by Amitav Ghosh
I have never had so many utterly depressing conversations, so many talks that ended with the phrase "We have hit rock bottom." There was the college student who said, "Now even Bill Gates will take us seriously." There was the research scientist who believed that now his papers would get more international attention. And there were the diplomats looking forward to a seat on the Security Council. Has the gap between the realities of the subcontinent and the aspirations of its middle classes ever been wider? Talking to nuclear enthusiasts, I had the sense that what they were really saying was, "The country has tried everything else to get ahead. Nothing worked. This is our last card, and this is the time to play it." I am convinced that support for India's nuclear program is occasioned by a fear of the future. The bomb has become the weapon with which the rulers of the subcontinent wish to avert whatever is ahead.
THE MARCH OF THE NOVEL THROUGH HISTORY
The Testimony of My Grandfather's Bookcase 1998
AS A CHILD I spent my holidays in my grandfather's house in Calcutta, and it was there that I began to read. My grandfather's house was a chaotic and noisy place, populated by a large number of uncles, aunts, cousins, and dependants, some of them bizarre, some merely eccentric, but almost all excitable in the extreme. Yet I learned much more about reading in this house than I ever did in school.
The walls of my grandfather's house were lined with rows of books, neatly stacked in glass-fronted bookcases. The bookcases were prominently displayed in a large hall that served, among innumerable other functions, as playground, sitting room, and hallway. The bookcases towered above us, looking down, eavesdropping on every conversation, keeping track of family gossip, glowering at quarreling children. Very rarely were the bookcases stirred out of their silent vigil. I was perhaps the only person in the house who raided them regularly, and I was in Calcutta for no more than a couple of months every year. When the bookcases were disturbed in my absence, it was usually not for their contents but because some special occasion required their cleaning. If the impending event happened to concern a weighty matter like a delicate marital negotiation, the bookcases got a very thorough scrubbing indeed. And well they deserved it, for at such times they were important props in the little plays that were enacted in their presence. They let the visitor know that this was a house in which books were valued; in other words, that we were cultivated people. This is always important in Calcutta, for Calcutta is an oddly bookish city.
Were we indeed cultivated people? I wonder. On the whole I don't think so. In my memory my grandfather's house is always full—of aunts, uncles, cousins. I am astonished sometimes when I think of how many people it housed, fed, entertained, educated. But my uncles were busy, practical, and, in general, successful professionals, with little time to spend on books.
Only one of my uncles was a real reader. He was a shy and rather retiring man, not the kind of person who takes it upon himself to educate his siblings or improve his relatives' taste. The books in the bookcases were almost all his. He was too quiet a man to carry much weight in family matters, and his views never counted for much when the elders sought each other's counsel. Yet despite the fullness of the house and the fierce competition for space, it was taken for granted that his bookcases would occupy the place of honor in the hall. Eventually tiring of his noisy relatives, my book-loving uncle decided to move to a house of his own in a distant and uncharacteristically quiet part of the city. But oddly enough the bookcases stayed; by this time the family was so attached to them that they were less dispensable than my uncle.
In the years that followed, the house passed into the hands of a branch of the family that was definitely very far from bookish. Yet their attachment to the bookcases seemed to increase inversely to their love of reading. I had been engaged in a secret pillaging of the bookcases for a very long time. Under the new regime my depredations came to a sudden halt; at the slightest squeak of a hinge, hordes of cousins would materialize suddenly around my ankles, snapping dire threats.
It served no purpose to tell them that the books were being consumed by maggots and mildew, that books rotted when they were not read. Arguments such as these interested them not at all: as far as they were concerned, the bookcases and their contents were a species of property and were subject to the usual laws.
This attitude made me impatient, even contemptuous at the time. Books were meant to be read, I thought, by people who valued and understood them. I felt not the slightest remorse for my long years of thievery. It seemed to me a terrible waste that nonreaders should succeed in appropriating my uncle's library. Today I am not so sure. Perhaps those cousins were teaching me a lesson that was important on its own terms: they were teaching me to value the printed word. Would anyone who had not learned this lesson well be foolhardy enough to imagine that a living could be made from words? I doubt it.
In another way they were also teaching me what a book is, a proper book, that is, not just printed paper gathered between covers. However much I may have chafed against the regime that stood between me and the bookcases, I have not forgotten those lessons. For me, to this day, a book, a proper book, is and always will be the kind of book that was on the bookshelves.
And what exactly was this kind of book?
Although so far as I know no one had ever articulated any guidelines about them, there were in fact some fairly strict rules about the books that were allowed onto those shelves. Textbooks and schoolbooks were never allowed; nor were books of a technical or professional nature—nothing to do with engineering, or medicine, or law, or indeed any of the callings that afforded my uncles their livings. In fact, the great majority of the books were of a single kind; they were novels. There were a few works of anthropology and psychology, books that had in some way filtered into the literary consciousness of the time: The Golden Bough, for example, as well as the Collected Works of Sigmund Freud, Marx and Engels's Manifesto, Havelock Ellis and Malinowski on sexual behavior, and so on.
But without a doubt it was the novel that weighed most heavily on the floors of my grandfather's house. To this day I am unable to place a textbook or a computer manual upon a bookshelf without a twinge of embarrassment.
This is how Nirad Chaudhuri, that erstwhile Calcuttan, accounts for the position that novels occupy in Bengali cultural life:
It has to be pointed out that in the latter half of the nineteenth century Bengali life and Bengali literature had become very closely connected and literature was bringing into the life of educated Bengalis something which they could not get from any other source. Whether in the cities and towns or in the villages, where the Bengali gentry still had the permanent base of their life, it was the mainstay of their life of feeling, sentiment and passion ... Both emotional capacity and idealism were sustained by it ... When my sister was married in 1916, a college friend of mine presented her with fifteen of the latest novels by the foremost writers and my sister certainly did not prize them less than her far more costly clothes and jewellery. In fact, sales of fiction and poetry as wedding presents were a sure standby of their publishers.
About a quarter of the novels in my uncle's bookcases were in Bengali—a representative selection of the mainstream tradition of Bengali fiction in the twentieth century. Prominent among these were the works of Bankim Chandra, Sarat Chandra, Tagore, Bibhuti Bhushan, and so on. The rest were in English. But of these only a small proportion consisted of books that had been originally written in English. The others were translations from a number of other languages, most of them European: Russian had pride of place, followed by French, Italian, German, and Danish. The great masterpieces of the nineteenth century were dutifully represented: the novels of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev, of Victor Hugo, Flaubert, Stendhal, Maupassant, and others. But these were the dustiest books of all, placed on shelves that were lofty but remote.
The books that were prominently displayed were an oddly disparate lot—or so they seem today. Some of those titles can still be seen on bookshelves everywhere: Joyc
e, Faulkner, and so on. But many others have long since been forgotten: Marie Corelli and Grazia Deledda, for instance, names that are so little known today, even in Italy, that they have become a kind of secret incantation for me, a password that allows entry into the brotherhood of remembered bookcases. Knut Hamsun too was once a part of this incantation, but unlike the others his reputation has since had an immense revival—and with good reason.
Other names from those shelves have become, in this age of resurgent capitalism, symbols of a certain kind of embarrassment or unease—the social realists, for example. But on my uncle's shelves they stood tall and proud, Russians and Americans alike: Maxim Gorky, Mikhail Sholokhov, John Steinbeck, Upton Sinclair. There were many others too whose places next to each other seem hard to account for at first glance: Sienkiewicz (of Quo Vadis?), Maurice Maeterlinck, Bergson. Recently, looking through the mildewed remnants of those shelves, I came upon what must have been the last addition to that collection. It was Ivo Andrić's Bridge on the Drina, published in the sixties.
For a long time I was at a loss to account for my uncle's odd assortment of books. I knew their eclecticism couldn't really be ascribed to personal idiosyncrasies of taste. My uncle was a keen reader, but he was not, I suspect, the kind of person who allows his own taste to steer him through libraries and bookshops. On the contrary, he was a reader of the kind whose taste is guided largely by prevalent opinion. This uncle, I might add, was a writer himself, in a modest way. He wrote plays in an epic vein with characters borrowed from the Sanskrit classics. He never left India and indeed rarely ventured out of his home state of West Bengal.
The principles that guided my uncle's taste would have been much clearer to me had I ever had an interest in trivia. To the quiz show adept, the link between Grazia Deledda, Gorky, Hamsun, Sholokhov, Sienkiewicz, and Andrić will be clear at once: it is the Nobel Prize for literature.
Writing about the Calcutta of the twenties and thirties, Nirad Chaudhuri says:
To be up to date about literary fashions was a greater craze among us than to be up to date in clothes is with society women, and this desire became keener with the introduction of the Nobel Prize for literature. Not to be able to show at least one book of a Nobel Laureate was regarded almost as being illiterate.
But of course the Nobel Prize was itself both symptom and catalyst of a wider condition: the emergence of a notion of a universal "literature," a form of artistic expression that embodies differences in place and culture, emotion and aspiration, but in such a way as to render them communicable. This idea may well have had its birth in Europe, but I suspect it met with a much more enthusiastic reception outside. I spent a couple of years studying in England in the late seventies and early eighties. I don't remember ever having come across a bookshelf like my uncle's: one that had been largely formed by this vision of literature, by a deliberate search for books from a wide array of other countries.
I have, however, come across many such elsewhere, most memorably in Burma in the house of the late Mya Than Tint, one of the most important Burmese writers of the twentieth century.
Mya Than Tint was an amazing man. He spent more than a decade as a political prisoner. For part of that time he was incarcerated in the British-founded penal colony of Cocos Island, an infamous outcrop of rock where prisoners had to forage to survive. On his release he began to publish sketches and stories that won him a wide readership and great popular esteem in Burma. These wonderfully warm and vivid pieces have recently been translated and published under the title Tales of Everyday People.
I met Mya Than Tint in 1995, at his home in Rangoon. The first thing he said to me was, "I've seen your name somewhere." I was taken aback. Such is the ferocity of Burma's censorship regime that it seemed hardly possible that he could have come across my books or articles in Rangoon. "Wait a minute," Mya Than Tint said. He went to his study, fetched a tattered old copy of Granta, and pointed to my name on the contents page.
"Where did you get it?" I asked, open-mouthed. He explained, smiling, that he had kept his library going by befriending the rag pickers and paper traders who picked through the rubbish discarded by diplomats.
Looking through Mya Than Tint's bookshelves, I soon discovered that this determined refusal to be beaten into parochialism had its genesis in a bookcase that was startlingly similar to my uncle's. Knut Hamsun, Maxim Gorky, Sholokhov—all those once familiar names came echoing back to me from Calcutta as we sat talking in that bright, cool room in Rangoon.
I also once had occasion to meet the Indonesian novelist Pra-moedya Ananta Toer, another writer of astonishing fortitude and courage. Of the same generation as Mya Than Tint, Pramoedya has lived through similar experiences of imprisonment and persecution. Unlike Mya Than Tint, he works in a language that has only recently become a vehicle of literary expression, Bahasa Indonesia. Pramoedya is thus widely thought of as the founding figure in a national literary tradition.
At some point I asked what his principal literary influences were. I do not know what I had expected to hear, but it was not the answer I got. I should not have been surprised, however; the names were familiar ones—Maxim Gorky and John Steinbeck.
Over the past few years, the world has caught up with Mya Than Tint and Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Today the habits of reading that they and others like them pioneered are mandatory among readers everywhere. Wherever I go today, the names that I see on serious bookshelves are always the same, no matter the script in which they are spelled: García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Nadine Gordimer, Michael Ondaatje, Marguerite Yourcenar, Günter Grass, Salman Rushdie. That this is ever more true is self-evident: literary currents are now instantly transmitted around the world and instantly absorbed, like everything else. To mention this is to cite a jaded commonplace.
But the truth is that fiction has been thoroughly international for more than a century. In India, Burma, Egypt, Indonesia, and elsewhere this has long been obvious. Yet curiously, this truth has nowhere been more stoutly denied than in those places where the novel has its deepest roots; indeed, it could be said that this denial is the condition that made the novel possible.
The novel as a form was vigorously international from the start; we know that Spanish, English, French, and Russian novelists have read each other's work avidly since the eighteenth century. And yet the paradox of the novel as a form is that it is founded upon a myth of parochialism, in the exact sense of a parish—a place named and charted, a definite location. A novel, in other words, must always be set somewhere: it must have its setting, and within the evolution of the narrative this setting must, classically, play a part almost as important as those of the characters themselves. Location is thus intrinsic to a novel; we are at a loss to imagine its absence, no matter whether that place be Mrs. Gaskell's Cranford or Joyce's Dublin. A poem can create its setting and atmosphere out of verbal texture alone; not so a novel.
We carry these assumptions with us in much the same way that we assume the presence of actors and lights in a play. They are both so commonplace and so deeply rooted that they preempt us from reflecting on how very strange they actually are. Consider that the conceptions of location that made the novel possible came into being at exactly the time when the world was beginning to experience the greatest dislocation it has ever known. When we read Middlemarch or Madame Bovary, we have not the faintest inkling that the lives depicted in them are made possible by global empires (consider the contrast with that seminal work of Portuguese literature, Camões's Lusiads). Consider that when we read Hawthorne, we have to look very carefully between the lines to see that the New England ports he writes about are sustained by a far-flung network of trade. Consider that nowhere are the literary conventions of location more powerful than in the literature of the United States, itself the product of several epic dislocations.
How sharply this contrasts with traditions of fiction that predate the novel! It is true, for example, that the city of Baghdad provides a notional location for the Thousand and One
Nights. But the Baghdad of Scheherazade is more a talisman, an incantation, than a setting. The stories could happen anywhere so long as our minds have room for an enchanted city.
Or think of that amazing collection of stories known as the Panchatantra or Five Chapters. These stories too have no settings to speak of, except the notion of a forest. Yet the Panchatantra is reckoned by some to be second only to the Bible in the extent of its global diffusion. Compiled in India early in the first millennium, the Panchatantra passed into Arabic through a sixth-century Persian translation, engendering some of the best-known of Middle Eastern fables, including parts of the Thousand and One Nights. The stories were handed on to the Slavic languages through Greek, then from Hebrew to Latin, a version in the latter appearing in 1270. Through Latin they passed into German and Italian. From the Italian version came the famous Elizabethan rendition of Sir Henry North, The Morall Philosophy of Doni (1570). These stories left their mark on collections as different as those of La Fontaine and the Grimm brothers, and today they are inseparably part of a global heritage.
Equally, the stories called the Jafakas, originally compiled in India, came to be diffused throughout southern and eastern Asia and even farther with the spread of Buddhism. The story, both in its epic form and in its shorter version, was vital in the creation of the remarkable cultural authority that India enjoyed in the Asia of the Middle Ages. Not until the advent of Hollywood was narrative again to play so important a part in the diffusion of a civilization.
Everywhere these stories went, they were freely and fluently adapted to local circumstances. Indeed, in a sense the whole point of the stories was their translatability—the dispensable and inessential nature of their locations. What held them together and gave them their appeal was not where they happened but how—the narrative, in other words. Or, to take another example, consider that European narrative tradition which was perhaps the immediate precursor of the novel: the story of Tristan and Isolde. By the late Middle Ages this Celtic narrative, which appears to have had its origins in Cornwall and Brittany, had been translated and adapted into several major European languages. Everywhere it went, the story of Tristan and Isolde was immediately adapted to new locations and new settings. The questions of its origins and its original locations are at best matters of pedantic interest.
