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BOOK REVIEW
A resounding
voice
The Imam and the Indian:
Prose Pieces by Amitav Ghosh
Reviewed by
Shailaja Neelakantan
Amitav Ghosh is of that
rare breed of writers for whom the personal is the
political and vice versa. His novel The Shadow
Lines was informed by the profound effect that the
horrendous massacre of Sikhs in the Delhi riots in 1984
after the assassination of Indira Gandhi had on him.
In an Antique Land, his memoir about his
fieldwork in Egypt, includes anthropological essays and
a vignettes about the ancient and the modern, the old
East and the new West, and the responses of individuals
to change.
Until now, however, much of Ghosh's
eclectic production - his journalism, scholarly essays,
travelogues and genre-defying pieces written for various
magazines and journals - had disappeared into the void.
At long last, Permanent Black, an art-house Indian
publisher, has collected many of Ghosh's prose pieces in
The Imam and the Indian. The sheer variety of
these pieces - ranging from the 1984 riots to a
fundraising dinner in New York for the Tibetan cause -
may leave some readers confused, grasping for a theme to
give them cohesion. A close reading, however, shows
these works are bound together by Ghosh's abiding
concern for the political, whether it takes him to
India, Myanmar, the US or Egypt.
The
self-critical, perceptive title essay relates an
incident from his time doing fieldwork in Egypt. He
argues with an intolerant village imam over the relative
merits of cremating the dead, as Indian Hindus do, and
the Egyptian Muslim practice of burying them. The imam
calls the Hindu custom "primitive" and argues that the
"advanced" West doesn't burn dead bodies.
Ghosh,
soon incensed, lashes out, saying that even Western
countries burn their dead: "They have special electric
furnaces meant just for that." Both sides are stung. The
imam accuses Ghosh of lying, with the logic that the
West cannot be so ignorant, as they "have guns, tanks
and bombs". Ghosh retorts that India not only has those
heavy armaments but also nuclear weapons: a response
that shocks Ghosh himself. "So there we were," Ghosh
concludes, "the imam and I, delegates from two
superseded civilizations vying to lay claim to the
violence of the West."
This subtle, all
encompassing worldview is vintage Ghosh. His historian's
eye takes in the breadth of peoples' experiences, and
his anthropologist's mind makes connections between
their religions, wars, cultures and ways of life. Above
all, he describes these complex connections with simple
profundity - with the skill of the novelist that he is.
Ghosh can be jocular, too, without being trite.
His essay "Four Corners" about a road trip in the US
illustrates his keen observational powers and ability to
relate the commonplace to history. America's
recreational vehicles (RVs), are, in his words, "if not
quite palaces, then certainly midtown condos on wheels".
He notices their curious names, Native American words
like Winnebago and Itasca. "The names of the
dispossessed tribes of the Americas hold a peculiar
allure for marketing executives of automobile companies.
Pontiac, Cherokee - so many tribes are commemorated in
modes of transport," Ghosh observes. And then, as
always, the summing up: "It is not a mere matter of
fashion that so many of the cars that flash past on the
highways carry those names, breathing them into the air
like the inscriptions on prayer wheels. This tradition
of naming has a long provenance: Did not Kit Carson
himself, the scourge of the Navajo, name his favorite
horse Apache?"
Why doesn't Ghosh come off as a
know-it-all? With disarming frankness, he acknowledges
that he doesn't have all the answers, or even
explanations, for the fascinating quirks of culture he
describes. In a short essay about a New York fundraising
party for Tibet, for instance, Ghosh confesses that as
an undergraduate, he and his friends would get drunk
when they went to eat Tibetan food at a Tibetan refugee
camp in Delhi. "You couldn’t help doing so – it was hard
to be in the presence of so terrible a displacement." As
Ghosh muses thus in the trendy Manhattan restaurant, he
catches the eye of the sole monk at the gathering and
finds that "... his smile seemed a little guilty: the
hospitality of a poor nation must have seemed
dispensable compared to the charity of a rich one." Or
perhaps he was merely bewildered, Ghosh continues. "It
cannot be easy to celebrate the commodification of one's
own suffering."
Despite the mysterious omission
of Ghosh's marvelous essays on Cambodia The Imam and
the Indian is one collection that should be on the
bookshelves of all who call themselves readers.
The Imam and the Indian: Prose Pieces by
Amitav Ghosh, Ravi Dayal & Permanent Black, New
Delhi, 2002. ISBN: 8175300477. Price: Rs 495 (US$10), pp
361.
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