Different strokes
By Chitralekha Basu (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-03-26 09:13
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Two writers take different routes to define the idea of India, one is goaded by travel while the other explores the compulsions of the free market. Chitralekha Basu reports
Standing on the ramparts of the Great Wall at Mutianyu, soaking in its jaw-dropping majesty, Amitav Ghosh was, self-admittedly, overwhelmed.
The Indian writer who has traveled across half the world, researching and writing - setting his books in Egypt, North Africa, Bangladesh and Myanmar, among other lands - marveled at how while monuments elsewhere in the world were about heights, the landmark Chinese structure spread out horizontally.
To Ghosh the Wall signifies the "immense and limitless possibilities" inherent in Chinese culture.
Ghosh, the co-winner of the $1-million Dan David Prize for his outstanding contribution to culture announced yesterday, was one among two of India's most representative writers brought to China by the Bookworm International Literary Festival 2010, the other being the novelist-musician Amit Chaudhuri.
Utterly unlike each other in terms of style and sensibilities, Ghosh and Chaudhuri are responsible for defining the idea of India and its place in the world and presenting it to an ever-widening panorama of English-speaking audiences.
Ghosh, 54, stumbled into social anthropology because he wanted to travel. A scholarship to study at Oxford was his ticket to see the world. He completed his PhD in a record two and a half years and began writing his novel The Circle of Reason (1986) - about a young weaver from a nondescript Bengal village on the run, hurtling his way through Bombay, the Persian Gulf to North Africa.
His second, Shadow Lines (1988), a slim but substantial text tracing the journey of two families across Dhaka, Calcutta and London, as they fatalistically entwine and disengage with each other, has been recognized as a soulful document of momentous historical events, such as the partition of Bengal and the ensuing violence and how they affect individual destinies.
Ghosh has since written In an Antique Land (1992), about a 12th century Tunisian Jewish merchant's Indian slave, set between India's Malabar coast and medieval Cairo; The Calcutta Chromosome (1996), a sci-fi thriller; and Dancing in Cambodia and At Large in Burma (1998), a collection of essays including one about the author's quest for the last vestiges of classical dance in a strife-torn Cambodia.
"Travel has long been an integral part of my life, and I find myself drawn to stories that bridge different cultures and countries," Ghosh says.
His coming to China was especially meaningful at this time. His most recent novel, Sea of Poppies (2008) - the first of the projected Ibis trilogy - leaves readers at a point where a shipload of indentured slaves and a motley crew are poised to set sail, heading toward the Chinese coast.
They include a mulatto sailor, a multi-lingual young French woman, trying to pass herself off as a man, her swashbuckling Bengali foster brother, the insufferably ingratiating Bengali sycophant of an utterly ruthless British merchant, among others.
Set against the backdrop of events leading to Britain launching the Opium War against China, Sea of Poppies unleashes a flood of Indian patois, colloquial Anglo-Indian, working-class Bengali, 18th-19th century South China pidgin and lascari (ship language), threatening to drown the Queen's language.
"The Indian Ocean region is an incredibly multilingual area," Ghosh reveals. "My book gives the reader only a very faint flavor of this by using different varieties of English. To the reader who is worried about missing the import of some words, I would say: It doesn't matter; perfect comprehension doesn't exist."
Dumbing down serious content for the sake of mass consumption - excellence doffing its hat to popular appeal - is a theme Amit Chaudhuri, 47, has been exploring for a while.
He wrote a short story outlining the idea in his collection, Real Time (2002), went back to the subject in his essays, Clearing a Space: Reflections on India, Literature and Culture (2008) and has given it an exhaustive treatment in his novel The Immortals (2009).
Teenage recluse Nirmalya, who is drawn to the deep, abstruse beauty of Hindustani classical music, cannot comprehend how his guru can remain unaffected by the rampant phenomenon of lung power masquerading as music.
"I am interested in the ambiguity of the artist and the artwork," Chaudhuri says. "The way the artist has to exist and fend for himself in the marketplace, when the older dispensations do not gel with the new world of plenty and munificence, which the artist also wants to partake of."
A Hindustani classical vocalist of consummate skills, a gift he inherited from his mother, the singer Bijoya Chaudhuri, Amit Chaudhuri also dabbles in experimental music, finding connections between utterly disparate sounds. He uses George Gershwin's Summertime to enter raga (the musical notes that make up a melody in Indian classical music) Malkauns, makes the opening bars of the All India Radio signature tune morph into jazz and has set a song to the sounds of the Berlin underground train pulling up and the recorded warning to passengers to step back.
As an aesthete and a cultural commentator Chaudhuri is one of a kind. Two anthologies edited by him - The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature (2001) and Memory's Gold: Anthology of Writings on Calcutta (2008) - are bountiful treasures that anyone interested in India, urbanism or literature might want to dig into.
Informed by years of studying European literature and Western critical thought (his PhD thesis, put together at Balliol College, Oxford, was titled DH Lawrence and "Difference"), Chaudhuri is a keen observer of the changing face of India, "its transition from old Nehruvian values to the free market".
Not surprisingly, on his maiden trip to China, Chaudhuri talked of making "fleetingly intimate connections" with Beijing and Chengdu, the cities where he spoke and performed to an enraptured audience, despite a nagging throat infection.
Local musicians, jazz pianist Xia Jia, guitarist Liu Yue and Matt Roberts on the trombone picked up the cues super-quick, leading to a never-before Indo-Chinese-American collaboration in Beijing.
Excited by the convergence of cultures and growing heterogeneity seen on Beijing's streets, cultural spaces and the subway, Chaudhuri has promised to return. And now that he has found a multicultural band to play with him in China, he has every reason to do so.