The fact-fiction brew of Amitav Ghosh

THE brilliant Amitav Ghosh is on a book tour of Ghost-Eye in the motherland these days, and no, he’s not coming anywhere close to Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh or Jammu & Kashmir, because it seems that despite the proliferation of literature festivals in the region — including two in Chandigarh, both of which are largely devoted to who-did-you-see-there, rather than have-you-read-this-book — there isn’t much of a reading market in these parts. (Even the book people know.)

So here’s the thing about Amitav — he is probably amongst the most unsociable people you will meet. He’s gruff, even growly. At an interview for a previous book, he refused to talk about the book. Decades ago, I carted a few copies of a title published only in South Asia his former publisher, Ravi Dayal, wanted to send him, from New Delhi to New York — after many emails we met at a coffee shop and I thought, aha, here’s my chance at discovering the man behind the genius. The man walked in, took the books from me, said thank you with half an accompanying smile, turned on his heel and left. I think I paid several dollars too many for a coffee that tasted both tepid and tasteless.

Then you begin to read. You must start with The Glass Palace, a story that will remain with you till the dying of the light, about India and Burma, an arc of fire and torment that connects the trials of the grandest King, Thibaw, ousted by the British from his beloved Mandalay and brought to Ratnagiri off the coast of Maharashtra, where he died a lonely death in 1916 — remember, the British took Bahadur Shah Zafar to Rangoon after the failed Mutiny of 1857, where he lived till he died in 1862. We tend to forget the intimate connection between India and its eastern neighbour, Myanmar, these days, even when things are falling apart.

Back in 2000 when Amitav wrote The Glass Palace and retrieved the drama of history from the history textbooks, you saw with blinding clarity how the brutal annihilation of two dynasties was undertaken by the British when both India and Burma were part of the Raj; that until 1935, when Burma was spun away into an independent country, Indian Railways connected Calcutta-Kolkata with Rangoon-Yangon and that people travelled, worked, married, had children without fear or favour of boundary, passport or visa, just like anywhere else in the enormous Indian subcontinent that spanned the Himalayas and the Indian Ocean; that a significant part of the Second World War was fought in Burma and Malaya, parts of what is now called South-East Asia, not just in the theatres of Europe and Africa; and that Indian soldiers fought everywhere, in the East and in the West, as many as 2.5 million of them, of which it is officially said, 87,000 died — fighting for a country or a coalition of nations not even their own.

That’s the thing about Amitav Ghosh. He mixes fact and fiction in a witches’ brew and makes it his own. So when UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer went to China earlier this week and you saw photos of him shaking hands with Xi Jinping, you bet your head raced back to Amitav’s Ibis trilogy. There’s love, of course, in the most uncertain places, as the grand drama of people’s lives unfold across continents, peppered with war, trade and that ultimate fix, opium.

River of Smoke explained why several Chinese historians believe that 1839 inaugurated the “century of humiliation”, beginning with the Opium Wars and ending only in 1949 when Mao led his bunch of bedraggled stormtroopers into the heart of the Middle Kingdom, Beijing. Understand, then, the connection between the opium factory in Ghazipur on the banks of the Ganga in the Poorvanchal and the indentured migration of Indians across the world, a story that begins with Sea of Poppies. Opium, its lucrative trade and its role in both building empire and crushing nationalism are the stuff of both River of Smoke and Flood of Fire.

The Shadow Lines is probably out of print these days — although, at the rate at which Bangladesh’s politics is changing today, you might want to retrace your steps to the local library. Fast forward to Gun Island, a fantastical tale about spiders, migration and environmental disasters, backing and forthing between Venice, Kolkata and the Sundarban. The story about Manasa Devi, the goddess of snakes, first unfolds here. The Hungry Tide seemed too much of a lecture, scolding us for not doing enough about the misfortune of climate change. Ghost-Eye picks up where Gun Island left off. Even the names of several characters are the same. The goddess, Manasa Devi, remains at the core of the story. As fact collides with fiction, Amitav seeks to unite the universe, pulling in past lives, both human and non-human, and throwing everything into the cauldron of science and mythology. From this churning of the ocean of stories, the Kathasaritsagara, emerges Ghost-Eye, a story of love without limits, without pretence.

On the edge of Chandigarh, in Panchkula, is located the temple of Mansa Devi, revered as a form of Shakti, the female goddess. It’s not clear if she is the same as Manasa Devi, the goddess of snakes at the heart of Ghost-Eye, but if she is, it may be time to relook at Ghosh’s prescription of life, where he approvingly quotes Carl Jung, which is, that “there are no coincidences, only synchronicity.” What this means is that when you read the master this weekend, it is not just meant to be, it is also time to redeem the connection between books, reading, education and learning.

It’s also when you take the leap of faith towards yourself. It’s time.