Amitav Ghosh
Amitav Ghosh is an acclaimed Indian-born writer, novelist, and intellectual activist known for his intricate narratives that blend history, anthropology, and philosophy. Born in Calcutta into a Bengali Hindu family, Ghosh's upbringing in an upper-middle-class environment fostered his early love for literature and understanding of familial bonds, themes that resonate throughout his works. His educational journey spans history, sociology, and anthropology, which significantly inform the complexity of his storytelling.
Ghosh's literary career began with his debut novel, "A Circle of Reason," and has since included notable works such as "The Shadow Lines" and the Ibis trilogy, which explores the colonial opium trade. His writing often addresses issues of migration, cultural encounters, and the complexities of postcolonial identity. Ghosh has received numerous accolades for his contributions to literature, including the Padma Shri and the Jnanpith Award. His works have been translated into over thirty languages, highlighting his global significance as a thinker and storyteller. Ghosh continues to engage with pressing themes such as climate change and human migration in his recent publications, solidifying his status as a prominent voice in contemporary literature.
Amitav Ghosh
- Born: July 11, 1956
- Place of Birth: Calcutta, India
INDIAN-BORN WRITER, NOVELIST, AND ACTIVIST
Amitav Ghosh’s narratives coalesce history, anthropology, and philosophy. A teacher, essayist, and intellectual activist, Ghosh’s novels are best known for the way they chronicle how India and members of the Indian diaspora cope with the experience of colonial and cultural encounters.
Full name: Amitav Ghosh
Early Life
Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta, India, into a Bengali Hindu household. Being Bengali and Hindu is an important part of Ghosh’s identity, and most of the protagonists in his novels are of the same background. Raised in an upper-middle-class home filled with books and visitors, Ghosh learned early to read and observe people. Growing up among grandparents and cousins, uncles and aunts, he quickly comprehended the virtues of family, an institution that he celebrates in his work. As his father was a diplomat, Ghosh traveled to Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Iran. This introduced Ghosh to the experience of migration, a recurrent theme in his literary works. Significantly, his father was a lieutenant in the British army during India’s fight for independence, a dilemma that Ghosh discusses in his fourth novel.
Graduating from Doon Valley boarding school, Ghosh went on to study history at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, for his bachelor’s degree, sociology at Delhi University for his master’s, and social anthropology at Oxford University in England for his doctorate. Due to his educational background, history, sociology, and anthropology inform Ghosh’s novels and give them a textural richness and complexity. During his three years in England, Ghosh also visited Egypt and North Africa; all three regions, cultures, and experiences found their way into his writing. America beckoned to him in 1988, and while teaching at the University of Virginia, he met his wife, the writer Deborah Barker. The couple have two children, Lila and Nayan, and lived in India after their marriage.
In 1993, the Ghosh family relocated to New York and lived there for about a decade before moving back to India. While living in the United States, Ghosh wrote for the New Yorker, taught at institutions such as Harvard University and the City University of New York, among others, and achieved international fame for his novels.
Life’s Work
Ghosh’s first novel, A Circle of Reason (1986), is about an Indian protagonist who flees from India to Africa and the Middle East. Winner of the Prix Médicis étranger award, the novel conjoins myth and the picaresque. His second novel, The Shadow Lines (1988) is set in Calcutta, Dhaka, Bangladesh, and London and portrays the dissonance in postindependence India through the interweaving tales of two families. Presenting history through the narrator’s recalled memories, the novel won India’s highest literary prize, the Sahitya Akademi Award. Ghosh’s third book, In An Antique Land (1992), is a history in the guise of a traveler’s tale. Combining travel narrative, journal writing, and autobiography, the book was the subject of a forty-minute documentary on the BBC.
Ghosh’s third novel, The Calcutta Chromosome (1996), offers an alternative history to Ronald Ross’s discovery of the malarial parasite. Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, Ghosh’s work of science fiction combines cybernetics with the Hindu philosophy of rebirth. The two books that followed were the anthology Dancing in Cambodia and At Large in Burma (1998) and the novel Countdown (1999). Marking the emergence of Ghosh as a thinker, these books present Ghosh’s activist pronouncements on events in Cambodia, Burma, and the Indo-Pakistan nuclear tests, respectively.
Ghosh’s fifth novel The Glass Palace (2000) unravels the colonial history of Southeast Asia through a narrative of family history. Centered on colonial Burma, the novel demonstrates Ghosh’s belief in the family as an alternative to the nation. The novel won the Grand Prize for fiction from the Frankfurt eBook Awards. The Hungry Tide (2005), Ghosh’s sixth novel, presents the conflicts of culture and class through the interaction of its American and Indian characters in the Sundarbans forest of Bengal. Winner of the Hutch Crossword Award, the novel was followed by two essay collections, The Imam and the Indian (2002) and Incendiary Circumstances: A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times(2005). The collections express Ghosh’s views on and opposition to fundamentalism for its role in inciting violence in India and worldwide.
The Ibis trilogy, Ghosh’s magnum opus, deals with the opium trade that Great Britain ran between India and China during the nineteenth century and attempts to encapsulate the colonial history of Asia. The epic narrative follows an assorted group of characters who are thrown together on the ship Ibis. The trilogy chronicles, through generations and continents, the interwoven lives of the Ibis passengers, a group comprised of Indians and Westerners, convicts and indentured laborers. The first novel of the series, Sea of Poppies (2008), was featured on the Man Booker Prize shortlist. The second entry in the series is River of Smoke (2011), and the third is Flood of Fire (2015).
In 2016 Ghosh published the nonfiction book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016). He continued to explore themes of climate change, human migration, and other major global issues in his 2019 novel Gun Island, which centers on a rare book dealer forced into an international journey.
Ghosh continued writing and publishing his work into the 2020s. He published his first book of verse, Jungle Nama, in 2021. The work focuses on an episode from Bon Bibi, a tale that was popular among the villages of Sundarban. During the same year, he published the novels The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis and Uncanny and Improbable Events. In 2022, he published the novel The Living Mountain. In his 2023 book of nonfiction, Smoke and Ashes: A Writer's Journey Through Opium's Hidden Histories, Ghosh gives readers a history of opium and also discusses Purdue Pharma and the US opioid epidemic.
Significance
Ghosh’s books had been translated into more than thirty languages and earned acclaim around the world. Ghosh was awarded the Padma Shri, India’s prestigious civilian honor, in 2007. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009 and declared a Dan David laureate in 2010 for his literary work. In 2016 he was given the lifetime achievement award at Tata Literature Live, the Mumbai LitFest, and in 2018 he was presented with the prestigious Jnanpith Award for outstanding contributions to literature. In 2019, he was named one of the most important global thinkers of the previous decade by the magazine Foreign Policy. His enduring legacy as a writer is his ability to show the evidence of history and the melting pots of cultures. His novels and essays do not just discuss migration, displacement, and dislocation, but reveal them as universal human conditions.
Bibliography
Dhawan, R. K., ed. The Novels of Amitav Ghosh. Prestige, 1999.
Ghosh, Ananya. "What Makes India's Greatest Writer Amitav Ghosh So Darned Angry?" Hindustan Times, 29 Jan. 2017, www.hindustantimes.com/brunch/what-makes-india-s-greatest-writer-amitav-ghosh-so-darned-angry/story-wjiVO1ALybNGl9tP1S0LXP.html. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.
Khair, Tabish, ed. Amitav Ghosh: A Critical Companion.Permanent Black, 2003.
Khan, Rakibul Hasan. "Amitav Ghosh's Gun Island: The Climate Crisis and Planetary Environment." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 7 Feb. 2024, doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2024.2314094. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.
Mondal, Anshuman. Amitav Ghosh. Manchester UP, 2007.
Sankaran, Chitra, editor. History, Narrative, and Testimony in Amitav Ghosh's Fiction. State U of New York P, 2012.
Wroe, Nicholas. "Amitav Ghosh: 'There Is Now a Vibrant Literary World in India—It All Began with Naipaul." The Guardian, 23 May 2015, www.theguardian.com/books/2015/may/23/amitav-ghosh-vibrant-literary-world-india-naipaul-interview. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.