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1. Diasporic Predicaments: An Interview with Amitav Ghosh
- State University of New York Press
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1 1 Diasporic Predicaments An Interview with Amitav Ghosh CHITRA SANKARAN CS: Your two recent novels The Glass Palace and The Hungry Tide have been seen as concerned with larger historical or global movements. They are often perceived as compelling explorations of some of the central problems and dilemmas surrounding both colonialism and globalization, concerned with ways individual predicaments and larger “Histories” get entangled. Would you agree? Did you write to expose these? AG: I wrote it because it was the only way that I could write it, I suppose . In some ways I don’t feel that these issues are distinct from the people. I mean the lives of, say, Dolly or Rajkumar and the rest of them in “the diaspora ,” where they are so bound up with the events that are happening around them. History itself is . . . in a novel . . . not very interesting, except in as much as it forms the background of an individual’s predicaments. So, for example, the character of Arjun is one that was very compelling to me from the start of the book and remains compelling to this day because the peculiar circumstance he finds himself in, the way in which he’s formed, the way in which his history is enmeshed with the history of the families around him . . . all of those make him what he is, really. CS: Actually, Arjun is a fascinating character because when he starts off, he’s not at all self-analytical; he takes things at face value. But then he progresses to a point when he is actually, for the first time, asking questions that seem inevitable to his predicament at that point in time. I think that’s a very good example of the way in which individual predicaments and history enmesh . . . entangle, because in Arjun’s story you have the predicament of 2 CHITRA SANKARAN the Indian soldiers under the British Raj, in a manner of speaking. And that seems to me to be such an important question that has really never been asked seriously. What led you to ask that question in such a serious way in that novel? AG: A number of reasons, you know. One of the reasons is that in some very important way, Arjun is like some of the people I went to school and college with, who were very bright, but also very un-self-conscious, you know . . . our brightness was often completely without self-awareness, in the sense of reflecting upon our place in the world, and I think that’s something to do with a kind of colonial conditioning really. I’ll just give you one example . . . this morning I went down to have breakfast. Here I am in a country [Singapore] which says everywhere that drug smugglers have the punishment of death. And this café was named after Ellenborough . . . you know Lord Ellenborough, who was an aggressive promoter of drug smuggling into China in the days of the opium trade. And you suddenly see there is a peculiar disconnect; an absolute lack of any kind of awareness or any kind of consciousness of how to make your place in the world, really. I think that is around us all the time—this kind of inability almost, to cope with our circumstances , our past. I suppose the seeds of Arjun’s character were planted for me by many different people, including my father, who was in the Second World War. Usually, when he told his stories it was all about “we were soldiers,” but once or twice he would let slip things that suddenly made you realize what he had had to deal with. He was in Kohima, for example, during the war and he got into a fight with a South African who called him “nigger” or something. And you suddenly realize this was something that they were constantly coping with, this racial denigration. It’s something which has incredible poignancy. I spent a lot of time talking with Colonel Dhillon who was in the INA, who was one of the first people to join the INA. And he came from a family which had, for three generations, been in the British-Indian Army. He came from one of the traditional British-Indian Army families and I was talking to him about what made him rebel. If the British had been as successful as they had always been in the past, they would not have asked themselves these questions. It was defeat on the field...