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10th June 2008 |
I sat with the writer Mukul Kesavan out on his lawn on a winter evening and talked about the scene in The Shadow Lines where the narrator opens his atlas, places the point of his compass on Khulna and the pencil end on Srinagar, and draws a large circle. The novel revolves around a riot that occurred at the centre of this circle caused by the disappearance of a relic of the prophet at its periphery; a forgotten riot that happened many years before the rusty compass came out of the drawer. The narrator's uncle, Amitav Ghosh's most compelling character Tridib, died in it. And as the narrator draws the circle, there is an incantation of names: Rann of Kutch, Kandy, Phnom Penh, Hue, Chunking, Inner Mongolia. "It was a remarkable circle," the narrator says. "More than half of mankind must have fallen within it.'' The narrator dwells on the "tidy ordering of Euclidean space'', on the fact that the happenings on some points of the circle could lead to mayhem and death at the centre, while other points in the circle lived on unaffected. He talks of his perplexity at the current of emotion that flows so directedly, and destructively, in such narrow channels. We are a people at war with ourselves, he concludes, a people who have forgotten that we are people, people who have become nothing but states and nations.
It's an incredible scene, I told Mukul, with the nerdish excitement that often erupts in conversations with fellow nerds. And he pulls it off, said Mukul, making me suddenly aware--many years after I first read the scene, some time after I had poked fun at it in my own novel --of the risk involved in writing something so earnest and heartfelt.
That compass is a particularly poignant lens to look through. It is found conveniently lying at the back of a drawer "forgotten'' there by the previous occupant. Perhaps Ghosh's narrator does not want to admit that a grown up man who can make sweeping and important conclusions from old newspapers found in the Teen Murti archive, is still enough of a Bengali schoolboy to own a compass. It reveals something important, that compass, about the place from which the world is being surveyed, and about the person doing the surveying. When you think about that compass long enough, you begin to see that research student's hostel room, somewhere up north near Delhi University; you see the whitewashed walls and the tubelight, the crowded desk, the mosquito coil on its stand near the bed, and you see a young man bent over a map, trying to make sense of the past in an effort to deal with the present. Even if you had not read the interviews and the essays in which Ghosh has talked about how writing The Shadow Lines was his way of coming to terms with his experiences during the 1984 riots, when you think about that compass hard enough you begin to see that this novel of Calcutta and Dhaka and London reflects the way our subcontinent's traumas have been filtered through the consciousness of those who have lived and studied in Delhi. The Shadow Lines is, in some fundamental way, a novel of Delhi.
Reading Philip Roth made me want to be a writer, but it was reading The Shadow Lines that gave me permission to write. I know this now and perhaps I knew it intuitively back in 1994--when I first laid hands on The Shadow Lines six years after it was first published--that there was a thread of wonder and joy at the vastness of the world that ran through Ghosh's work. It may have been an inheritance from the likes of Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyaya or Tagore. And to the
insatiable and wonderful curiosity of his forbears Ghosh had added a powerfully contemporary and equally beautiful awareness of a shared pain; the thing Iqbal was talking of when he ended his celebrated and celebratory taraana-e-hindi by saying "Iqbal koi mehram apna nahin jahaan mein / maalum kya kisi ko dard-e-nihaan hamara'' (Iqbal, we have no confidant in this world / who knows the pain we hide inside.) I don't think it was just me. I suspect that back in the nineties there was more than one young Indian person who was seduced by that combination of pain and wonder, who thought after reading The Shadow Lines that there was nothing better you could do in this world than to be a writer.
It's been twenty years since The Shadow Lines was first published, in simple elegant hardback by Ravi Dayal. In these twenty years Ghosh has continued to write books that are true to that pain and that wonder. And as we celebrate the coming of Sea of Poppies this month, I cannot help but think of the time when Amitav Ghosh first put his compass down and drew me--and Mukul, and the winter evening we spent together out on Mukul's lawn, and my city, and this subcontinent, and the suffering of each and every person who has ever lived--into his arc.
This piece first appeared under the title Circle of Life in Brunch on Sunday, 8th June 2008. |
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