kings, Sisowath soon forgot his development
plans, and his exhortations sound didactic when read today. But as the Indian novelist
Amitav Ghosh perceptively observes in this slim volume of fascinating reportage from
Cambodia and Burma, "For all the apparent servility of its tone, it makes no cultural or
political concessions at all: the 'emulation' it calls for is entirely within the domain of
technology and economics ...If this is the view that has come to prevail throughout South-
east Asia, no one is likely to thank him for it." What has the 1906 dance tour got to do with
today's Cambodia? Plenty, if one sees Cambodia through the eyes of Ghosh, whose novels
include the acclaimed "Shadow Lines" and the part-anthropology, part-literature, "In An
Antique Land". Ghosh sees a link which connects stories and lives in incredible ways.
Ghosh picks up the thread of Sisowath's visit to France, and with rare ingenuity and
empathetic understanding of modern Cambodian history, places it in the context of the
return of civil society in Cambodia. Consider this: in early 1900s, a royal Cambodian ballet
troupe performs in France. In 1950s, young Cambodian students, including Saloth Sar (later
Pol Pot),study in France and pick up ideas that transform the Cambodian countryside into a
vast graveyard.

And in 1993, when civil society returns to Cambodia, the Cambodians demonstrate it
through dance. Ghosh displays the irony of it all: of how the protagonists are linked; how
the tragedy is, geopolitical realities apart, essentially a Cambodian tragedy. Travelling
through the countryside with mine-diffusing sappers, Ghosh seeks out people whose
memory plays tricks. They want to forget an immediate past but who yearn to remember, a
27
more ancient past; they are fighting the tendency to forget everything. He meets Chea Samy,
a dance instructor, who knew Sisowath's daughter, Princess Soumphady who had gone on
the French tour. And when Ghosh reminds her about Soumphady, she responds with "a
smile in an indulgent, misty way in which people recall a favourite aunt." But the same
Chea Samy is the wife of a man whose youngest brother was Pol Pot. And it is Pol Pot's
men who killed Chea Samy's dance instructor, who took over from Princess Soumphady,
whom Chea Samy recalls meeting as a small girl. These coincidences--of evil coexisting
with aesthetics--is what intrigues Ghosh. Ghosh is impressed by the phenomenon of a
people who had been robbed of their education, names, profession and identity, who now
pick up the small strands and clues that link them back to the source of their culture.
Watching Cambodians responding, with tears in their eyes, to a dance performance, Ghosh
concludes: "It was a kind of rebirth: a movement when the grief of survival became
indistinguishable from the joy of living." The Czech author Milan Kundera rued the decline
of Central Europe during the years of Soviet dominance of eastern Europe. Kundera used a
Czech word to describe that anguished longing: litost. Ghosh doesn't have a similar singular
word, but by revealing how a brutalized people are trying to reconstruct their society, by
seeking inspiration from high art, he casts light on a similar human disposition.

In another essay in the same volume, about Burma, Ghosh follows the well-trodden path of
contemporary Burmese history. Ghosh meets Aung San Suu Kyi twice, and recalls an earlier
meeting with her when she lived in Oxford with her family during more tranquil times. But
what sets his reportage apart from other writers are the details. Ghosh presents fascinating
vignettes about the ethnic Indian community in Burma: about how Indian families, now
pauperized in Calcutta after leaving Rangoon in the late 1940s, waxed nostalgically about
that golden land and the fortunes they had made there. Ghosh goes beyond--to the very heart
of Burma's little-known wars--to the Karenni struggle. He crawls with the soldiers fighting
the SLORC forces and discovers an ethnic Indian leader committed to the freedom of the
Karenni region. While he intellectually realizes the futility of Karenni forces' struggle and
the inability of the province to survive as an independent nation state, he admires the
determination of the people fighting for it, and is conscious of the tragedy. These articles
first appeared in Granta and the New Yorker. The volume would have been considerably
enhanced had it included Ghosh's essay last year on the Indian National Army, which
appeared in the New Yorker, as that piece, too, deals with southeast Asia. The link between
those pieces and the INA piece is not tenuous. There is an Indian--and Indic--influence on
southeast Asia, which is visible in the form of the popularity of dangdut music in Malaysia,
the temples throughout the region from Vietnam to Burma and Indonesia, and the special
role the Hindu epic Ramayana plays in the lives of southeast Asians even today. (When
Jakarta burned in May, students in buses were singing songs extolling Anomon who had
destroyed Dasomuko's Lanka; Anomon being the monkey-god Hanuman and Dasomuko
being the Lankan king Ravana, from the Ramayana). However, Indian writers haven't
shown much interest in southeast Asia's history or culture.

Through his reportage, Ghosh is interpreting southeast Asian reality through south Asian
eyes. That is an important development in post-colonial discourse. For instance, at the
Khmer Rouge's torture chamber, the Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh, a guide once told
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me that she was perplexed that Asian tourists walked through the exhibits as though they
were watching pictures at an exhibition. But western tourists, sensitized by the holocaust,
were deeply moved and often wept. One possible explanation is that not enough Asians
have told Asia's stories in an accessible manner to other Asians. Ghosh's essays contribute to
that effort. The wounds in Cambodia are still fresh and raw, and documenting oral histories
is a monumental task. It is reassuring to know that writers like Ghosh are reading the Pol
Pot years with new, or different, eyes. They link strands that may remain oblivious to the
journalist in a hurry and are possibly peripheral to the concerns of historians who want to
count the dead and the tortured. But they weave a pattern that shows that the society's
tapestry is far more complex; one that we are only beginning to understand.

( First published in the Far Eastern Economic Review)

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