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by Amitav Ghosh Published by Ravi Dayal, New Delhi (1998) |
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The Czech author Milan Kundera rued the decline of Central Europe during the years of Soviet dominance of eastern Europe. Kundera used a Czech word to describe that anguished longing: litost. Ghosh doesn't have a similar singular word, but by revealing how a brutalized people are trying to reconstruct their society, by seeking inspiration from high art, he casts light on a similar human disposition. In another essay in the same volume, about Burma, Ghosh follows the well-trodden path of contemporary Burmese history. Ghosh meets Aung San Suu Kyi twice, and recalls an earlier meeting with her when she lived in Oxford with her family during more tranquil times. But what sets his reportage apart from other writers are the details. Ghosh presents fascinating vignettes about the ethnic Indian community in Burma: about how Indian families, now pauperized in Calcutta after leaving Rangoon in the late 1940s, waxed nostalgically about that golden land and the fortunes they had made there. Ghosh goes beyond--to the very heart of Burma's little-known wars--to the Karenni struggle. He crawls with the soldiers fighting the SLORC forces and discovers an ethnic Indian leader committed to the freedom of the Karenni region. While he intellectually realizes the futility of Karenni forces' struggle and the inability of the province to survive as an independent nation state, he admires the determination of the people fighting for it, and is conscious of the tragedy. These articles first appeared in Granta and the New Yorker. The volume would have been considerably enhanced had it included Ghosh's essay last year on the Indian National Army, which appeared in the New Yorker, as that piece, too, deals with southeast Asia. The link between those pieces and the INA piece is not tenuous. There is an Indian--and Indic--influence on southeast Asia, which is visible in the form of the popularity of dangdut music in Malaysia, the temples throughout the region from Vietnam to Burma and Indonesia, and the special role the Hindu epic Ramayana plays in the lives of southeast Asians even today. (When Jakarta burned in May, students in buses were singing songs extolling Anomon who had destroyed Dasomuko's Lanka; Anomon being the monkey-god Hanuman and Dasomuko being the Lankan king Ravana, from the Ramayana). However, Indian writers haven't shown much interest in southeast Asia's history or culture. Through his reportage, Ghosh is interpreting southeast Asian reality through south Asian eyes. That is an important development in post-colonial discourse. For instance, at the Khmer Rouge's torture chamber, the Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh, a guide once told me that she was perplexed that Asian tourists walked through the exhibits as though they were watching pictures at an exhibition. But western tourists, sensitized by the holocaust, were deeply moved and often wept. One possible explanation is that not enough Asians have told Asia's stories in an accessible manner to other Asians. Ghosh's essays contribute to that effort. The wounds in Cambodia are still fresh and raw, and
documenting oral histories is a monumental task. It is
reassuring to know that writers like Ghosh are reading the
Pol Pot years with new, or different, eyes. They link
strands that may remain oblivious to the journalist in a
hurry and are possibly peripheral to the concerns of
historians who want to count the dead and the tortured. But
they weave a pattern that shows that the society's tapestry
is far more complex; one that we are only beginning to
understand. Pages 1 - 2 |