The Ashes of history

Bahram Modi, a Parsi trader from Bombay, laments that he sold his soul to Ahriman, the devil-figure in the Zoroastrian faith, "and it was all for nothing." The year is 1839 and Modi is horrified when his fellow opium merchants create a pretext for war between China and Britain. He's otherwise a man of god, and though he's voluntarily skirted on the edges of morality before to make profits off drugging Chinese, he wants nothing to do with the evil of war.

But opium has a way of devouring all associated with it. That's Amitav Ghosh's constant message in his ambitious "Ibis" trilogy on the Opium Wars. In the first novel Sea of Poppies (2008), the India-born author told the tales of Indians hurt by the opium the British grow in their chief colony. Directly or indirectly because of the drug, villager Deeti's marriage is doomed, landowner Neel lands in prison, and runaway Ah Fatt's life and mind are ravaged. The last we see them, they're bound together as indentured laborers aboard the opium clipper Ibis, and some of them are about to jump ship in the middle of a storm.

This second volume of the trilogy takes us from the whirlwind of that storm off India to the quieter mist of the Pearl River in south China. Ah Fatt and Neel make their way to Canton, where Neel discovers how the river functions as an artery pumping pollution into the Middle Kingdom.

Foreign merchants come to the city to buy and sell many items, but the most lucrative one by far is opium. Mr. Ghosh introduces us to historical figures like William Jardine, the doyen of the opium trade, and the lesser-known Lancelot Dent. These are men who have made millions off Chinese cravings and don't intend to stop. Dent especially believes the invisible hand of "Free Trade" can't be halted; he's only supplying what his customers want.

Full report here WSJ

Plots of gold

They sell in lakhs, churn out hundreds of novels in a lifetime and constantly finetune their storylines according to the latest trends. Aabhas Sharma meets the bestselling writers of Hindi pulp fiction.

Sitting in the basement office next to his palatial bungalow in Meerut, Ved Prakash Sharma makes a startling revelation in a matter-of-fact tone. “I stopped counting after 1.5 million.” Sharma is talking about his bestselling novel, Wardi Wala Gunda (Hooligan in Uniform), which is treated as a classic in the Hindi pulp fiction genre. “My books sell as they are a heady cocktail of what an average reader wants,” he says. His heady cocktail includes murder, revenge, sex and greed. Throw in book jackets in technicolour screaming murder, cheap thrills, raunchy women and a gun, and you have a sure winner.

Titles like Bahu Maange Insaaf (Daughter-in-Law Demands Justice), Aankhon Wali Andhi (The Blind Woman with Eyes), Dahej Mein Mili Revolver (In the Dowry came a Revolver) and Paintra (Move) have sold like no other genre in the country. The men churning out these potboilers prolifically might not be as famous as Chetan Bhagat, but enter the Hindi heartland and you will find that they are celebrities. Bhagat’s last book, Two States: The Story of My Marriage, has sold about a million copies — stupendous but still 500,000 short of Sharma’s Wardi Wala Gunda. Amitav Ghosh’s latest book, River of Smoke, has so far sold around 60,000; Shobhaa De’s bestsellers do around 25,000.

Take the case of Anil Mohan. This Delhi-based writer has written over 180 books in two decades. On an average, his books sell about 50,000 copies each. (He could be close to the 10 million mark now in overall sales. Though far short of the 400 million or so copies of Harry Potter books of J K Rowling, this is better than any Indian English writer can claim.) Still, he feels that he hasn’t got due credit: “When they [English writers] sell 3,000, it becomes a bestseller. What about our books?”

Full report here Business Standard

Smoke and mirrors

The author of a new book on the Opium Wars on how these kick-started a rare century of decline for China, their place in modern memory, and what they can tell us about globalization today

The Anglo-Chinese Opium Wars of the mid-19th century have sprung back into public memory in India recently. River of Smoke, the second instalment of Amitav Ghosh’s swashbuckling naval Ibis epic, which was published last month, is set in the bustling global city of Guangzhou, or Canton, and follows its Indian, Chinese and European characters, enmeshed in the opium trade through to the brink of the war.

The Opium Wars, conducted in two phases—1839-42 and 1856-60—were a bitter conflict between a British empire eager to expand its global trade, and Qing Dynasty China opposed to British ideas of trade and political relations, and severely displeased with the illegal British supply of opium (which came from the poppy fields of north India) entering the country and raising addiction rates among Chinese at alarming rates.

China’s defeat in the wars is considered the mark of a long period of decline for the country. The world’s oldest nation, and one of its most powerful for much of human history, was to spend the next century fighting against Western empires on the one hand, and the belligerent Japanese empire on the other.

Full review here Mint

Smoke on the water

In the second of his ‘Ibis’ trilogy, Ghosh is at the pinnacle of his prowess. It’s a triumph, a truly global novel

We’re just halfway into the year, but if there’s one novel in 2011 that will make the pulse race and the mind wonder with sweep, scale, power and a riveting, multi-threaded story, it is Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke. Coming three years after Sea of Poppies, which was the first volume in the Ibis trilogy, the middle panel of the triptych is even vaster, denser with action and richer in backdrop.

Poppies was set primarily in the Calcutta of 1838—the fulcrum of the British empire in the east, where trade was the lubricating agent of colonization—and on board the Ibis, transporting indentured workers to Mauritius, along with convicts. But River of Smoke abandons this centre, for the most part, stretching its action from Mauritius in the West to Canton in the East, with passing cameos by other parts of the world, such as the island of St Helena where Napoleon is exiled after losing the Battle of Waterloo, which puts in an appearance in the novel.

Much of the action continues to take place on board merchant ships—either in mid-voyage, or anchored off the coast of China, as events come to a slow boil in the world’s largest market for the opium that British and Indian traders make a killing on. The line from the poppy fields of eastern India is thus drawn all the way to Canton. Here, local opium dealers supplying a willing population of addicts not only help reverse the trade deficit of the British empire with China—while adding to the wealth of individual opium traders from all countries who’ve joined the gold rush—they also lead the Chinese empire to clamp down on opium imports. The outcome, of course, will be the Opium Wars, in not one but two editions.

Full review here Mint 

Chinese, Pak, African authors at Kovalam

Chinese writer Lijian Zhang along with Pakistani writers Mohammed Haneef and Ali Sethi will be the prime attractions of the Kovalam Literature Festival early next month in Thiruvanthapuram.

Zhang, who is visiting India for the first time would speak about her bestseller Socialism is Great, a memoir of her growing up years in China of the 1980s, at the third edition of the festival, scheduled to be held on October 2-3 at the Kanakakunnu Place in Kerala's capital city.

Mohammed Haneef who wrote A Case of the Exploding Mangoes along with Ali Sethi whose debut novel The Wish Maker and H M Naqvi's The Home boy form the authors from Pakistan who will read out and discuss their books at the festival.

"We also have Debrah Baker, the wife of Amitav Ghosh reading out from her yet to be released book on Islam and Pakistan," says an organiser of the festival.

Baker''s book The Convert: A Parable of Islam and America, is scheduled to be released next year in India.

Among other invitees include poet lyricist ONV Kurup, writer Paul Zachariah, Kashmiri author Basharat Peer, graphic novelist Sarnath Banerjee, Amish Tripathi, Mridula Koshy and Manu Joseph. Capt Gopinath, talks about his autobiography "simply fly.in" with Amit Baruah.

Full report here MSN

In Mumbai, finding the written word

Mumbai is home to a growing number of chain bookstores - well-lit, air-conditioned spots that often host book launches and stock the latest best-sellers from Indian and international authors. But bibliophiles looking to ferret out bargains or rare finds shouldn't end their search without digging a little more deeply, from decades-old shops to street stalls.

Start at the appropriately, if unimaginatively, titled New and Secondhand Bookshop (526, Kalbadevi Road, Dhobi Talao; 91-22-6524-1731). Opened in 1905, the shop has two cramped floors of shelves, sorted dutifully according to subject matter. These range from poetry to international politics, with many stops in between. A recent visit yielded a 1902 Edinburgh-published Jonathan Swift collection from the rare and out of print section.

As the result of a recent anti-hawker campaign, the pavements to the north of Hutatma Chowk (formerly Flora Fountain) aren't as dense with book stalls as they were five years ago. But this is still a fine place to find a wide range of new and used books, including current favorites like William Dalrymple and Amitav Ghosh, as well as Penguin classics, at a steep discount from the cover price. (Do, though, beware counterfeits when shopping.)

Full report here NDTV

Why Jesus didn't turn wine into water

It’s a myth that Sanskrit is the best language for writing computer code. Patriotic Indians have spread this lie for many years. - Bill Gates

There are some people whose books you don’t want to finish in a hurry because you know, instinctively, that your next read is unlikely to measure up.

Manu Joseph’s Serious Men ranks alongside the others in my list - books by Amitav Ghosh, Orhan Pamuk, Vikram Seth and Salman Rushdie.

His voice is so fresh that he ascribes quotes to Bill Gates the latter has no idea he is believed to have said. Well, in all fairness, it is Ayyan Mani, the protagonist of the novel, father of an acclaimed genius and resident of the BDD chawl in Mumbai who does this.

Inevitably, there have been comparisons to the driver from White Tiger. As the author himself confessed at a reading, he groaned when Aravind Adiga’s claim to fame came out.

“I was well into my book by then,” he says,” and I thought ‘Noooo!’”

But while Yann Martel’s and Adiga’s tigers didn’t impress me much, Manu Joseph’s writing is lyrical even when the thoughts he puts down on paper are coarse. Take the pages in the beginning, when the author gets into Ayyan Mani’s head, to describe the ‘long concrete stretch by the Arabian Sea’, made famous by the climactic scenes of Bollywood movies.

Full report here Sify

Damning the oriental scene

Reading literature and having a damn good time had become quietly but decidedly uncoupled,” writes Lev Grossman in an essay on the rise of the trashy hybrid novel. He could have been writing about India, where the rise of imitation pulp fiction — the Third World version of Eric Segal, not even the Third World version of Stephen King — and the growth of worshippers at the broad church of illiterature is an alarming but persistent trend. These are four things I’d love to see changing about the Indian literary scene in the next decade.

The Booker: It’s so tempting to pin the Indian obsession with the Booker on Arundhati Roy, whose win in 1997 for God of Small Things sparked off the great Indian Booker gold rush. (Blaming Arundhati is now a small cottage industry in its own right, so she may as well take the rap for the Booker. It’s a more interesting crime than hating the US, sympathising with the Maoists and never writing a sentence if she can get away with a paragraph.)


But the truth is, it’s our fault. If we’re losing interest in the Booker this year because Rushdie didn’t make it to the longlist and there isn’t another Indian/Asian contender, perhaps we need to ask when we became such insular readers. A century ago, the first Indian writers to claim English as one of their own languages read broadly; their imaginations were fired by their counterparts in Russia, Europe and America. A generation ago, Amitav Ghosh chronicled the practice of using the list of Nobel literature laureates as a kind of reader’s guide — a dreary but worthy way of inviting the world onto one’s bookshelves. What we’re seeing today isn’t just a preoccupation with literary success; it’s an unhealthy self-obsession.


Full report here Business Standard

At home in a world of ideas

Novels are about human behaviour, about our sense of right and wrong, she says. Award-winning novelist Margaret Atwood on why she doesn't quite see herself as a ‘feminist' or ‘activist'. Excerpts from an exclusive interview….

Controversy and Margaret Atwood have never been strangers. As former president of Pen Canada, she has been a long-time champion of writer's rights. As one of the most-acclaimed writers alive, awards are an everyday affair. But her decision to accept the million-dollar Dan David prize, along with Amitav Ghosh, has landed her in the eye of a veritable typhoon! In her widely-publicised response to the outcry from activists urging her to refuse the award (whose earlier recipients include Tom Stoppard, Peter Brook, Al Gore, Zubin Mehta and Tony Blair), Atwood decried cultural boycotts as a “form of censorship”. But after returning from Tel Aviv she wrote a piece in the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz lamenting the ‘Shadow over Israel' — one that would remain until “Palestine has its own legitimised state within its internationally recognised borders”. Meanwhile, despite the storm that raged without, between television interviews and on the eve of yet another journey, Margaret Atwood made time for a long conversation.

Margaret Atwood looks up from the book she is signing, her mischievous blue eyes sparkling with good humour, and urges me to ask her questions as she multi-tasks!

At the moment, the grand dame of Canadian literature couldn't be busier. Fuelled by rave reviews of her dystopian masterpiece, The Year of the Flood, and the chart-busting success of Payback and its uncanny foretelling of the financial meltdown, she is in serious demand. She is short on time but has agreed to a meeting at the office of the publishing company she helped set up, the House of Anansi Press, in downtown Toronto. She breezes in, dressed in black, long pink scarf flapping, and launches straight into a book-signing spree. I am struck by how small and frail, how delicately chiselled and feminine she is. Somehow this comes as a surprise, although I am uncertain about what I was expecting. I recall the chillingly brilliant opening lines of her Power Politics, “you fit into me like a hook into an eye; a fish hook, an open eye”, but before I can delve deeper into the apparent contradiction between the writer and her craft, a cup of coffee interrupts my brief reverie and I find myself, unsurprisingly, addressing a well-spring of quotable quotes: Atwood's conversation is witty, exceptionally intelligent and interspersed with a ready, infectious laugh.

Full interview here Hindu

Hinduism and modernity

The contemporary Indian novel might be said to have two strains. The first is the Indian novel in English, and its best-known representatives are household names: Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Chandra, Kiran Desai and Aravind Adiga. The second is the Indian novel in languages other than English, and who the great names are in this space depends very much on the language and geographical location of the reader. The English-speaking reader, relying solely on translations and looking down again from a pan-Indian perspective, might say that currently these are the Bengali novelists Sankar and Mahasweta Devi, the Tamil writer Salma, the Hindi writer Alka Saraogi, the Oriya writer Chandrasekhar Rath, and the Rajasthani folklorist Vijay Dan Detha.

One remarkable aspect of the Indian novel is that both these strains trace their origins in the work of one man, Bankimchandra Chatterji (1838-1894). The first Indian to take a BA under the new English-medium educational system set up by the British, Chatterji thereby came under the influence of the novel, then a prose form unknown in India. Chatterji’s first novel, Rajmohan’s Wife (1865), written while he was a young deputy magistrate in the newly established Indian civil service, was composed in English.

Full report here Mint

'It Is Not Awarded By The State Of Israel'

Amitav Ghosh on his refusing to refuse the Dan David Prize: 'I do not believe in embargoes and boycotts where they concern matters of culture and learning.' These, he argues, 'must, in principle, be regarded as autonomous of the state'.

Ever since Amitav Ghosh's name was announced--jointly with Margaret Atwood-- for the Dan David Prize, headquartered at Tel Aviv University, Israel, there have been some protests and campaigns, asking him to decline the prize, reminding him about his withdrawing The Glass Palace from the Commonwealth Prize competition in 2001. "I am not a person who seeks out controversy," he had told us in 2001, and he underlined the same today when we asked him why a private e-mail of his was doing the rounds of email-lists and some websites instead of a formal public statement from him: he did not wish it to become a big public issue, he said, and offered the following version of the statement:

Thank you for your message. I have received many others in relation to the Dan David Prize, which I am sharing with Margaret Atwood.

To begin with let me say that I am appalled by the enforced isolation of Gaza, by the continued expansion of settlements in the West Bank, and by the intransigence and extremism of the present government in Israel. My sympathies go to all of those who have suffered, and are suffering, in this long and destructive conflict.

Full text here Outlook

History goes pop

There was a time—all of the 19th century—when the educated read history books and the slightly less educated read historical novels. This trend petered out sometime around the mid-20th century, under the impact of decolonization (which exposed much of “history” as Eurocentric), the rise and defeat of fascism (which exposed some of “history” as racist) and later, feminism and postmodernism (which, in different ways, revealed “history” to be often “his story”).

Lately, however, there has been a revival—both of popular histories (as in the “Mughal” books by William Dalrymple) and of historical fiction (as in Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace or Hilary Mantel’s Booker-winner from last year, Wolf Hall).

Jonathan Phillips’ Holy Warriors: A Modern History of the Crusades and Ira Berlin’s The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations are sterling examples of good history books written, once again, for a large readership and not just for scholars.

Full report here Mint

What is ‘common’ about this prize?

As literary awards go, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize appears to be as anachronistic as the institution itself. Neither a geographic entity, nor one uniting similar cultures and societies at similar stages of development, the Commonwealth is a group of highly diverse countries brought together only because Britannia once ruled the waves, and the Union Jack fluttered over the official buildings in those colonies (only just, though: Mozambique, which was never under British rule, is now part of the Commonwealth, and the US, which overthrew British rulers more than two centuries ago, has never been part of the Commonwealth).

Today, authors of the Commonwealth write in a remarkably disparate manner, and Britain, or the shared experience of being part of the empire, is only marginally part of the writers’ consciousness. Ironically, the one author who has written most interestingly about the shared links across countries once ruled by the British empire, Amitav Ghosh, famously turned down the prize for Eurasia for his 2001 novel, The Glass Palace. Indeed, his current project, starting with the novel Sea of Poppies, suggests a ruthless examination of the cultural dislocation the empire brought about in India, Mauritius and Hong Kong. But Ghosh had good reasons not to be part of the celebrations: Celebrating a shared experience without reflecting on the pain was wrong in itself; not recognizing the rich profusion of languages spoken in the Commonwealth, and focusing only on English was, to him, another major problem.

Full report here Mint

Amitav Ghosh to share $1-million Israeli award with Margaret Atwood

Even as Amitav Ghosh is working on the second volume of the Ibis trilogy (the first volume, Sea of Poppies, won the 2008 Vodafone Crossword Book Award for fiction and was also shortlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize), his romance with the awards continues. The author of award-winning novels, like The Circle of Reason and The Calcutta Chromosome, has been awarded the $1-million 2010 Dan David Prize for his contribution to modern literature which he will share with Canadian author Margaret Atwood. 

The prize was founded in 2002 by Dan David, an Israeli businessman. It has three categories: Past, Present and Future. The laureates in each category share a $1-million prize. Every year, a different discipline is recognized in each category. The focus each year, however, is on sciences, arts and humanities. Ghosh — and Atwood — are the winners in the present category.

Ghosh garnered much praise from jury members for his fiction which, they said, "is distinguished equally by its precise, beautifully rendered depictions of characters and settings, and by its sweeping sense of history unfolding over generations against the backdrop of the violent dislocations of peoples and regimes during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."Ghosh will recieve the award at a ceremony at Tel Aviv University on May 9.

Amitav Ghosh wins Israeli prize

Amitav Ghosh was named as one of the three winners of the international Dan David Prize, which annually awards three prizes of US$1 million each for outstanding achievement.

The Dan David Prize is named after international businessman and philanthropist Dan David and is headquartered at Tel Aviv University. The laureates, who donate 10% of their prize money towards 20 doctoral and postdoctoral scholarships, will be honoured at a ceremony onMay 9, 2010 at Tel Aviv University in the presence of the President of the State of Israel.

The citation for him read: "for his novels which offer a panoramic treatment of twentieth-century history from a postcolonial perspective and a transnational understanding of the self seen as the intersection of the many identities produced by the collision of languages and cultures".

Dalrymple lauds NRI writing

Each of his books have been bestsellers. Despite that, William Dalrymple doesn’t like people calling him a successful ‘novelist’. He’d rather people call him a ‘non-fiction writer'.

Dalrymple first came to India as a young traveler in 1984 and was fascinated by the sights and sounds of the country. Since then he has made India his home. His latest book Nine Lives, which released late last year, has been another bestseller. Within the first two weeks of its release 35,000 copies were sold in India, the fastest in this country. “For the first time ever I sold faster in India than Britain, which is very nice. If I write about India and Indians don’t recognise that, there’s a problem. It feels wonderful that now I am making a good living as a writer, writing about India. There is a big market for books about India.

However, Dalrymple also feels that there is a dearth of quality travel writing emerging out of India. “Much of the best of Indian writing is happening by NRIs. If I name the top five travel books written by Indian authors, almost all of them reside outside India. Examples being Suketu Mehta, VS Naipul, Amitav Ghosh, Pankaj Mishra and Vikram Seth,” he says.

Full report here DNA