The Link Between Anthropology & Writing
Excavation
Lila Azam Zanganeh interviews Amitav Ghosh May 2011The author Amitav Ghosh discusses the link between anthropology and writing, The New Yorker’s edit of his essay on the Iraq war, and John Updike’s worst book.
Many novelists start out dreaming in their bed at night. As Sartre describes in The Words, they dream of how they’ll write these wild romantic novels. But Amitav Ghosh seems to come from quite a different place. As a young man he worked as a journalist; his first job was at the Indian Express newspaper, based in New Delhi. He next earned a PhD at Oxford in social anthropology, followed by a stint in Egypt. As he tells Lila Azam Zanganeh, our “Nabokovian“ interviewer, his background in anthropology—as opposed to, say, an MFA—might have been the best training imaginable for his fiction and essays: “What does an anthropologist do?” he asks. “You just go and talk to people, then at the end of the day you write down what you see.… It trains you to observe, and it trains you to listen to the ways in which people speak.”
Ghosh published the first of his six novels, The Circle of Reason, in 1986, and his career was given a boost when France awarded the book a prestigious Prix Médicis Etranger. While he lives in Brooklyn, writes in English and feels at home in the New York publishing scene, his sensibility is clearly that of an internationalist. Enabled in his career by writers such as Salman Rushdie and V.S. Naipaul, he cares almost nothing about identity in its narrowest sense. Why? Because of India. “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.”
This has been decisive in his life as a writer. In the relationship between his fiction and his ample body of nonfiction, his focus has been to decipher the world as it already is, but also, as the New York Times has it, to be “archaeologist of the powerless.” “If you were to divide writers,” he says, “like people do divide painters—between the abstractionist and the figurative painters—I’m definitely a figurative person. I mean it’s the world that interests me.”
Ghosh, who turns fifty-five in July, launched his “Ibis trilogy” with 2008’s Sea of Poppies, a finalist for the Booker Prize. The novel, writes Gaiutra Bahadur in the New York Times, “is big and baggy, a self-styled epic with colossal themes and almost a dozen major characters, including the son of an American slave (who is passing as white), the orphaned daughter of a French botanist (who is passing as a coolie) and an Anglophile raja (who has been wrongly sentenced to a penal colony on Mauritius).” To envision it, writes Alan Cheuse in the San Francisco Chronicle, “imagine if Charles Dickens had signed on for a berth on the Pequod.” River of Smoke, the second in the trilogy, will be out in September.
In April, Ghosh was awarded Canada’s Blue Metropolis Literary Prize, with a cash award of ten thousand dollars in recognition of his lifetime literary achievement.
Read full article @ Guernica
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