Biography

Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956. He grew up in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan), Sri Lanka, Iran and India. After graduating from the University of Delhi, he went to Oxford to study Social Anthropology and received a Master of Philosophy and a Ph. D in 1982. In 1980, he went to Egypt to do field work in the fellaheen village of Lataifa. The work he did there resulted in In an Antique Land (IAAL 1993). Ghosh has been a journalist and published his first novel, The Circle of Reason in 1986, and his second, The Shadow Lines, in 1988. Since then, he has published IAAL, The Calcutta Chromosome, and The Glass Palace, done fieldwork in Cambodia, lived in Delhi and written for a number of publications. He currently lives in New York and teaches at Columbia University.

Selected Publications

A. Books by Ghosh:

The Circle of Reason. New York: Viking, 1986. 423 pp.
Ghosh's first novel opens with the arrival of a child "Alu" ("potato"-- for the shape of his head) in a small village and is divided into three sections: "Satwa: Reason," "Rajas: Passion," and "Tamas: Death."

The Shadow Lines. New York: Penguin, 1990. (First published in England by Bloomsbury Press, 1988) 246 pp.
His second novel focuses on the narrator's family in Calcutta and Dhaka and their connection with an English family in London.

In an Antique Land. New York: Vintage, 1994. (First published in England by Granta Books, 1992) 393 pp.
The cover proclaims IAAL "History in the guise of a traveller's tale," and the multi-generic book moves back and forth between Ghosh's experience living in small villages and towns in the Nile Delta and his reconstruction of a Jewish trader and his slave's lives in the eleventh century from documents from the Cairo Geniza.

The Calcutta Chromosome (Picador, 1996)
This novel has been described as "a kind of mystery thriller" (India Today). It brings together three searches: the first is that of an Egyptian clerk, Antar, working alone in a New York apartment in the early years of the twenty-first century to trace the adventures of L. Murugan, who disappeared in Calcutta in 1995; the second pertains to Murugan's obsession with the missing links in the history of malaria research; the third search is that of Urmila Roy, a journalist in Calcutta in 1995 who is researching the works of Phulboni, a writer who produced a strange cycle of "Lakhan stories" that he wrote in the 1930s but suppressed thereafter.

The Glass Palace (Random, 2000)
In a review in The New York Times, Pankaj Mishra describes Ghosh as one of few postcolonial writers "to have  expressed in his work a developing awareness of the aspirations, defeats and disappointments of colonized peoples as they figure out their place in the world."  The novel is set primarily in Burma and India and catalogs the evolving history of those regions before and during the fraught years of the second world war and India's independence struggle.
 

B. Articles by Ghosh

"The Global Reservation: Notes Toward an Ethnography of International Peacekeeping." Cultural Anthropology 9.3 (1994): 412-422.
This essay describes Ghosh's encounters with UN workers in Cambodia and their broader implications towards what he calls "an anthropology of the future."

"The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi." The New Yorker 17 July 1995: 35-41.
An essay on writing and politics, this account focuses on "sectarian violence" in Delhi in 1984 after which Ghosh sat down to write The Shadow Lines.

"The Fundamentalist Challenge." Wilson Quarterly 19 (Spring 1995): 19-31.
Examines the contradiction between "religious extremism['s]" reliance on scripture and its attack on artistic production in the late twentieth century.

"Holiday in Cambodia," "Petrofiction," and "The Human Comedy in Cairo." The New Republic 208 (28 June 1993): 21-25l; 206 (2 Mar. 1992): 29-34; 202 (7 May 1990): 32-36.
The first of these three articles is a shorter version of his "The Global Reservation" (above). The second looks at the novels of Abdelrahman Munif and their connection to oil trade, and the third looks at the life and work of Naghib Mahfouz the year after the Egyptian writer won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Reviews and Criticism

Book Reviews in the New York Times:

The Shadow Lines: July 12, 1989. Sec. VII, 10:1
In an Antique Land: August 1, 1993. Sec. VII, 26:1

Criticism:

Bagchi, Nivedita. "The Process of Validation in Relation to Materiality and Historical Reconstruction in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines." Modern Fiction Studies 39:1 (Spring 1993). 187-202.

James, Louis and Jan Shepherd. "Shadow Lines: Cross Cultural Perspectives in the Fiction of Amitav Ghosh." Commonwealth Essays and Studies (Dijon, France) 14:1 (Autumn, 1991): 28-32.

The Oxford UP (India)-- Delhi: Oxford UP, 1995-- edition contains 4 articles:

Kaul, AN. "A Reading of The Shadow Lines." pp299-309.

Kaul, Suvir. "Separation Anxiety: Growing up Inter/National in The Shadow lines." pp 268-286.

Sundar Rajan, Rajeswari. "The Division of Experience in The Shadow Lines." pp. 287-298.

Mukherjee, Meenakshi. "Maps and Mirrors: Coordinates of Meaning in The Shadow Lines." pp. 255-267.

In Viney Kirpal, ed. The New Indian Novel in English: A Study of the 1980's (New Delhi: Allied Publishers Ltd., 1990):

Prasad, G.J.V. "The Unfolding of a Raga: Narrative Structure in The Circle of Reason." 101-108.

Kapadia, Novy. "Imagination and Politics in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines." 201-212.

Author: Peter Nowakoski, Spring 1996

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