It may be said of literary careers, if you don’t mind humouring a simplistic analogy from Hindustani classical music, that they often play out similarly to a maestro sitting down for an hours-long performance. The alaap of the debut often unfurls into the meatier, more decadent khayal, tapering eventually towards the concise pleasures of the thumri or chhota khayal. Some writers, perhaps like Arundhati Roy, have been known to use the alaap to launch into a less predictable, fiery tarana. Others, a la Rushdie, find themselves bashing the same raga over and over again until the audience starts to thin out at the back. Amitav Ghosh, after the glittering though occasionally uneven bada khayal of his Ibis trilogy has, of late, retreated into a series of shorter bandishes. Colonialism and climate change, prevailing motifs of his fiction, have represented the central preoccupation of a number of his recent non-fiction books. His newest work is a culmination of decades of scattered writing on the subject — examining in his own words “the myth-making of modernity” to reveal interconnections across nature and the sociopolitical present. Previous strands of research, correspondences with notable intellectual figures and stray essays across the years are given the waste-to-wealth treatment. In that regard, Wild Fictions may be more tape-cassette remaster than live album. It is a testament to the brilliance of the man that the worst criticism of his novels has been that Ghosh the academic sometimes overshadows Ghosh the novelist — the consonances between plot and archive drowning out the dissonant atonalities that fiction — and indeed, real life — often present. Sectioned off between essays on the climate, travel, correspondences, past presentations and archival research, however, is a collection that may prove richly rewarding for those of us interested in his process as a novelist. This, some might say, is pure, uncut Ghosh — an amiable and erudite (if occasionally supercilious) interlocutor between reader and world. In several sections, the writing conveys the sense of a writer deeply in tune with the churning forces that have brought us to this sorry pass, criss-crossing across Enlightenment Europe, colonial Indonesia, and the long twentieth century. Zoom in and zoom out: at its best, one witnesses the turning of the Earth through Ghosh’s writing, narrated briskly through the eyes of numerous figures who have informed the writer’s convictions. Most memorable among them is a deeply valuable exchange with the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, as well as an eloquent essay with climate change and migration that acts as a companion piece to Ghosh’s previous work. The only quibble is that the book is something of an uneven compilation. Certain essays repeat each other, others oscillate across ideas with decades in between. The curation produces a distracted quality to the writing, like a friend promising to catch you up on their life, only to mass-forward messages from another chat. Yet like in real life, one is minded to overlook these infelicities. As a testament to his great intellectual worth, or, to quote Ghosh himself, “an alibi for a life”, it is enough. Wild Fictions: Essays Amitav Ghosh Fourth Estate India pp. 496; Rs 799
Source link
