`A praise book of the tides'

Interview with Amitav Ghosh.

Wanting to meet a writer because you like his/her book is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pate, said Canadian writer Margaret Atwood. Meeting famous novelists in a bid to have a peek into their private lives is usually a pointless and underwhelming experience. Amitav Ghosh, however, is a surprise. He ducked the standard post-colonial writer questions, and chatted about his latest book, about reading Rilke, the class he teaches at Harvard, and his brief stint as a journalist. Excerpts from an interview he gave Amulya Gopalakrishnan:

What kind of research goes into your books? You have a background in anthropology and history, and have written credible science fiction as well, but cetology and geology? How do you manage such a formidable sprawl of interests?

I decided a long time ago to write about things that interest me - if they don't interest me, I don't give a damn! Fifteen years ago, in Benares, my wife and I saw a whole school of Gangetic dolphins, for about 15 minutes, and it was the most enchanting thing. To write this book, I went and stayed with a young woman researching Irrawady dolphins and it was fascinating. I think that's what an academic background gives you - the confidence of knowing that you can pick an area that interests you and master it, at least enough to write about it convincingly. I have served time as a journalist as well, which probably helps.

You write about the problem of trying to be at home in a translated world. What does that mean? Also, how do you deal with writing about India in English?

All of us have to confront the basic question of what it means to present one reality in terms of another. Naturally, the language and the translator figure are central to my writing. For example, with Kanai, I was trying to explore what that kind of facile eloquence means when faced with the inexplicable.

In this book, I had to deal with how to represent a certain region of India, which is rather complicated. It is not like Thomas Hardy writing in Wessex English, and nor could I write chutney English because my novel is not set in a place where that is that natural tongue. You see, it is a version of a language, not a lesser language. I had to convey a variant of Bengali, with its own different rhythm - so I experimented with meter and style to write the legend of Bon Bibi, for instance.

The Hungry Tide dwells on dispossession and pain in the Morichjhapi story, and different models of social transformation through Nirmal and Neelima's perspectives. Yet you, as a writer, remain rather self-effacing - do you think that a story can change minds more effectively than flag-waving activism can?

Oh, I'm very aware of the limits of being a writer. But your critique of the world is reflected in everything you do. For me, Morichjhapi was inescapable. I'm concerned with the dilemma of how to balance human needs with nature. In India, the state seems to be so rigid, throwing people out, working under the assumption that they are wicked people with some perverse criminal instinct. But they are so terribly poor, braving the forest for nothing more than some honey. These are some of the poorest people in the world.

Right after the publication of The Glass Palace, you were affected by 9/11 and its aftermath. This is your first book since - how has it shaped your writing?

Actually, this book has a lot to do with that period. After the senseless pity of 9/11, reading Rilke gave me a sense of sanity restored. "That I may one day, leaving the vision of terror, sing praise and glory again to assenting angels," he writes. In such a bleak troubled time, as people suffer so much, we mustn't lose sense of what is glorious, and splendid about the world - or you end up with the same brand of nihilism that causes 9/11. Rilke teaches you that, such a profound appraisal of what is around you. In this book, when Kusum still yearns to go back to the malevolent mud country, or when Bon Bibi is celebrated, it is just my attempt to write the praise book of the tides.