Episode 6: Amitav Ghosh

In this episode, we’re joined by acclaimed novelist Amitav Ghosh for a wide-ranging conversation about storytelling in an age of crisis. Ghosh, who holds  two Lifetime Achievement awards and four honorary doctorates and has been named as one of the most important global thinkers of the last decade, reflects on his work as a writer: from anthropology to journalism, fiction to academic work. This thoughtful interview explores how stories can help us see the world—and our responsibilities within it—more clearly.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:22

Welcome to Broad Street to Bright's Head. Today I'm joined by celebrated author Amit Havgosh, author of the Ibis trilogy, The Hungry Tide, Sea of Poppies, The Nutmeg's Curse, and Gun Island to name just a few. His novels intricately weave together themes of colonialism, identity, migration, the environment, and myth. His stories interconnect individual characters with the major global historical events going on in their lives. He dissolves boundaries between fiction, non-fiction, history, and anthropology, creating profound, complex works which leave a mark on the reader long after they've closed the back cover. Thank you so much for joining me today. I would like to start by just having just have you talk to me a little bit about uh your journey to Oxford and why you decided social anthropology, because that sounds like a really interesting subject, but also not one that you sort of immediately think of. And then also whether you knew that writing was always going to be what you wanted to do, or whether that was something that came out of your studies.

SPEAKER_01 1:36

Well, that's those are some very big questions. I'll try and answer them as best I can. Uh so uh it uh you know it was a sort of uh strange journey that got me to Oxford, really. I had done my undergraduate studies uh in at Delhi University, and after that, I didn't really want to go on with uh you know with studying and academics and so on. So I went into journalism, you know. I worked for a paper called the Indian Express, uh, which was in New Delhi. But a friend of mine persuaded me to, you know, to sign up for an MA uh in uh in what was essentially social anthropology at Delhi University. So I was doing two things at the same time. I was doing um, I was studying, uh, you know, studying anthropology and I was working at the uh at uh the Indian Express. But the two actually uh, you know, they sort of fed into each other because a lot of the uh journalistic work I did uh really consisted of something that was like anthropological fieldwork, you know, going and reporting from various places. So there was a kind of similarity between them. And it so happened uh that a couple of years before I graduated with my MA, this Indian family uh started up uh this set of scholarships. The family was the Shivdasani family, and their scholarships are called the INLAX scholarships. At that time, they paid for two years at either Oxford or Cambridge. It had just started up, but it was already very, very competitive and it was very difficult to get. But you know, a friend of mine uh who the who got it the year before uh persuaded me to apply. And you asked about writing. Well, you know, back then uh in India there was really no such thing as a writing uh career, you know, especially if you were writing in English. So that was why I always wanted to be a writer, you know. But for me, I wanted to uh I wanted to have the experience of the world that would make it possible for me to be a writer. And for me, that meant travel because you know, many of the writers I I really admired, like James Baldwin and V. S. Nypaul and so on, they were great travelers, you know. So there's a kind of uh there's a way in which travel and writing sort of inform each other, you know. So I wanted to travel really. So that was why I I put in um uh an application uh for this scholarship, and that year they were giving the scholarship to just eight applicants. And so I went for the interview, and I don't remember what I said or what it bore anything, but then uh the list of uh successful applicants came out, and I was 10th on the list. So really I should, you know, it was just awful because I thought, oh my god, now what do I do? But then fortunately, two of the people who were ahead of me uh dropped out and went off to American universities. So I just weaked in and I got this scholarship. Uh, and it was really completely a life-changing experience. Suddenly, then I found that I've I was able to do everything I wanted to do. And again, the other, you know, social anthropology, you asked social anthropology, uh, is a very small department at Oxford. In fact, it's called the Institute of Social Anthropology. And uh I don't know if the situation has changed now, but back then uh you couldn't even do social anthropology as an undergraduate. Uh, the first uh degree that they offered was called uh a diploma in social anthropology. That's just a year-long course. But again, you know, it was very important for me just to be able to travel and see the world. And, you know, anthropology is a very good way of seeing the world because you don't uh you become something other than a tourist, you actually have to go and live somewhere for a long time. It became possible for me to travel to many, many places. So, you know, I actually studied Arabic in Tunisia, and at the end of that, I uh I traveled, I hitchhiked across the Sahara, which was an amazing experience, you know. You know, I went through this uh through these uh deserts uh with uh the grand one of those deserts is called the Grand Oriental Erg Desert, uh, you know, with these towering dunes and so on. And all of this later fed into my uh fed into my writing in one way or another. So it was very exciting. And then after that, my scholarship was meant to be just for two years. Once I became interested in Arabic and the Arab world, my supervisor, who was uh a wonderful man called Dr. Peter Leonhardt, uh, he was the resident specialist on the Middle East at the Institute of Social Anthropology at that time. And he he urged me to uh uh to do a PhD, a D Phil. And I told him, uh, look, I just have two years funding. Uh but he said, no, no, you know, uh, if you get funding for three years, then it doesn't matter. That covers your fees for a for a D fill. He was absolutely wrong about this. It is covered to my cost later. But he actually persuaded the INLAX Foundation to cover an extra year for me. Uh, I was able to go off to Egypt, uh, where I lived in a small village uh in northern Egypt. And that was really completely fundamental to my career as a writer, because it was while living in this village that I started keeping a journal and so on. And uh it was really my equivalent of writing school.

SPEAKER_00 7:41

I began to dream of Cairo in the evenings as I sat in my room listening while Abu Ali berated his wife or shouted at some unfortunate customer who had happened to incur his displeasure while making purchases at his shop. I would try to shut out the noise by concentrating on my book or my diaries, or by turning up the volume of my transistor radio. But Abu Ali's voice always prevailed, despite the thick mud walls of his house and the squawking of the ducks and geese who lived around my room. This is the opening of In an Antique Land, a book based on Amitabs Gosh's time working on his PhD in Egypt. But what exactly is this as a story? A novel, a diary, something in between, with its jumps between a medieval trader's life and Gosh's own time. It is perhaps beyond genre definition. But how did Gosh come up with this story in the first place? What inspired him to write it? And how would he define the work?

SPEAKER_01 8:49

People often uh describe that book as a novel, and I always have to explain to them no, it's not a novel. It's uh it's nonfiction. I mean, there's not a word uh of fiction in it. I didn't make up anything. But but but uh I wrote it was my third book, and by the time I began to write it, I had already written uh two novels. So I knew very well the difference between fiction and non-fiction. You know, so uh well, you know what happened is that uh what the way I came to be interested in uh in Arabic and in um the Middle East is that uh I knew that there was a long history of contacts between India and of course Egypt and other parts of the Middle East. But one day I was at a library, I think it was the it it wasn't the Bodleian, I think it was the Ashmolean or somewhere like that. And I came across uh across this volume of letters uh that had been um letters written by medieval Arabic uh medieval Jewish uh traders. And there was this trader called Abraham Ben Yju, who was actually born in Tunisia, but then he went to live in Cairo, in a in a part of Cairo called Fustap. And then from there he went to India and he lived in India for 17 years. Uh, this is in the 12th uh century, and he lived there for 17 years in a place called Mangalore, and then he came back uh to Egypt, but he brought an Indian servant with him, and uh there were some cryptic references to this servant, and this got me really interested in thinking about these long contacts between India and Egypt and the Middle East, contacts which have sort of lasted over eight centuries. So that that was what uh really got me launched upon this um upon this project of uh uh doing research in uh in Egypt. And the sort of research I did was not really anything to do with medieval history or anything of that kind. It was a pretty standard uh village study, uh as they used to be called in those days. Uh it was just an ethnography of two villages uh in a in a region called Behera in Egypt. But what it did do for me is that I became at that at that time extremely fluent in Arabic, uh, you know, in colloquial Arabic. So many years later, but it was a you know, fieldwork for anthropologists is always a very intense experience because there you are, you're completely alone, you're in a place where you don't know anyone, where in the beginning you don't even know the language, you don't have any friends. So it is uh it's almost you could say a sort of traumatizing experience, you know. Uh I'm sure you can imagine what it's like. It's culture shock in multiple levels, you know. So for me, there was the culture shock of arriving at Oxford, and then from there, the culture shock of arriving in uh in uh in Egypt. So after I finished my PhD, which I had to do in a record time actually, uh, because uh uh contrary to what my uh supervisor, Dr. Leonhardt had said, it turned out that if I didn't finish my uh PhD uh within uh this three-year time span, you know, I wouldn't graduate with a degree. So in the end, I actually had to uh write my thesis in uh pretty much all of it uh in uh five weeks, you know. So it was it was very, very intense in many ways. Uh but then after that I went back to India and uh all I wanted to do was write a novel, really. And that's what I did over the next three years. I had a I had a couple of you know sort of jobs at think tanks and so on. But fortunately, these jobs uh you know, they didn't, I mean they paid me very, very little. Uh but I I was able to I was able to um you know to write my first novel. But after I had written my first novel and my second novel, both of which I wrote in uh New Delhi in the 1980s, and New Delhi in the 1980s was a very intense and kind of uh violent place. Uh, you know, there were all these insurgencies, there was the insurgency in uh especially in the Punjab. And in 1984, while I was there, there was this uh uh assassination of Indra Gandhi, which was followed by a pogrom in which uh thousands of Sikhs died, and you know, I was an eyewitness to all of that, and uh so uh, you know, this was a very uh this was a very intense time to live through. Uh and then uh, you know, I wrote these books over there, and but somehow my mind kept uh returning uh to uh to Egypt and to the time I had spent in this village, and I realized that unless I wrote about it as a book, I would never be able to, as it were, get past uh that experience. So I find I you know I wrote out a proposal and uh I sent it to uh Bill Buford, uh who was then the editor of Granta magazine, you know. Uh Granta, he had revived Granta. He was one of the great editors, really, of all time, I would say. Uh and um uh you know he was he he'd taken a sort of interest in my career and had helped me publish at Granta and so on. So when I sent him this proposal, he immediately took to it and said, Yep, go ahead, I'll give you some money. So go ahead and write this book. So that's what made it possible for me to write the book.

SPEAKER_00 15:08

Fantastic. Um, I wanted to ask you, actually, you mentioned earlier talking about several levels of uh culture shock. And I was just wondering if that maybe influenced, I think a lot of the books you write are often about cross-cultural identity and people moving between different cultures. And I was just wondering if you think that your own experience of traveling first from India to Oxford and then Oxford to Egypt, and then and back to India, uh, whether that sort of shaped your own desire to write about cross-cultural identity and experience.

SPEAKER_01 15:50

Oh, yes, very much so. But you know, even though I've written about a lot of different places and have lived in a lot of different places, uh, there's the one constant in my life has always been uh Bengal, which is where I'm from. I was born in Calcutta, and Bengal has been uh really a place that I've always returned to, and Bengali, uh which is my uh my mother tongue, has played a very important part in my life as well, because it's provided me with uh a lot of resources, you know. Uh you're a student of history, so you know how important primary sources are.

SPEAKER_02 16:27

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 16:27

And uh Bengali is incredibly rich in primary sources of many different kinds, going back to the early Middle Ages and so on. And uh I've relied on them a lot. And uh especially, you know, Bengal is also uh the home of the Sundarban. You know, the Sundarban is the world's largest mangrove forest. And uh I've written about the Sundarban in many different books. Uh, you know, uh in a lot of my work, I keep returning to the Sundarband. And that's been a very important part uh of my life and my career, which has been so uh all my sort of environmental and ecological engagements really began in the Sundarband, but also I could say they began in Egypt, uh, you know, because it was while I was living in this village that I really came to understand what it means to be a farmer, or what or you could say a peasant, uh, you know, living off the land and what that involves, uh, you know, as a way of life, as a way of uh wresting a living from the soil, if you like. Uh so yes, uh all of that has played a very important part in my life.

SPEAKER_00 17:34

Something I've always wanted to ask of an author who writes accurate and detailed historical fiction is where do you begin? Writing a novel is already difficult enough, but ensuring the history of the work is truthful, realistic, and accurate to the time period must be nightmarish. I wouldn't even know where to start. So, how did Amitav Ghosh do it? And did his time at Oxford help him with that researching aspect?

SPEAKER_01 18:03

That goes back very much uh to my uh to my uh D-fill and to the research that I did in the you know uh various libraries at Oxford back then. But more than that, I think it really goes back to uh in an antiquand. Because in order to write in an antique land, uh I suddenly found myself in a situation where I had to learn this um uh this medieval uh dialect uh called Judeo-Arabic, because uh Abraham Ben Yju's letters were written in Judeo-Arabic. And Judeo-Arabic is a very obscure language, uh, you know, you know, not known by very many people. But I had to translate, I ended up having to translate uh Abraham Ben Yju's uh letters from uh Judeo-Arabic. And Oxford actually, the Bodleian has one of the largest collections of uh Judeo-Arabic documents. Uh it's called the Taylor Schechter uh collection. And um uh back in those days, uh you know, it's amazing to think of now, uh, you could actually sit in the Bodleian and you'd be handed these manuscripts, these 800-year-old manuscripts, and you'd hold them in your hand, you know, uh, and you would uh, you know, you could read them as you sat there with them. So, you know, I really had to sort of acquaint myself with many kinds of different uh techniques of research and uh languages and so on. And I think that really made me lose my fear of uh archives, you know. That was where I really became became very interested in archives, and I became uh I learned my way around archives, you know, how to do research in archives and so on. So later, as I wrote my other books, I kept returning to archives of various kinds. And suddenly for my uh three historical novels, uh this is the Ibis trilogy, uh, which are actually about 19th century India and connections with China and about indentured labor and so on. I did a lot of research uh, you know, uh at uh the British Library. The British Library is an amazing resource, uh, you know. So I found a lot of material there. And uh, you know, to be honest, I enjoy the research. I certainly enjoyed the research for the Ibis trilogy. I mean, you know, research is the easy part. I mean, it's much easier than writing because there it is, it's all there in front of you.

SPEAKER_00 20:55

Let's move on to Gosh's more recent shift towards environmental works. He has written both a fictional work such as The Hungry Tide in Gun Island and non-fictional works such as The Great Derangement and The Nutmeg's Curse, which focus on environmental themes, exploring both the environment and how it affects people, places, economics, societies, essentially the intersection of the natural and human world. So I wanted to explore with him how he approaches environmental issues. Does he look at them with a social anthropological angle? Does he look at them with a social anthropological angle? Are there other influences on this change? How does he approach the major themes of his novels in general?

SPEAKER_01 21:39

Yeah, I have many different perspectives in my head, you know, and they're not separate. So I, you know, I've done a lot of journalism in my life, and that's been a very important part of my uh of my career. Uh and uh certainly uh, you know, uh what I learned of social anthropology helped. Helped me with my journalism, and my journalism helped with uh social anthropology. You know, these things feed into each other. And, you know, as an undergraduate, I studied history in Delhi University, so that has also helped me in many ways. I have a really sort of powerful engagement with history. So in my later books, uh, especially, you know, with uh with my book, The Nutmeg's Curse, and uh a lot of other books which uh approach the planetary crisis in various different ways, I've drawn upon uh you know what I know of history, what I know of uh anthropology, what I know of writing fiction, uh, you know, all those things come together. And uh people often ask me, you know, so you know, what did you draw upon for this or that? I I I don't even know, you know. In my head it's uh it's all in Oxford is a bit of a world apart.

SPEAKER_00 22:57

And although the workload can be intense, the social life can be even more so. There are thousands of clubs and groups, societies, unions. They're all over the place. So was there anything that Amiktav Gosh particularly felt affected by, got involved in, or loved? Did he have any particularly memorable experiences which perhaps changed him or shaped him and his perspective on things?

SPEAKER_01 23:22

I I don't even know where to begin. Uh, you know, it was just uh all of it. I mean it was like um waking up and finding yourself uh, you know, uh in a fairy land or a dream or something, you know. Uh it was just uh I I uh you know, I would literally wake uh wake up sometimes uh unable to believe uh where I was. It was just so astonishing to me. Everything was new, everything had that peculiar brightness and sharpness, you know, that you bring to the world when you're a young adult, just discovering the world for yourself. So it was all just marvelous. And I met so many people, I made so many friends. Uh I would say, you know, strangely enough, uh Delhi University, where I had where I had done my uh MA was at that time academically a very exciting place. I had amazing teachers, and uh when I arrived at Oxford, I actually discovered that uh you know I knew more than uh most of my fellow students, or you know, I was certainly abreast of everything. So I could spend my time really just discovering other things, you know, friendships, um parties, social life, uh, you know. So all of that was just fantastic. I had a uh I I really had an absolutely wonderful time, even though I and I have to say this back in those days, uh there was a lot of racism in England, you know. I mean, sort of really in your face kind of racism. I mean, cars would stop and call name, call you names as you're walking down the high street, you know. And uh that racism existed even at the college level. I mean, you would encounter it uh all the time, but somehow it didn't really matter to me, uh, I have to say, uh, because uh I was just enjoying myself so much. I was discovering so many things and uh learning so much and making so many friends, and really a lot of these friendships have remained lifelong friendships.

SPEAKER_00 25:31

Coming from India to England is a major shift, as we've already touched on a little. The culture shock and environmental change must have been extraordinarily impactful. So I want Amitav to reflect with me a little more on these changes, and also what he thought of the people he met at Oxford and how they perhaps changed him.

SPEAKER_01 25:51

When you're at uh at a college as a graduate student, you don't really mix with the undergraduates, uh, you know. That really just doesn't happen at all. And I'm sure that was the case when I was there, and I'm sure that it's still the case now. Uh so you know, college life uh is really a sort of marginal thing for graduate students, you know, but you have your own common room, and that was a big part of my life hanging out there. Uh I don't I remember that was when uh you know those uh early Le Care uh novels were being uh were being uh uh produced a series on television, uh Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy and so on. You you probably never even heard of them, but I've seen Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy. I've seen with Alec Guinness and everything. Um you know, every week there'd be a new episode that we'd all crowd into the common room to watch. So I remember that there, I remember that very vividly. And the common room had its own um uh you know social functions and institutions and a bar and so on. And it was it it it was great. I mean, the Teddy Hall um uh common room for graduate students was fantastic, and I you know made a lot of friends there. Uh I had very warm memories of that, really. Uh and but what what's also really nice over there is that you know you get invited to other people's common rooms and you get to see the university as it were laterally. So as a graduate student, I think the experience is very different from that of an undergraduate.

SPEAKER_00 27:32

I am sure if I moved countries, came to a place alone to pursue studies at a foreign university, I would feel changed by the experience. But then again, I'm not exactly a budding social anthropologist. Did Amitav Gosh feel changed by his time at Oxford? Or merely the experience of living in a different country? Did he feel like it made an impression on him or changed his way of looking at things? Or was the difference not so significant?

SPEAKER_01 28:02

When one looks back on one's life, you realize that it's not so much that it uh that the shifts in one's life are like uh turning a corner or a new turn or something. It's all an accumulation of experience, you know. And for me, Oxford was certainly a very, very rich uh uh uh source of experience. It gave me uh you know an acquaintance, as I said, with uh with libraries, with archives, with archival methods, with methods of research. And it also made me cosmopolitan, you know, so I don't have much trouble fitting in uh you know wherever I go. I mean uh it becomes uh second nature in a way, you know, after you've been uh around quite a lot. And those early experiences certainly uh played a very, very important part in my life. And um, yeah, uh absolutely. I mean, uh I think if I were to say uh look back and say, where did I get uh the richest deposits of experience in my life, uh Oxford would certainly be one of them.

SPEAKER_00 29:40

From India to Oxford, Egypt to New York. The vast geographical, cultural, and societal experiences Gosh has had has perhaps contributed to his deep, intimate human novels set against global backgrounds. It is clear Gosh's life has revolved around meeting people and coming to understand new mindsets and attitudes, from Abu Ali to the graduate students he mixed with at Teddy Hall, and his journalism days in Delhi. Gosh's diverse life experience certainly contributes to his truthful and provoking literary production. Thank you so much for joining me today, Amitav, and thank you so much for listening. I hope you've enjoyed.