A new interview with writer Amitav Ghosh has appeared in Guernica magazine. Parts of it reminded me of a saying by Plutarch: “It isn’t always in the most distinguished achievements that men’s virtues or vices may be best discovered: but very often an action of small note, a short saying, or a jest, shall distinguish a person’s real character more than the greatest sieges, or the most important battle.” The interview, between the lines, sheds light on Ghosh’s India, the audience he addresses, and his social vantage point. Consider his claim:
“People often talk about identity. It’s not one of the things which really is washing about in my head at all. One of the reasons why is because anybody who’s lived in India knows that India is incredibly, incredibly diverse.… That’s one of the wonderfully liberating things about India; it lets you be exactly who you want to be.”
Umm, really? Or is that the privilege of a tiny social class—his own? Ghosh laments that lit critics in America “think primarily about identity … I mean from the age of like fourteen onwards when they first read Catcher in the Rye or whatever, they’re taught that that’s what literature is about. So that’s what they think it’s about.” Really? A novelist—and former social anthropologist—scoffing at the lens of identity in understanding the lives of others?
It’s quite possible that the above remarks didn’t come out sounding right in the interview form, so perhaps we should cut him some slack. But he then makes other half-baked remarks: “What we see today in [sic] that nation-state is fading to be replaced by these enormous diasporic civilizations. India is one, China is one …” These two are fading nation-states? On the contrary, they have grown more nationalistic in recent decades. A bit later, the interviewer, Lila Azam Zanganeh, asserts that Ghosh is “constantly compared to V.S. Naipaul.” By whom? I have not heard that myself, nor can I think of any justification for it. Ghosh, promptly contrasting himself with Naipaul, explains:
“I was very lucky in that unlike Naipaul I was from a large country—a large, increasingly self-confident country. Often I think the weaknesses of Naipaul’s work come from the fact of his having grown up in a circumstance where there were very intense small conflicts. Where he, I think, could never really claim Trinidad for himself, and never felt enabled to claim it for himself. But I felt very much that I was looking at the world as an Indian. So I think that was certainly one of the huge differences.”
Why is that a source of weakness in Naipaul’s or anyone else’s work—and not strength? What differences does Ghosh speak of, if not of identity? His luck, I submit, lies not in his being from a large country, but from a privileged class, whose members have the vantage point to behold the world “as an Indian” (though when asked directly, he says there is no such thing as “being Indian”). His feel-good invocation of an “increasingly self-confident country” (presumably without “intense small conflicts”?) must resonate with his disaporic fans in the West, who he claims form 60-70% of his audience at readings. They frequently take pride in their country in ways that resemble chauvinism more than self-confidence. Who but a member of his social class can coolly say, “As late as the nineteenth century every Bengali learned Persian; it was normal! We’ve always learned Sanskrit.” Every Bengali? Sanskrit? We? What slice of India does Ghosh confuse for the whole?
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