‘This is the story that people tell here’,
Ustaz Sabry said to me, as I scribbled furiously in my notebook.
(Ghosh 1994: 140)

1Bengali novelist and essayist Amitav Ghosh came to writing while he was still a student, ‘scribbling furiously’ in a notebook. In 1981, he went to Egypt on a research trip for his PhD in social anthropology entitled ‘Kinship in Relation to the Economic and Social Organization of an Egyptian Village Community’. Parts of this experience were later to appear in the travelogue In an Antique Land (1992), from which the above epigraph is taken.

2Among the many voices of Indian Writing in English, Ghosh stands out. In The Vintage Book of Indian Writing, Salman Rushdie appraises his work by stating that his ‘most impressive achievement to date is the non-fiction study of India and Egypt, In An Antique Land’. He adds that ‘it may be (or it may not) that his greatest strength will turn out to be as an essayist of this sort’ (xxii). If he is indeed a sharp-eyed essayist, Ghosh has also asserted his voice as a novelist. His fiction is widely acclaimed and consists in a multifaceted corpus including science fiction with The Calcutta Chromosome (1995), history with The Glass Palace (2000) or ecology with The Hungry Tide (2005). I contend that what makes his voice unique is his training as an anthropologist. Looking at In an Antique Land, one might say, to paraphrase Rushdie, that Ghosh is a novelist of this sort. Logging facts in his journal, the anthropologist is like the writer described by James Clifford (2). This paper will show how the scribbling of the anthropologist merges with the writing of the novelist. In an Antique Land illustrates the synergy of such a process. What is more, because its hybrid form combines fiction and non-fiction, the text provides an ideal referential pattern to analyze the novels. As a matter of fact, anthropological aspects in Ghosh’s writing have mostly been explored in this key text. For instance, Claire Chambers’ article, ‘Anthropology as Cultural Translation: Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land’, shows how the text deals with the New Anthropologists’ concerns, which ‘have sought to locate ethnography as a textualized construction’ (2). Such an acute analysis helps to give the present study a critical frame. However, my focus is not on anthropology as such, but on anthropology at work within fiction.

3Clifford Geertz defines social anthropology as ethnography. He explains that ‘doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of "construct a reading of") a manuscript’ (10). He argues that it is not so much the method as the effort that characterizes the task. This study of Ghosh’s fiction is an attempt to show both the method and the effort in his writing that exposes the craft of the novel and that emphasizes his in-between positioning as a writer. I will focus not only on the way Ghosh observes the world, but also on how the anthropological prism affects the narrative. Relying on the appreciation of the document as the raw material used to make sense of History, following Foucault in The Archeology of Knowledge (7), the analysis will scrutinize the novels as pieces of archive, focusing on the way Ghosh opens up the genre. As a writer/anthropologist, Ghosh’s field seems to be the Indian Ocean. The paper will then expose how he explores the cultural contacts between East and West, but also between India and Pakistan, or India and Burma, throwing into relief how the anthropologist’s gaze guides the novelist’s hands.

4‘Scribbling in [his] notebook’, Ghosh is in a characteristic posture for an anthropologist, trying to translate what he sees and hears into a fieldwork account. To identify the anthropological input in the novels, the reader needs to look for signs of how the subjectivity of the experience intersects with the objectivity of the facts. Considering the novel as a notebook, fieldwork then implies thorough preliminary research. Although Ghosh’s novels may be very distinct from one another, they all display minute details in their field of expertise. For example, before writing The Hungry Tide, in which the main character is an American scientist studying dolphins, he travelled to the Sundarbans and met with ‘one of the world’s leading cetologists’ (401). In fact, the author’s notes in sections of the novels show what a meticulous researcher he is. These acknowledgments make the anthropologist even more visible when read against passages from In an Antique Land. Ghosh claims that he enjoys the preliminary work as much as the writing itself. ‘For me the research part is fun and easy, because I enjoy looking at documents and things’, (‘Opium’) he confesses. It is as though the novels started in the hands of the anthropologist. Ghosh travels, reads, and collects information, just the way an anthropologist would. What he says in an interview of the making of The Glass Palace is highly revealing:

Writing this book did take me into harm’s way, something that happens very rarely in a writer’s life. I spent a lot of time with the Karenni-insurgents who were under attack from the Burmese army. I marched along with these revolutionaries armed with Kalashnikovs. Coming under fire from the Burmese army was surreal. We were shelled: the Burmese army uses 21mm guns and some pretty heavy artillery. (Ghosh 2006)

5In the silence of libraries or under Burmese fire, Ghosh experiences writing in the field while exploring the Indian Ocean.

6As evidenced by his essays, which show a constant interest in society, novelist/anthropologist Ghosh is, above all, an observer. It may be argued that, if the essays are ‘chronicles’ of our time, the novels are also a way for the writer to share his experience of the world. Ghosh’s reader cannot help but be struck by the way his essays and novels work together. In a book dedicated to this versatile writer, John C. Hawley notes about Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma (1998): ‘Taken together, the three essays in this little book can be seen as the reporter’s notebook, the anthropologist’s series of observations, the historian’s musing, that issue forth as The Glass Palace three years later’ (Hawley 2005: 30). Many themes and personal memories in the essays also appear in the novels. Besides, Ghosh writes compulsively. On his blog, he sometimes posts excerpts from his journals which illustrate a new form of ethnography and provide the reader with precious insights in the making of the novels. The journals encapsulate narratives in the making. In the Mekong journal, for instance, scientist Isabel Beasly is said not to eat ‘much apart from instant noodles and Ovaltine’, a detail Ghosh uses to shape Piya’s character in The Hungry Tide. Yet, what is even more revealing here is that his concerns as a novelist rely on local people’s accounts. The journals may be read as a collection of facts, while the novels find a way to narrate them. Ghosh is like Nirmal who ‘hunt [s] down facts in the way a magpie collects shiny things. Yet when he str [ings] them all together, somehow they d [o] become stories—of a kind’ (Ghosh 2005: 283). Looking at the different novels, one might even say that collecting defines an aesthetics, which is beautifully illustrated in River of Smoke (2011) when the narrator gathers historical facts while Neel collects words and Paulette collects plants.

7Ghosh produces both fiction and non-fiction from the same experience. To understand how anthropology filters through the novels, one has to look at the ‘I’ revealed in the two types of text. Echoes from the personal life of the writer are scattered in the essays as well as in the novels. In this regard, the author’s notes are revealing. For instance, at the end of The Glass Palace, Ghosh writes that the ‘seed’ of this book ‘was brought to India long before [his] lifetime by [his] father and [his] uncle’. Yet, he goes on to say that fiction transformed these seeds: ‘But neither my father nor my uncle would have recognized the crops I harvested’ (471). Writing is lived as germination, as a long and slow process. As a matter of fact, our referential text, In an Antique Land, was published almost ten years after the original experience. In the acknowledgements to his collection of essays, The Imam and The Indian (2002), Ghosh writes: ‘I did not know it then, but the writing of The Imam and The Indian [1985] signaled the gestation of another project—my third book, In an Antique Land which I was not to embark on until 1989’ (vii). This remark shows to what extent Ghosh’s writing is a palimpsest. In an Antique Land is a seminal work in which the narrator/anthropologist sets out to follow ‘barely discernible traces that ordinary people leave upon the world’ (17). This project reverberates throughout all the novels. An aesthetic of vanishing can be seen throughout his fiction, as in The Calcutta Chromosome, which opens with ‘the remnant of an ID card’ (3) and ends with a ‘disembodied’ holographic projection of Murugan (310). Just like the student who was in search of Bomma, a simple slave, the novelist turns to minor characters. In this regard, it is highly revealing that the narrator in the Glass Palace quickly shifts away from the royal family to focus on Rajkumar, an orphan whose name means ‘Prince’ (4).

8James Clifford insists on the ‘objective distance’ (13) that should imbue an anthropologist’s work. Critical distance is conveyed in the novels by the recurring motif of the lens, which is reminiscent of the image of Ghosh studying documents in the Geniza in Egypt (Ghosh 1994: 105). Binoculars, magnifying glasses and cameras point to a particular way to look at reality. For instance, the King in The Glass Palace has binoculars to stare at the horizon, while Piya in The Hungry Tide uses them to study dolphins. Both characters try to achieve a better understanding of their surrounding. Throughout the chaos of exile, King Thebaw holds on to his binoculars. Looking at Indians on the waterfront, he wonders:

What vast, what incomprehensible power, to move people in such huge numbers from one place to another—emperors, kings, farmers, dockworkers, soldiers, coolies, policemen. Why? Why this furious movement—people taken from one place to another, to pull rickshaws, to sit blind in exile? (Ghosh 2000: 50)

9This insight into the King’s mind seems to echo the author’s own questioning of colonial supremacy. The distance epitomized by the binoculars juxtaposes the immediacy of the King’s experience which is paralleled by the way Ghosh germinates facts before writing. As Rukmini Bhaya Nair puts it, ‘Ghosh’s technique is simply to borrow the war-journalist’s tripod, lenses and so forth and then swivel his viewfinder so that it alights on families living out their lives in tumultuous times’ (Nair 2003: 164). The viewfinder of the camera enables the narrator to frame certain events echoing the way the anthropologist chooses to write about certain facts instead of others. In The Glass Palace, Dinu explains that taking pictures is ‘the most intimate way that [he] can know anyone... or anything’ (358). The use of optical devices not only crystallizes the critical distance of the writer, but it also pinpoints the refraction potential of the novels. Writing fiction is Ghosh’s own lens to make sense of what he sees.

10What is more, in In an Antique Land Ghosh is an outsider looking from the inside, which is in keeping with the observer-participant positioning of the anthropologist. If one looks closely at his fiction, it appears that the outsider is a recurrent figure. There is always a foreigner living in a community and speaking from the inside. Rajkumar, for instance, is a kalaa among the Burmese, that is to say, an Indian ‘from across the sea’ (Ghosh 2001: 3). Sometimes the outsider/insider status is not as straightforward. In The Hungry Tide, Piya, the American scientist, is often mistaken for a local because of her Bengali origins. Ghosh very often displaces his characters so that they will not really belong. These characters embody his position as a ‘border-intellectual’, to borrow Santosh Gupta’s words (242). To some extent, Ghosh is like Nirmal, a guest in a hut, witnessing history ‘from a chink in the bamboo wall’ (Ghosh 2005: 68).

11Ghosh adopts an anthropological stance in his writing, observing and transcribing facts from this particular place. In this regard, his travelogue/ non-fiction novel helps to highlight the specificity of such writing. In an Antique Land brings to the fore the overlapping of genres and disciplines. In fact, Amitab—as he is called in the text—is told by another character that social anthropology is ‘a bit like history or philosophy’ (123). This anecdote alludes to the interdisciplinary quality of anthropology that contaminates the narrative itself. In this regard, one of the most characteristic aspects of Ghosh’s writing is its academic texture. A scholarly voice regularly emerges to disrupt the narrative. A pattern appears In an Antique Land in which the method and rigor of the anthropologist take over the telling of the story. To depict the setting of his adventure, Ghosh writes:

Cairo is Egypt’s own metaphor for itself.
Everywhere in the country except in the city itself, Cairo is Egypt. They are both spoken of by the same name, Masr, a name that is appropriate as well as ancient, a derivative of a root that means ‘to settle’ or ‘to civilize’. The word has a long history in Arabic... Like English, every major European language derives its name for Egypt from the Greek AEgyptos, a term that is related to the word ‘Copt’, the name generally used for Egypt’s indigenous Christians.
(32)

12The narrative is carved with such scholarly pauses in which the narrator seems to vanish. Impersonal forms then proliferate. These paragraphs are structured around etymology and historical details. In The Circle of Reason, there is a similar paragraph dedicated to cotton:

Think of cotton. It’s easy now, but it wasn’t once.
India first gave cotton, Gossypium indicus, to the world. The cities of the Indus valley grew cotton as early as 1500 BC. But soon cotton was busy spinning its web around the world. It had King Sennacherib of Mesopotamia in its toils by 700 BC, and before long it had found its way to Herodotus in Greece. (56)

13The change of tone is signalled by the typography. Then the focus is drawn onto language and chronology. The choice of the Latin word, which regularly happens in the different novels, paves the way for an underlying scientific discourse and gives the passage academic credit. Yet, what is particularly interesting here is the conversational tone (in ‘Think of cotton’), reminiscent of In an Antique Land, in which the ethnographic account comes to life with conversations. Furthermore, the above quotation reveals Ghosh’s talent in standing in-between the scholar and the storyteller. ‘It wasn’t once’ conjures up the scenery of a forgotten time to be imagined by the reader, in which cotton is the epic hero. The impression of storytelling is reinforced by the image of the spinning web, which parallels the rhythm in the passage. On the one hand, it is worth noting the metaphor of weaving that recurs in the novel, as Robert Dixon points out (14). On the other, one notices how facts and imagination interact to become a story. Scholarly aspects of the novels are also conveyed by characters such as Tridib (Shadow) who holds a PhD in archaeology, and Nirmal (Hungry) who is a teacher. Both embody an intellectual elite whose speech introduces didactic aspects into the narratives. Yet, they also draw attention to how facts are transformed, for they both are storytellers. As Anshuman A. Mondal puts it, ‘many of [Ghosh’s] works seek to deconstruct, or at least put into question, the value of distinguishing between "facts" and "fiction"’ (19). Ghosh’s craft lies in the way he combines anthropology with imagination in order to challenge the very notion of truth.

14Nevertheless, when erudition and imagination collide, the narrator sometimes starts chronicling rather than telling a story. I argue that the novelist then becomes a chronicler, not only of the past, but also of changing societies. It seems that what prevails in Ghosh’s fiction is a sense of place. Settings are painted with many topographic details which conjure up the image of Piya’s GPS in The Hungry Tide. Descriptions carve the text and create pauses in the unfolding of the narrative. Architecture appears as the backbone of these passages. The Glass Palace, presented as a magnetic place through the eyes of the young Rajkumar, is thus depicted by the narrator:

Most of the buildings in the palace complex were low, wooden structures, linked by long corridors. The palace was of relatively recent construction, just thirty years old. It was closely modelled on the royal residences of earlier Burmese capitals, at Ava and Amarapura. Parts of the royal apartments had been transported whole after the founding of Mandalay. (Ghosh 2001: 24)

15On the one hand, the many details seem to vouch for authenticity, and on the other they underline cultural friction through the emphasis on chronology. Ghosh explores the sediments of the past:

Deeti and Kabutri rarely had the occasion to come into town, and they had stared in fascination at the walls of the Chehel Satoon, a forty-pillared palace built by a noble-man of Persian ancestry, in imitation of a monument in Isfahan. A short while later they passed a still-greater wonder, a structure of Grecian inspiration, with fluted columns and a soaring dome; this was the mausoleum of Lord Cornwallis, of Yorktown fame, who had died in Ghazipur thirty-three years before. (Ghosh 2008: 65, my emphasis)

16Ghosh depicts in great detail the way people dress and eat, as well as where they live and their lifestyle to expose cultural porosity.

17What is more, descriptions rely at times on an existing document. Ghosh explains in his interview with Christopher Lydon that in Sea of Poppies the Ghazipur opium factory resembles the one depicted by J. W Mc Pherson. Along with monuments, archives—and particularly textual archives—make their way into the narrative. Many ‘semiliterary genres’, as Bakhtin calls them (381), such as letters and journals, are grafted on the text. In The Shadow Lines, press articles and newspaper headlines fill in the gaps of a family story. In The Glass Palace, the narrator uses pictures and a pamphlet of the Indian Independence League (391) to revive historical moments. Ghosh also opens the novel to other genres such as memoirs in The Calcutta Chromosome. In fact, Ronald Ross’s memoirs are embedded in Murugan’s speech. Ghosh stages the archive in a way that evokes the debut of Bomma ‘in the obscurest of theatres’ (Ghosh 1994: 13). In The Hungry Tide, Nirmal’s notebook embodies an archival source of knowledge. It reappears after many years and thus entices the characters to think over their past. Traces of the past then shape the narrative. Ghosh’s craft of the novel here surfaces in the way he brings together real documents and fictional archives. For instance, the First Princess is said to write clandestine letters to Dolly. One of these letters is grafted onto the narrative. The Princess tells Dolly about the King’s funeral (Ghosh 2001: 205). Ghosh challenges historical facts and blurs the limits between fact and fiction as he transcribes a public event into a private story.

18Furthermore, Ghosh not only excavates documents but also cultural signs such as films and songs. In the wake of the intertextuality at work with the many documents underlying in the narrative, a form of intermediality emerges. Clifford Geertz equates the observational role of the anthropologist with an interpretive intent (9). Facts are collected and chosen by the researcher to be translated into a text. In his novels, Ghosh stands for an interpreter of cultural signs. He craftily evokes films and songs, and he uses newspapers and the radio in order to entice the reader to adopt his own positioning regarding society. Before turning to the ethics of such novels, we need to look at how this archive transforms the narrative. In Ghosh’s fiction a cinematographic quality stands out, as it is inflected with dramatic effects, close-ups, and wide-angles. In The Shadow Lines, one passage epitomizes how the narrator converts the text, using visual tools, ‘into a silvery tableau’. The scene takes place in a bar with the narrator, his cousin Ila and their uncle Robi: ‘The singer dropped her microphone and the band froze into a silvery tableau under the spotlight. There was a moment of complete silence. Then, like a reel in a film coming unstuck, everyone sprung to life’ (86). The pause in the narrative creates a space for the reader to think about the cultural encounter at stake. Ila wants to behave like a European and rejects her own culture. The incident of the microphone crystallizes—ironically enough with a moment of silence— the voice of a new generation of well-travelled Indians who expect cultural changes. Authentic and fictional archives in the text lead the reader to reflect on the society. Ghosh relies on the plurality of viewpoints to maintain ambivalence in his texts. In this regard, the way he tackles colonial issues is revealing. In The Circle of Reason, Balaram goes to the cinema to see Aradhana (1969), a film by Shakti Samanta. Balaram accuses his friend: ‘you’ve spent too many years reading novels about drawing-rooms in a language whose history has destroyed its knowledge of its body. The truth is that your mind is nothing but a dumping-ground for the West’ (53). The dismissal of the supremacy of the West is immediately offset by the ironical reversal one sees in Balaram’s fascination with Pasteur. The irony is further reinforced if the reader knows that Aradhana is a remake of an American film. Here, the cultural archive enlightens the hermeneutic journey the reader is invited to undertake. References to films are sometimes enhanced by Ghosh’s use of Bollywood songs, like when Rakesh hears ‘the unmistakable throbbing of Mere Sapnon ki Rani’ (Ghosh 1998: 182), the leading song in Aradhana. In The Shadow Lines, the narrator hums a song:

at the back of my throat I was softly humming the tune of an old Hindi film song—beqaraar karke hame yun na jaiyen... I don’t know why it was that tune: I hadn’t seen the film nor even possessed the record, but it was always that one and no other. (92)

19This passage alludes to Bees Saal Baad (1962), which is considered to be a loose adaptation of Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles. In this instance, the song draws on the narrator’s strong cultural anchorage, who is living in London. Ghosh insists on the way different cultures are interwoven, and cultural archives are a pretext to usher the reader into ‘the temples of modern India’ (Das Gupta 1988: 130).

20I argue that Ghosh uses archives as a tool to prompt the reader into an active role. The documents, objects, monuments and allusions to Zee TV are offered for the reader’s interpretation. In The Glass Palace, royal archives filter through the narrative as the King reads: ‘There is no rival for our glory and our karma; to place you beside us is to compare the great Galon of Vishnu with a swallow’ (87). This passage implies a counter-reading of what surrounds it— that is to say an account of how the palace, transformed into a polo court, has been redecorated to suit Western purposes and leisure (Ghosh 2001: 66).

21Ghosh opens the novels to other genres and mixes disciplines. Writing is then a way to question knowledge, an attempt at translating society. Here it is worth noting that Ghosh’s interest in anthropology derived from his taste for languages. His novels offer a web of language from Bengali to French. In Sea of Poppies, he even revives the forgotten tongue of the Lascars:

Laskari—that motley tongue, spoken nowhere but on the water, whose words were as varied as the port’s traffic, an anarchic medley of Portuguese calaluzes and Kerala pattimars, Arab booms and Bengal paunch-ways, Malay proas and Tamil catamarans, Hindustani pulwars and English snows. (96)

22I contend that Ghosh engages with a linguistic anthropology, and that linguistic hybridity is a pretext to explore cultural frictions. Alessandro Duranti presents linguist anthropology as ‘the study of language as a cultural resource and speaking as a cultural practice’ (2). Ghosh grapples with the history of language, and his use of different sociolects is a way to muse on cultural issues. The Ibis Chrestomathy, published on his website, crystallizes the stakes of linguistic excavations.

The Chrestomathy then, is not so much a key to language as an astrological chart, crafted by a man obsessed with the destiny of words... it is devoted to a select number among the many migrants who have sailed from eastern waters towards the chilly shores of the English language. It is, in other words, a chart of the fortunes of a shipload of girmityas. (1)

23Through the Raja of Raskali’s eyes, the evolution and migration of languages are exposed. The Ibis—the boat on which the coolies are transported—is given as a catalyst to the transformation of language and reveals linguistic hybridity as a key to analyse society. Like the anthropologist/ethnograph who records people’s accounts, Ghosh inserts in his narrative a ‘live’ archive and reproduces accents. Thus Nilima’s English in The Hungry Tide unveils social strata:

a perfect specimen of a tongue learnt in the schools of the Raj. It was like listening to a lost language, the dialect of a vanished colonial upper middle class, spoken with the crisp enunciation once taught in elocution classes and debating societies. (131)

24The narrative draws language into focus to pinpoint, among other things, the complexity of the colonial relation. Like many other postcolonial writers, Ghosh depicts language as a symbol of power. Speaking the other’s tongue is presented as a way to assert one’s authority and superiority, as shown by the Queen in The Glass Palace or by Mr Doughty in Sea of Poppies. The novelist/anthropologist also foregrounds hybridity of language in order to enlighten the different aspects of East/West cultural encounters. In Egypt, Ghosh found himself ‘trapped by language’ (Ghosh 1994: 62). In his novels, many characters—and very often the reader too— experience a similar feeling. In The Hungry Tide, Piya is unable to communicate with Fokir, the local fisherman who saved her from drowning. In Sea of Poppies, when the Raja of Raskhali is arrested, he uses English as a way to resist: ‘with his head bowed between his legs, Neel still would not stop: "Proud man, drest in a little brief authority, his glassy essence like an angry ape"’ (267). Quoting from Hamlet, he tries to reverse the colonial violence. Ghosh deals with the traditional East/West dichotomy (, ) and questions the supremacy of the colonizer’s tongue. For example, the Burnhams who have been living in India for about 25 years (Ghosh 2008: 77) use vernacular words while they speak English. Ghosh tries to show all aspects of linguistic hybridity. Language is used as a tool for historical retrieval, which really asserts the anthropological prism in the novels.

25Ghosh’s training as an anthropologist influences his writing and frames it with method. Yet, it appears that the anthropologist’s touch is even more visible in the form of the novels. Shaped by the interdisciplinarity of his other career, Ghosh is at ease with weaving together mythology and ecology, as in The Hungry Tide. In an interview he explains: ‘the novel can do anything. I see it as the overarching form... I don’t see it necessarily as fictional, I think it overarches fiction, and non-fiction, and history, the present, the past’ (Chambers 2005: 32). The novel may be seen then as a tool for the author to give an interpretation of the world. There is a distinctive archival aesthetic in Ghosh’s novels which shows that the past is at the heart of his preoccupations as a writer. Telling about History, however, is not his main concern. He is more interested in how people deal with it. In grafting archives onto the narrative, he dwells on the fact that they are fragments to be read and interpreted. Ghosh gives his reader questions but no definite answers. His novels diffract reality to reveal what James Clifford calls ‘partial truths’ (1). For as the narrator in The Shadow Lines discovers, archives may give access to the past, but they are unable to grasp certain things.

The realities of the bombs and torpedoes and the dying was easy enough to imagine—mere events, after all, recorded in thousands of films and photographs and comic books. But not that other infinitely more important reality: the fact that they knew; that even walking down the street, that evening, they knew, all four of them, that their world, and in all probability they themselves, would not survive the war. What is the colour of that knowledge? Nobody knows, nobody can ever know, not even in memory, because these are moments in time that are not knowable: nobody can ever know what it was like to be young and intelligent in the summer of 1939 in London or Berlin. (67)

26Ghosh’s novels are then given as impressionistic collections of ‘partial truths’ that make the reader think.