Amitav Ghosh S Travel Writing

© S.Bhattacharji/"Amitav Ghosh's travel writing"/ 13. 5. 2006 /
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ABSTRACT
This essay was first presented at the seminal conference on Indian travel
writing organised by the Sahitya Akademi in 2004, when people would ask ‘Is
there such a thing as travel writing?’ and walk away as w fumbled for answers.
But even then there was enough evidence to consider Amitav Ghosh as chiefly
a travel writer. At the end of his first novel, The Circle of Reason (1986), his
protagonists are poised for further travel. Except for one character who travels
to the West, the rest journey from Calcutta to North Africa. These elements
will recur in Ghosh's later work. His first non-fiction travel book, In an Antique
Land (1992),1
also about travel in the East, as is Dancing in Cambodia; At
Large in Burma (1998). Based on Ghosh’s travels in Cambodia and Burma in
the 1993 and 1995-1960s, the two intertwine recent history with the past.2
The
essays in The Imam and the Indian (2002) are not all travel pieces, but the title
essay was reprinted in The Best of Granta Travel, while some essays manifest
his interest in other travellers.3
This essay is a tentative exploration of
questions like what kind of travel writer is Ghosh? Does he have a distinctive
style? Where is Ghosh's place in Indian travel writing?
KEYWORDS
Amitav Ghosh, Cambodia, Burma, Egypt, life writing, narrative non-fiction,
academic traveler, literary traveller, Indian travel writing
Amitav Ghosh's Travel Writing: In an Antique Land, Dancing in
Cambodia, and The Imam and the Indian*
Shobhana Bhattacharji
Travel forms the bulk of Amitav Ghosh’s first novel, The Circle of Reason
(1986). At its last full stop, its protagonists are poised for further travel. Except
for one character who travels to the West, the rest journey from Calcutta to
North Africa. These elements will recur in Ghosh's later work. His first non-
fiction travel book, In an Antique Land,4
also about travel in the East, was
published in 1992. Six years later came the slim and riveting Dancing in
Cambodia; At Large in Burma (1998). Based on Ghosh’s own travels in
Cambodia and Burma in the 1993 and 1995-960s, the two tracts are about the
*
This essay was published in Travel Writing in India, ed. Shobhana Bhattacharji (New Delhi:
Sahitya Akademi, 2008), pp. 56-76

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intertwining of recent history with the past.5
The Imam and the Indian (2002)
is not entirely about travel but its title essay was reprinted in The Best of
Granta Travel, while others, such as “An Egyptian in Baghdad” and “Tibetan
Dinner,” manifest his interest in other travellers.6
There is enough evidence, in
other words, to consider Ghosh as chiefly a travel writer.
Ghosh himself is wary of labels: “[W]e must not allow them to
become tools for a new kind of intellectual colonization.”7
The issue must have
troubled him considerably for he opens The Imam and the Indian with a sort of
directive to critics:8
To those of a taxonomic bent of mind, it may appear that the contents of this
collection are heterogeneous enough to require classification under several
headings. I have resisted the temptation to do this in the belief that in the
circuitry of the imagination, connections are of greater importance than
disjunctions.9
Quotable critical touchstones apart, almost every reviewer has said that
Ghosh’s writing defies categories. In An Antique Land, for instance, has been
described as
Simultaneously an anthropologist’s field diary, a historical novel, a detective
story, a research monograph. . . a travelogue, a memoir, and . . . an essay
protesting against irrational divisions between people based on ethnicity.10
Either critics cannot discuss a work without first capturing it within a genre or
Ghosh’s work is in genuinely new forms. Analogies are, after all, a sort of
preliminary description before a summing up word is found for unprecedented
experiences and objects.
Nevertheless, when someone recommends a book, we ask, “Is it a
novel? Is it history?” Classification is a necessary device of marketing, even
when it creates confusion. The blurb on Dancing in Cambodia describes it as
“travel and interpretative writing,” which sounds clever but what does it mean?
Finding or not finding a category for a book is a way of understanding its craft
and emphases. Ghosh himself uses the comparative method to understand the
places he visits. It would be easy to describe almost any writer from any

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country as a travel writer for travel writing is a loose category. Within that,
there are recognisable groups or sub-genres, not all yet clearly defined.
For instance, what kind of travel writer is Ghosh? Does he have a
distinctive style? This seemingly innocuous question, even when restricted to
his non-fiction travel writing, produced sprawling answers that wandered off in
many directions, chiefly, I think, because neither Indian travel writing nor
Ghosh’s travel writing have generated sufficient criticism to create essays
whose elegance depends upon a foundation of footnotes. Less ambitious
questions seemed the way to order to the subject, such as where is Ghosh's
place in Indian travel writing? Mary Louise Pratt wrote of the recent
"estheticist or literary vein of scholarship . . .in which travel accounts, usually
by famous literary figures, are studied in the artistic and intellectual
dimensions . . . ."11
Ghosh seems to slot himself into this category, and it is the
one I will try to explore.
The data
Ghosh is among those Indians who write about other countries. In recent years,
many of them have focused on Indians adjusting to the developed West, but the
bulk of Ghosh's travel writing is about places that more or less form the
cummerbund of the world. The staple of his fiction is travel in the East or by
people from the East, noticeably so in The Shadow Lines and The Glass
Palace. In its reverse journey from the West to Calcutta, Calcutta Chromosome
was unique among his novels until the Hungry Tide, but the focus of interest in
both these novels is also the East.
Some writers encourage people to visit places, others write about the
feelings aroused by journeys, ranging from enthusiasm to disgust. Ghosh
generally keeps his enthusiasm under control,12
yet he returns to places he
likes, especially Egypt, which he visits differently each time. His Granta essays
on Egypt are about what happened to people he got to know in a village he
liked, while in his review of the Egyptian Nobel Prize winner, he looks at a
small aspect of essentially urban culture. In An Antique Land comprises
digressive bits that he had to leave out of his doctoral thesis, such as personal
experiences and “irrelevant” information he chanced upon during his “regular”
research. Correspondingly, perhaps, he uses a different form for each of his
published writings about the place. His Egyptian experiences first appeared as
essays, then as a book, followed by a collection of prose pieces with a
prefatory essay explaining the essays and the book in relation to each other.

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There is self-consciousness evident in all this. Ghosh is concerned with himself
as a traveller and researcher, not necessarily synonymous terms.
Take the link between journey and narrative. Any movement from A
to B is bound to be described through a linear narrative that may tell of actual
journeys or of metaphoric ones such as the bildungsroman. The abstractness of
change can only be described though metaphor, and travel is the commonest
metaphor for change in time. The journey is the metaphor, and critics use it as
much as Ghosh himself. He sees time as a journey as he travels between past
and present. He says, for instance, that in Goiten’s study of the Geniza
fragment, “the reference to the individuals, such as Ben Yiju, were scattered
randomly like the windblown trail of a paperchase.”13
There can be other
metaphors of time, of course. Iago, describes the Othello’s repeatedly
imagining Desdemona in adulterous situations as “telling beads,” an image that
fits in with the reversal of the sacred which is the premise of the Iago plot.14
Ghosh’s images, on the other hand, are appropriate to a world relatively
starved of alternatives to empirical reality. Since stories unfold in time, like
journeys they are linear. The metaphor becomes the word rather than a word
for. Time is the journey, not like a journey.
Much have I travelled in realms of gold
The metaphor I want to focus on links books and travel, as in Keats’s sonnet,
“On First Reading Chapman’s Homer,” which he wrote after he sitting up all
night reading a translation of Homer’s Odyssey, which, of course, is an early
European travel book.15
That travel expands the mind as books do is a cliché,
though not less valuable for being one. Keats compresses the metaphor of
travel for new experience, references to travels of conquest and discovery, and
travelling on land and in space into fourteen lines. Each is a cliché now, but
Keats’s sonnet is an instance of ideal travel writing, a realm of gold at each
reading. It ends with Cortez standing upon a hill, silent with astonishment at
his first sight of the Pacific Ocean. Mary Pratt points out that promontory
descriptions, common in Romantic and Victorian writing, are often found in
the writing of male travellers in the age of colonial expansion. Ghosh,
however, chooses what Pratt would call the alternative mode, of writing from
within a village or rebel camp. Promontory descriptions of landscape are rarely
found in his travel writing though there is a sturdy promontory metaphor at the
start of In An Antique Land as Ghosh surveys a swathe of history from

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Alexander the Great to the Crusades to more recent Asian and European
events, the textual territory he will visit and conquer. Almost inevitably, he
pairs books and travel, archaeology and history -- how else can we know the
past but through books?
Like Keats, travel writers tend to allude to other travel writers exactly
as poets allude to each other. They are conscious of writing within a tradition
and its conventions. Let’s look at the stylistic and literary operations of
Ghosh's allusions.16
Many motifs of Ghosh's travel writing are found in Shelley's sonnet,
“Ozymandias,” from which Ghosh took his title, In An Antique Land. Unlike
Shelley, Ghosh actually travels, memorably and repeatedly, to the antique land
of Egypt; the traveller he meets in An Antique Land is an ancient one, and his
tale is told in scholarly accounts. Like Shelley, however, Ghosh uses the
autobiographical narrative, "the form that became canonical and authoritative
in the bourgeois era," according to Pratt. 17
Ghosh's is not confessional
writing.18
His narrating "I" is contemplative in quite a different way to Byron's
in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Every stage of the journey in Byron’s poem
leads to contemplation in myriad directions. The pattern of Ghosh's
travelogues, on the other hand, is that he faces an unusual situation, asks
himself questions, and briskly sets about finding out the answers. He is not out
to explore himself (though this is debatable). Accidental discovery of all sorts
is in the nature of Byron's travelogue, but Ghosh states his goal clearly at the
outset. In An Antique Land, for example, he reports that he found a reference to
the slave of MS H.6; the book is about his research.
The struggle to find answers is not part of his narrative. He mentions
some difficulty in the prefatory bit of In An Antique Land, but in the narrative,
he does not show himself thinking about how he should go in search of
answers. We don’t learn about conversations he must have had or his own
meditations on the questions that must have arisen. Just as the actual journey to
Egypt is not a part of his narrative, he also leaves out the planning for it.19
The
published account, like much neo-classical poetry in England, is the result of
his search, not its process, and in a well-known classical method, it has a
beginning, middle, and end. Even In An Antique Land, with its double narrative
of Ghosh's fieldwork and Ben Yiju's business tours in the 12th
century, is not a
pastiche but a mosaic, a clear, simple design emerging from its alternating
narrative patches which could be summarised as, "Ben Yiju was a traveller, so
am I." Ghosh seems to have assumed that the world, his chosen portion of it at

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any rate, is knowable, and he is determined to know and communicate it. The
research and his account of it are arranged like a successful quest. He is not the
passive third person or absent narrator but an actor in his narrative, writing in
the dear-reader-I-was-there mould but with the Othello effect of telling a
round, unvarnished tale that charms the reader. Its content is history, anecdote,
description, and reporting others' words, but his is the seeing eye and observing
mind, as was much male travel writing from the middle of the eighteenth
century, when science replaced adventure and sentiment.20
These simple 'rules' of style remain more or less constant from one Ghosh
work to the next.
Maps and gaps
Is Ghosh a traveller in fact or in metaphor?
The usual terms for journeys in fact and experience are travel in time and
space. The critical problem arises when travel as metaphor is elided with
travel as travel. A cursory look at any literary criticism on travel writing shows
how quickly a journey can become a metaphor for something else, which
mystifies anyone who has planned and been on a journey. It is easy to consider
any piece of writing about learning in as a metaphoric journey, but travel
literature must be about actual travel and,W if one were going to an unfamiliar
place, one would probably use a map at some point.
What does Ghosh do with maps? In spite of famous instances in The
Shadow Lines, he does not like them very much. He mentions places, even
places in relation to each other (X was this far from Y; the terrain changed
thus), as a geographer might, but Dancing in Cambodia and In an Antique
Land leave one longing for handy survey maps. Ghosh is interested in people
and impressed by some of the things they do, such as shifting an entire pagoda
from Angkor Wat to Siem Reap, or travelling from Egypt to Malabar in the
12th
century. A map would have shown his readers just how impressive the
journeys were.21
Why, then, does he leave them out? Is it an oversight or is
there more to the issue?
In her essay on The Shadow Lines, Meenakshi Mukherjee opens up the
possibility of considering maps for what they are rather than as metaphors,
making them a route of discovery about Ghosh. Does he consult them before
undertaking a journey? Did he use them to plot routes when he wrote The
Glass Palace? Did he follow his subjects' routes in Dancing in Cambodia or

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did he invent others for them? What is the relationship between survey and
thematic maps in his travel writing? How, if at all, does he make these
connections? The answers could help one to come to grips with the texture of
Ghosh's deceptively lucid style.
I will quickly go over the next bit which is not my primary focus but a sort
of context for understanding of Ghosh's travel writing.
Maps are notoriously unreliable. They are unstable sources of
information and ideologically biased. Which maps Ghosh consulted could well
reveal unexpected aspects of his writing. The most accurate maps, or the ones
we consider accurate today, come out of methodology that derives from the
Enlightenment, not one of Ghosh's favourite periods in history. Yet just as the
Great Surveys of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries attempted to fill
in blanks on maps, Ghosh too sets out to fill in blanks. He does not travel
without a destination, but neither is he in search of a homeland, a place of rest.
He is not like Philip Larkin who grieved,
No, I have never found
The place where I could say
This is my proper ground
Here I shall stay;
Nor met that special one
Who has an instant claim
On everything I own
Down to my name.22
Ghosh’s is not that sort of travel quest. The restlessness of Byron’s Childe
Harold derives from his dislike of rest, a dislike of his home, even of a goal as
the end of his travel. An onward impetus is in the nature of Childe Harold's
Pilgrimage, possibly because the journey matters more to some travel writers,
whereas the goal is more important to Ghosh. In tourist brochures, everything
is knowable and known. Ghosh is at another extreme from this. He may travel
in difficult and unusual circumstances, e.g. among the Karenni in Burma, but
how he travelled does not have much place in his writing.
Ghosh doesn't travel for adventure in the way of some mountaineers, who
are rumoured to climb a mountain “because it is there,” but from an intellectual
interest. In An Antique Land grew out of the query, "What was an Egyptian
Jew doing in Malabar?" At one point in the book, the pattern that would

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become characteristic of Ghosh’s travel writing is especially clear. He starts by
describing the goal, then he says, "When I first read about it, [it] sounded
bafflingly esoteric" (that's the unclear road to the quest), but of course, he
mastered it (the successful quest).23
Ghosh travels to find answers to specific
questions, and his quest is always successful; the blanks are effectively filled
in, as the Great Surveys painstakingly filled in the empty spaces in their maps.
Ghosh tends to use travel as a metaphor, even in the tiniest element of the
larger work; they are miniature essays about travel.
Like the efficient research scholar he undoubtedly is, Ghosh goes on a field
trip, keeps a diary, and writes up a report. There is a solid particularity in his
writing, which is probably a consequence of his training as an anthropologist.24
His prose is "transparent" -- it tells us things rather than distracting us with
itself and preventing us from seeing beyond it. Ghosh generally lets the
ordinary and everyday do his work of description and communication. His use
of mapping methods is not the only aspect of modern science in his work, for
this is a modern, scientific, eighteenth-century style prose.25
From the time of the Great Surveys, we have learnt to think of travel and
the adventure of the unknown as basic to modern travel writing,26
but is are
these possible any more? A recent satellite picture of the world by night
showed that other than the sea, the only uninhabited parts of the earth are cold,
hot, or mountainous deserts. There are no blanks on the map of the sort that
attracted travellers when the Great Surveys were taking place. The modern
traveller must look for adventure by creating blanks on the maps for himself.
Thus Ghosh says, "In the 1960s, Burma had become a kind of lost world."27
His quest is to fill in the blanks of incomplete stories and insufficient
knowledge about places or events -- stories that have not been corroborated by
other stories or personal stories that have not been backed by newspaper stories
or "facts," as in The Shadow Lines.
In the matter of actual journeys, Amitav Ghosh follows known routes
on the whole. He is the learned traveller, the research scholar as traveller who
goes from a footnote to uncorroborated stories to verifying a story for himself
to considering why no stories came out of the petroleum crisis of the early
1970s. Sometimes he visits a well-known place like Egypt and, within it, its
villages that are little known to in the English reading world. In a well-mapped
world, the traveller can discover the unknown in existing information.
Ghosh thus creates two kinds of adventure for himself, the quest and
the lesser-known places on well-worn routes. He travels in fact, of course, but

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he reserves the real excitement, especially of In an Antique Land, for what he
finds in books. He journeys through texts to achieve his real goal, which is to
find the answer to his preliminary question, "What happened in this place?"
Additional excitement is created because he is a man with a mission, correcting
Western stories about the region in the course of his south-to-south research
tourism. In Antique Land, he expands a footnote by Western scholars into
several essays and a book, as if to say that since no one else has written about
the slave, the onus is on an Indian to recover the man from the footnote. In
Dancing in Cambodia, he reminds us that
The most powerful of the myths that surround Angkor -- the legend of its
accidental discovery by the nineteenth-century French explorer Henri Mouhot -
- is no more and no less true than of others inscribed upon the temple.28
Reversing academic spaces, he gives the Frenchman a parenthesis yet
the Frenchman's account is where he begins his “correct” account of Angkor
Wat. Some of the travellers Ghosh alludes to are on his side, as it were, while
he writes about others, like the Frenchman, from a critical distance, but he does
not follow the ones he venerates. For instance, he does not do an Ibn Battuta
tour as Tim Mackintosh Smith did. His pervasive style is a knowing one that
incorporates history, language, and culture as he compares times and thinkers
in a rich text to be savoured, read, and reread. He revisits a place and makes us
revisit it as well.
In The Imam and the Indian, however, we find Ghosh's lesser,
unknowing, relatively “empty” style, as in his report of the Tibetan dinner. As
usual Ghosh is the observer, but the essay is about as exciting as a pedestrian
story in a third-rate magazine. It has a couple of good phrases ("thicket of reed-
necked women") and a small climactic moment but it does not rise above a
description by an outsider of a quaint native ritual. In An Antique Land,
however, after the quest has been partially completed and the slave of MS H.6
has been given a name, Ghosh invites us to imagine a drunken Bomma
cheering on troops at Aden. His excitement over the discovery of Bomma is a
discreet, academic jubilation. For most of the book, Ghosh deals with him in
the larger contexts of trade, money, and the comings and goings of the 12th
century, but he never becomes more than a tiny stick figure. Any discovery
about him makes Ghosh happy but it is a sort of ecstasy among the footnotes.
Nevertheless, it is definitely a joy, founded upon documented evidence or upon

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educated guesses, as in the case of Bomma's name. A drunken Bomma, on the
other hand, is pure speculation to fill out the scattered and paltry
documentation which he has already attempted to fill out with chunks of his
personal story.
A quick recap. Some rules of style remain constant from one Ghosh
work to the next. There’s an initial story and the research to fill in blanks he
creates for himself in a map of knowledge, reported in transparent prose,
arranged like a research paper, and shot through with motifs from Shelley’s
“Ozymandias,” a traveller, an antique land, and a story within a story. At the
same time, there is an attempt at dispassionate scientific objectivity reminiscent
of eighteenth-century Enlightenment writing.
Travel writing is often defined by negation—it is not this, that, or the
other, a useful method for learning about the structure and style of Ghosh’s
travel writing.
The structure
Ghosh is not a post modernist.29
He cannot be because his travel and
his narrative are to do with goals and quests. To travel with a purpose
presupposes a linear journey, and Ghosh is at his best at linear narratives. In An
Antique Land, with its juxtaposed clusters of this-time and that-time, has a TV-
serial-airport-pot-boiler structure that predates postmodernist pastiche, but TV
serials and airport pot-boilers always link their many simultaneous narratives,
whereas apart from the foundational fact that Ghosh's field work gave him the
opportunity to pursue the slave of MS H.6, there is no connection between his
two narratives.30
In that respect it is a generic failure, yet it shares a crucial
formal similarity with these serials and potboilers. Like them, both of Ghosh’s
stories in An Antique Land proceed inevitably towards successfully completing
the quest, the unambiguous conclusion to his narrative.
Within the goal-driven linear narrative of Ghosh’s travel writing is the
repeated design of the sonata form, ABA, a beginning, middle, and a return to
the beginning so slightly altered that even some of the vocabulary is the
same,31
as in At Large in Burma. After Sonny tells Ghosh that the Karenni
have been fighting for 50 years and that some of them had spent their entire
lives in refugee camps, Ghosh wonders, "What does it take to sustain an
insurgency for fifty years, to go on fighting a war that the rest of the world has
almost forgotten?"32
The central portion of At Large in Burma is about his visit

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to the rebel camp, a narrative so absorbing that one forgets where he started,
but Ghosh reminds us of the beginning when he concludes with, "I had looked
upon Sonny as an anachronistic remnant of a dwindling series of 'dirty little
Asian wars'. I now saw that I was very likely wrong; what Sonny represented
was not the past but a possible future."33
One may see this as a question-
research-answer pattern, a short essay within a longer one, a short story within
a longer one as in epics, a story with a beginning a middle and an end, or a
short Chamber music piece within a concert of the music of a single composer,
but the ABA form remains. In fact, the two longer essays in Dancing in
Cambodia; At Large in Burma are separated by the brief account of Angkor
Wat called "Stories in Stones."
In An Antique Land is constantly in some sort of engagement with
academic modes of research and communication. Ghosh's quest for the slave of
MS H.6 began with a footnote he encountered during his doctoral research, but
theses do not have place for serendipitous discoveries. Ghosh turned his
particular discovery into a quest which he then wrote about, not in the
academic thesis mode but the academic speaking mode. Academics tend to
speak digressively, including footnotes in the main text, as it were, wanting to
say everything they consider relevant to their narrative. Written academic
narratives, on the other hand, are expected to be austerely linear; digressions
are not removed but are banished to the footnotes. Ghosh's style seems
appropriate for material he came across accidentally. A relatively informal
discovery requires a style to match.
The finesse of Ghosh's prose, however, is the work of a master
craftsman. He seldom strays into metaphor; he rarely uses analogies, and when
he does, they are weighty, not merely decorative, as for instance his reference
to Ibn Battuta.34
Just as his travel writing tends to be in the sonata ABA form,
Ghosh’s prose is often like music. There can be a pleasing rhythm in a brief
sentence, as in this example of his "lithe prose,” where acute observation is
expressed in words that sensuously alter the rhythm of the sentence:35
Occasionally she would spring off the bench and bend back a dancer's arm, or
push in a waist, working as a sculptor does, by touch, moulding the limbs like
clay.
The verbs -- spring, push, mould, quick -- suggest rapid movement, but the
initial spring-- a quick, sudden propulsion by a person of her own body -- gives

12
way to a slower movement. As if some ground in the dance lesson has been
covered, we next get bend back a dancer's arm, an action that would take a
little time as the teacher comes up to a dancer and selects the point that will
become the fulcrum of the bending. An even slower pace succeeds this as the
still tactile moves become more deliberate. Moulding implies the teacher's
complete control over the pupil who is clay and pliable, as if without a will of
her own. The teacher and pupils' litheness is captured so subtly that prose itself
seems lithe.36
Fact or fiction?
Close reading of Ghosh's travel writing shows up a couple of odd matters. His
educated guess is that Ben Yiju left Aden suddenly and did not return for
twenty years possibly because of "debt or financial irregularity;" he goes on to
say, "it is hardly likely that the ruler of Aden would take interest in a purely
civil dispute . . . ."37
Why would a ruler not be interested in "purely civil"
disputes? The merchant rulers of Venice whose wealth depended upon
overseas trade certainly were. Aden is a port town, and it is possible that it was
a merchant state. Was this so? Is Ghosh correct in saying that Aden’s rulers
would not have been interested in a purely civil dispute, or is there some truth
in our surmise? Yemen is not as well known as Venice to the English reading
world, nor is it easy to find information on it, not if you want precise
information about its history between 1132 and 1152, but when we desperately
seek a footnote, Ghosh has none. This is a tiny fissure in his apparently
flawless writing, but there are others.
He tells us about places that have touched him personally in some
way. He has heard stories about them from a father or an uncle, he has read a
footnote, or there is a connection with India. Although not exactly
foregrounded, Ghosh’s travel writing tends to be arranged as a binary
opposition between Indians and others, especially from the developed West.
Part of his quest in An Antique Land, for example, seems to be that although
foreigners have written about India, what of its immense trade in the past?
Having asked the question, he rummages around in documents for information
on trade. Yet the fact that he uses this binary opposition does not mean that his
Indian perspective is an untroubled one.
At Large in Burma, for instance, opens with a reasonable and pleasant
sentence:

13
Like many Indians, I grew up on stories of other countries: places my parents
and relatives had lived in or visited before the birth of the Republic of India, in
1947.38
Are these many Indians the bhadra Bengalis with geography books in their
homes that Meenakshi Mukherjee wrote of? Ghosh doesn’t tell us, but "places
and relatives my [family] had visited" suggests that he must be referring to the
few Indians who could travel, possibly the well off middle class. Normally his
prose expresses exactly what is verifiable against factual information but here
we have a sweeping generalisation.
Supposing, however, that Ghosh has knowingly equated his personal
experience with "many Indians," how would it influence our reading of the
essay? A particular situation often leads him to a generalising question.39
About the Burmese rebels, he asks, "I wondered what made people fight lost
wars against such odds?" Thereupon he goes to the rebel camp in search of
answers. Renewed fieldwork furnishes enough new particulars for a long
essay, but the detail he leaves out as a significant motivation for people
fighting against odds is politics. He does say then came a dictator, and then
came Suu Kyi, but he does not link these changes to economic conditions and
so on. Ghosh seems to turn away sternly from master narratives that could have
provided explanatory frames to all his diligently acquired data.
But let’s look at the last phrase of the sentence, "the birth of the
Indian Republic in 1947." Ghosh must know that India was not a Republic in
1947. Why did he put the phrase in then?
The next bit is difficult to say without sounding narrowly chauvinistic,
but baldly, sometimes Ghosh pushes into the background the very Indianness
that forms one of the poles of his structural binary opposition, with disturbing
results. In An Antique Land, for instance, he says that the Egyptians use the
phrase, "'gone outside'" for "gone abroad," or "gone outside the country."40
We
use similar expressions in North India: "baahar gaya hai," "baahar se laye hain”
(he has gone outside, i.e., abroad; we bought this from outside, i.e., abroad).
Ghosh does not mention the similarity between the Egyptian and Indian idiom.
Of course he may not be familiar with the North Indian usage, but he has lived
in Delhi, and we may speculate that he would not be unacquainted with it. If
this is the case, then perhaps his effacement of India is a variation of how
Indians writing in English write for the West. At other places, Ghosh he seems
to be redressing the Occidental bias of research, such effacement is a bit odd.

14
Majeed puts it in another, not less harsh, way: "There is a hint here of how
post-colonial identities are in collusion with the powerful effects of European
colonialism, but part of the problem of the book lies in Ghosh’s evasion of
these relationships of collusion between post-colonial Indian identity and
European colonial rule." 41
If Ghosh is indeed careless about India, can he be a reliable witness
about other places? Or is his carelessness about the birth of the Indian Republic
a clue that he alters historical details as he altered the pronoun in Shelley's
“Ozymandias?” Is his non-fiction really fiction? What is permissible in literary
allusions, after all, is not permitted when citing history, not unless Ghosh was
writing fiction or what-if history.
In other words, “Like many Indians, I grew up on stories of other
countries: places my parents and relatives had lived in or visited before the
birth of the Republic of India, in 1947” is not a good opening sentence for a
chapter in which Ghosh is going to narrate the history of a place.
Time to take stock once more. I am trying to find ways looking at
Ghosh as a travel writer but it is not easy because the area is relatively new and
hasn’t had time to become rooted in a fertile bed of footnotes. The wealth of
possible approaches, too, can be exhausting. I elected to subject the style and
structure of his travel writing to close reading, which has shown that there is a
consistency in them. Ghosh begins his travel writing with the question, "What
happened to . . .?" Like a determined research student, he travels in search of
the answer, and like a successful one, he usually finds it. I don’t think he has
yet written anything that does not end with an answer to a question he has
asked himself. At any rate, he writes as if the last full stop has coincided with
absolute discovery and there are no more blanks on this particular map. He
prefaces the middle part of his narrative with, "There is no mystery about
why,”42
manifesting a characteristic sureness of purpose. Given such certainty,
one may be forgiven for assuming that the opening sentence of At Large in
Burma is has been written not out of carelessness but because Ghosh wished it
to be that way.
The Egyptian works
The possibility that Ghosh's non-fiction is slightly fictionalised is even more
evident in his writing about Egypt.43
Compare the essay, "The Imam and the
Indian" (1985) with the same incident in An Antique Land (begun in 1989).44

15
Ghosh's reports about the differences between Islam and "Indian" religion45
as
perceived by an Egyptian are substantially the same. There is the same horror
of the uncircumcised and burning of the dead in the Egyptian, the same
confusion in the Indian, but Ghosh changes the names and identities of the
protagonists. The barber-Imam-medicine man of the essay becomes an Ustaz
(teacher) and an ex-law student from the University of Alexandria in An
Antique Land. Ghosh does not tell us which is true? Why does he withhold
information? Is it that style and content mesh in his travel writing? In An
Antique Land, he seems to equate Hindu with Indian. This happens primarily
when he reports his conversations with the Egyptians about cremation, and
perhaps the awkwardness arises from this, but he does not tell his Egyptian
interlocutors that all Indians do not burn their dead.
So what?
So, this. Sometimes what lies at the heart of a long prose or poetic
work is its chief emphasis. Thus, Odysseus's meeting in Hades with Achilles,
the hero of the Iliad is at the very centre of the Odyssey. Similarly, the
Nashâwy section lies more or less at the centre of In An Antique Land.46
Ghosh
begins the section with "I sometimes wished I had told Nabeel a story."47
He
then tells us, but not Nabeel, the story of the 1964 riot, ending with the much
quoted, "I could not have expected them to understand an Indian's terror of
symbols."48
It seems as if being a Hindu in a Muslim country makes Ghosh
uncomfortable, but that isn't his reason for not telling Nabeel the story of the
1964 riot. He says that the riot is a mirror of a similar riot in Calcutta, thus
obliterating difference and implying that all riots are virtually the same, but he
evaded the question of why being a Hindu in a Muslim country makes him
uncomfortable. In fact, he never explains his attitude. Instead, he takes refuge
in the argument that he could not have explained the riot to Nabeel because
Indians have a terror of symbols which, presumably, Egyptians don’t. Whereas
riots were said to be similar, now difference of culture becomes significant.
Stylistically, Ghosh slips from exposition to obfuscation, for what does "an
Indian's terror of symbols" mean? Much like Rhett Butler's "Frankly my dear I
don't give a damn,"49
it is has little to do with what has gone before and
explains nothing.

16
Ghosh is on two journeys of discovery in An Antique Land, and he
does indeed discover a lot about the slave, but if in section 13 of "Nashâwy" he
was meant to be travelling into his own past, why didn’t he tell Nabeel the
story? When he tells it to us, why doesn't he explain why he kept it from
Nabeel? Without a reason for why he didn’t tell Nabeel the story, his saying he
wished he had is mere words, even a substitute for action. This journey into
himself at least is thwarted and blocked.
The first published version of Section 12 of "Nashâwy," the context
for the story he never told Nabeel, is an essay in The Imam and the Indian,
which ends with Khamees saying, "You must bury me." Prior to this, Ghosh
has had a fiery confrontation with the Imam in which issues of power and
powerlessness have been raised. Khamees has been upset by their disagreement
and wishes to apologise to Ghosh, in accordance with which he says he will
visit India, but were he to die there, Ghosh must bury him. No dialogue, no
forward movement follow, making the essay a kind of stasis, a species of
picture-making that (perhaps) parallels Ghosh's approach to the past which is
to be explored but which he never quite sees as reaching into the present and
future. Present day Egyptians don't understand what he is doing in their
country, but he cannot connect the past he is exploring to their present.
The thing about travel writing is that the writer has little place to hide.
Up against the unfamiliar, he only has his values and judgements on his side;
his account of his journey shows this up.
NOTES
1
Vintage Departures, an appropriate name, published an edition of it.
2
"In 1993 the author visited Cambodia, a land ravaged by the `Pol Pot years' from 1975 to 1978 and which
has been in almost ceaseless turmoil thereafter. Amongst other things, he met members of Pol Pot's family
and travelled to the village where he was born. . . .Visited Burma twice in 1995-6 . . .brings alive [its]
recent history . . .from the death of Aung San in 1947 to his daughter Suu Kyi's current struggle for the
restoration of democracy in Burma. . . .travelled to the jungle camps of the Karenni insurgents. . . .The
entire book is a masterpiece of travel and interpretative writing" (blurb, Dancing in Cambodia; At Large in
Burma).
3
The Circle of Reason (Great Britain: Hamish Hamilton, 1986; New Delhi: Roli, n.d.), cited as CR; The
Shadow Lines (New Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1988), cited as SL; In An Antique Land (New Delhi: Ravi Dayal,
1992), cited as IAAL; The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium and Discovery (New Delhi:

17
Ravi Dayal, 1996), cited as CC; Dancing in Cambodia; At Large in Burma (New Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1998),
cited as CB, but individual essays have been referred to by their full titles; The Glass Palace
(HarperCollins, 2000), cited as GP; The Imam and the Indian: Prose Pieces (New Delhi: Ravi Dayal and
Permanent Black, 2002), cited as I&I; The correspondence between Amitav Ghosh and Dipesh Chakrabarty
at <amitavGhosh.com> has been cited as Adda.
NOTES
4
Vintage Departures, an appropriate name, published an edition of it.
5
"In 1993 the author visited Cambodia, a land ravaged by the `Pol Pot years' from 1975 to 1978 and which
has been in almost ceaseless turmoil thereafter. Amongst other things, he met members of Pol Pot's family
and travelled to the village where he was born. . . .Visited Burma twice in 1995-6 . . .brings alive [its]
recent history . . .from the death of Aung San in 1947 to his daughter Suu Kyi's current struggle for the
restoration of democracy in Burma. . . .travelled to the jungle camps of the Karenni insurgents. . . .The
entire book is a masterpiece of travel and interpretative writing" (blurb, Dancing in Cambodia; At Large in
Burma).
6
The Circle of Reason (Great Britain: Hamish Hamilton, 1986; New Delhi: Roli, n.d.), cited as CR; The
Shadow Lines (New Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1988), cited as SL; In An Antique Land (New Delhi: Ravi Dayal,
1992), cited as IAAL; The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium and Discovery (New Delhi:
Ravi Dayal, 1996), cited as CC; Dancing in Cambodia; At Large in Burma (New Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1998),
cited as CB, but individual essays have been referred to by their full titles; The Glass Palace
(HarperCollins, 2000), cited as GP; The Imam and the Indian: Prose Pieces (New Delhi: Ravi Dayal and
Permanent Black, 2002), cited as I&I; The correspondence between Amitav Ghosh and Dipesh Chakrabarty
at <amitavGhosh.com> has been cited as Adda.
7
Adda.
8
For the distinct possibility that this collection of his prose pieces has been published to assist academic
research on his work, see my review of The Imam and the Indian: Prose Pieces, “Writer of Many
Dimensions” (The Book Review Vol.XXVI No.9 (September 2002): 30-31). Another comment by Ghosh to
Dipesh Chakravarty is that since he knows how difficult it is for anyone to write, he prefers to focus on
what a writer has said rather than what he has left unsaid. It seems as if Ghosh would like to orchestrate
critiques of his writing, but a writer’s views on his work are always welcome.
9
I&I vii.
10
Aditya Bhattacharjea, “The Shadow Lines in context,” Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines: Critical
Essays ed. Arvind Chowdhary (New Delhi: Atlantic, 2002), 203-216, 206, henceforth. Since I have later
compared Byron and Ghosh, one might recall Byron’s amused list of all he had been compared to in
“different journals English and foreign:”
I have seen myself compared personally or poetically—in English French German (as
interpreted by me) Italian and Portuguese within these nine years—to Rousseau—
Goethe—Young—Aretne—Timon of Athens—“An Alabaster Vase lighted up within”,
Satan—Shakespeare—Buonaparte—Tiberias—Æschylus—Sophocles—Euripides—
Harlequin—The Clown—Sternhold and Hopkins—to the Phantasmagoria—to Henry the
8th
, Michael Angelo—to Raphael—to a petit maitre—to Diogenes, to Childe Harold—to
Lara-to the Count in Beppo—to Milton—to pope—to Dryden—to Burns—to Savage—to
Chatterton—to “oft have I heard of thee my Lord Biron” in Shakespeare, to Churchill the
poet—to Kean the actor—to Alfieri &c. &c. &c. . . ” [‘In the Wind’s Eye’: Byron’s
Letters and Journals ed. Leslie A.Marchand, 13 volumes, vol 9: 1821-1822 (London:
John Murray, 1979) 11].
Critics have targeted Byron’s personal life as much as his work. Ghosh is possibly more fortunate. His
education at St.Stephen’s College, his being an anthropologist, and his travels have been of critical interest
only insofar as they impinge on his writing.
11
Pratt 10.
12
Compare, say, Robert Byron.
13
IAAL 100.
14
Othello Act III, scene iii.
15
John Keats, sonnet, “On First Reading Chapman’s Homer.”

18
16
Javed Majeed has an interesting slant on travel and books in An Antique Land: “The central concern of
the text is less with diaspora as the migration of people, and more with diaspora as the dispersion of
manuscript and archival material from an original point of collection. Its ‘strong sense of the archival’
comes from the ‘materiality’ of the dispersed archive, the descriptions of paper, the paper trade and so on,
and that the historical has priority over the imaginative.” (Javed Majeed, "Amitav Ghosh's In An Antique
Land: The Ethnographer-historian and the Limits of Irony," The Journal of Commonwealth Literature vol.3
no.2 (1995): 45-55, cited as Majeed, 46.
17
Pratt 171.
18
Compare Wordsworth, e.g. who edited The Prelude to enhance its confessional aspect. By contrast,
Byron is less and confessional and more public-18C.
19
Compare the accounts of explorers and mountaineers.
20
As did Alexander von Humboldt, who sought seeking "to pry affect away from autobiography and
narcissism and fuse it with science" (Pratt 124). See Pratt, chapter 9, on the seeing man and monarch-of-all-
I-survey mode of travel writing.
21
Thor Heyerdahl's The Kon-Tiki Expedition: By Raft Across the South Seas has a map on its dust jacket
and as its frontispiece (1948; English translation 1950; rpt. London: Allen & Unwin, 1951).
22
Quoted in Stanley Kunitz, "Poetry's Silver Age: An Improbable Dialogue," in Writing in America, ed.
John Fisher and Robert B.Silvers (New York: Pyramid, 1962), 29-45, 37.
23
IAAL 101-103.
24
However, writing of the dense detail of Theroux's account of South America, Pratt says that "in the 1960-
s and 1970s, exoticist visions of plenitude and paradise were appropriated and commodified by on an
unprecedented scale by the tourist industry, 'Real' writers [like Theroux] took up the task of providing
'realist' . . . versions of postcolonial reality" (Pratt 221). Ghosh began writing 8 years after Theroux's book,
which is not very long in terms of influences in literary styles.
25
Yet another of Ghosh's Enlightenment slants is his distrust of religious enthusiasm. In the already quoted
passage from IAAL, Ghosh says "God wills it" is a dead language, yet almost all around the world that is
exactly the language that is being used. Ghosh is well aware of this, for he says that he wrote the epilogue
to IAAS after a "deeply disturbing" visit to Egypt shortly before the Gulf War, about ten years after his
field trip. What disturbed him was that "Luxor, usually so crowded with tourists, had the look of an
abandoned city and the rumblings of fundamentalist rage were already audible in the eerie gloom" (I&I
viii). How are we to reconcile Ghosh’s using the tools and attitudes of the Enlightenment with his critiques
of it?
26
Tourist brochures are the opposite of this. They make everything comfortably familiar.
27
CB 65.
28
CB 59.
29
But see Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, The Illustrated History of Indian Literature (Delhi: Permanent Black,
2003), where Ghosh has been described as “a champion of post-modernism."
30
But see Majeed 50-52.
31
When Ghosh was a fresher at St.Stephen's College, Rukun Advani, already in college, asked him to
identify some music, which to his relief Ghosh recognised as Beethoven's Emperor Concerto and Sixth
Symphony. Thereafter, literature and music became the staples of their conversation. See Ghosh, "The
Lessons of Rudra Court," The Fiction of St.Stephen's ed. Aditya Bhattacharjea and Lola Chatterji (New
Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 2000) 21-24, 21. For Beethoven and the sonata form, see Charles Rosen, Beethoven’s
Piano Sonatas: A Short Companion, (New Haven: Yale University P, 2002), and his Sonata Forms (New
York:WW Norton, 1980).
32
CB 93.
33
CB 107.
34
IAAL 11.
35
Meenakshi Mukherjee, review, Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma, IndiaStar Review of Books
<http://indiastar.com/mukherjeel.html> [Live when accessed in 2002; unable to access it in May 2006].
36
This sensitivity to rhythm doesn’t show up in most of The Imam and the Indian, which has an insistent
beat, the inevitable result of collecting occasional pieces in one place. The exception is the sweeping, heady
cadences of Ghosh’s review of the translation of the Babur-Nama, which perfectly suit the topography of

19
the steppes and the drama of Babur's career. Unfortunately, it throws the rhythm of the other essays into
unhappy relief. The woodpecker effect doesn’t occur in Ghosh's novels or a longer essay like Dancing in
Cambodia.
37
IAAL 161.
38
CB 65.
39
As a disciplined anthropologist, he universalises from his experience.
40
IAAL 284.
41
Majeed 46.
42
CB 101.
43
See Bhattacharjea.
44
See Ghosh, "Acknowledgements," I&I. Elsewhere he says, "I left Egypt in 1981, and it was not until
seven years later that circumstances permitted me to begin a serious enquiry into the slave of MS H.6: in
the ten years that had passed since I first came across Goiten's brief reference to Abraham Ben Yiju and his
slave, my path had crossed theirs again and again, sometimes by design and sometimes inadvertently, in
North Africa, Egypt and the Malabar, until it became clear that I could no longer resist the logic of those
coincidences." ". . . I started upon the slave's trail. . ." (IAAL 99).
45
The term is from IAAL.
46
IAAL 204-210.
47
IAAL 204.
48
IAAL 210.
49
In the film of Gone with the Wind

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