Have Ideas, Will Travel

  • Photograph by Alexander Ho for TIME

    Man of the world: The importance of the nation-state in defining identity, says Ghosh, is "profoundly dissolving"

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    "For the first 15 or 20 years of my writing, it was met with incomprehension almost," he says. "The world at large was asking, 'What is this?'" Now we know: Ghosh has been writing about globalization since before the word existed. Perhaps that's why he is finally finding a wider audience in the U.S. For years, his books sold steadily in Europe and Asia but modestly in his second home. That changed with Sea of Poppies , a devastating portrait of the personal and political costs of the trade in opium, a commodity even more addictive than cheap oil. The book was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize in 2008 — the year that Americans, too, suddenly found themselves vulnerable to the flows of global capital — and Ghosh is amused to find his lifelong ideas suddenly trendy. "It's only because the world caught up with us."

    Despite being steeped in history, much of his work has the prescience of science fiction. The Shadow Lines , about a family torn apart by the division of Bangladesh, was published in 1988, prefiguring a much later wave of books about the traumas of Partition. In 2005, a year before Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth , Ghosh explored Bangladesh's Sundarbans, a fragile mangrove forest on the brink of environmental collapse, in The Hungry Tide . Says Indian book critic Nilanjana Roy: "Amitav tends to anticipate what we're going to be interested in."

    There are also faint stirrings of Cairo's Tahrir Square — young men at a loose end in villages with few prospects — in Ghosh's 1992 nonfiction work on Egypt, In an Antique Land . Considered by many critics his most important book for its intimate style and use of history to illuminate contemporary conflicts, it traces two parallel narratives: that of Ghosh as a graduate student doing fieldwork in the Egyptian countryside and that of Bomma, a 12th century Indian slave whose story Ghosh mosaics together from shards of archived letters and journals. In piecing together an opinion on the Arab Spring, Ghosh warns that Americans are misreading Egyptians' call for freedom. "A lot of those marchers are demanding exactly the opposite of what Americans think," he says. "They are demanding a stronger welfare state, they are demanding higher wages through unions, they are demanding more benefits."

    Listen to Ghosh's critiques of unchecked capitalism, imperial hubris or reckless military action, and it would be tempting to see him as playing to type — a leftist Bengali intellectual, pronouncing strident condemnations of the West in impeccable boarding-school English. But he is no ideologue. He acknowledges that a globalized world can be as thrilling as it is destructive.

    This essential contradiction is beautifully expressed in Bahram, a character in River of Smoke . The Parsi trader is disgusted with what he has become — an opium smuggler serving the god of free trade — but knows that his life has also been freed by trade. "It was here, in Canton that he had always felt most alive ... It was Canton that had given him wealth, friends, social standing, a son; it was this city that had given him such knowledge as he would ever have of love and carnal pleasure. If not for Canton he would have lived his life like a man without a shadow."

    As Bahram comes into his own, his best friend, Zadig the Armenian clock merchant, implores him, unsuccessfully, "to speak for all of us who are neither British nor American nor Chinese." In Ghosh, they find a voice.

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