Live Blog from Amitav Ghosh’s talk

The book we are talking about is Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies.

Homi Bhabha and Sugata Bose go on and on about how Conradian Ghosh’s work is. Then Ghosh comes up and declares how much he hates Conrad and how his work is not at all inspired by him. It is delightfully funny.

Further, he goes on to say how he finds Conrad with his mention of Englishmen with pangs of conscience (Lord Jim) as counter historical

Sugata Bose titters embarassedly. Homi Bhabha growls and does not seem very pleased, may be because of Ghosh’s dig about how post-colonialists have to have the last word.

Ghosh talks about his admiration for the Bengali historical novel – Sunil Gongopadhyay, Saradindu Bandyopadhyay. He especially mentions a book by Saradindu about a boy in Shivaji’s army.

Ghosh’s is delicious. An audience member indicates her unease with the language in the sense that while Hobson-Jobson tells what Indian words found their way into the language of the British Raj, we have no idea about how frequently those words were used or how they were used. Ghosh responds, “Oh I made that up. There is no way of knowing that…Its a novel after all”.

He also makes pertinent points – He talks about the rich maritime history of East Bengal, in particular, and how there is no single literary evidence of this tradition available. And how the African slaves have a narrative because by the second generation they had learnt to read and write while the Indian coolies have no written narrative of their experience – only a diluted oral narrative encountered in snatches of song.

Here is the Sea of Poppies website.