Dancing In Cambodia Other Essays

Through Extraordinary First-Hand Accounts Including Two Pieces Never Published Before In India Amitav Ghosh Presents A Compelling Chronicle Of The Turmoil Of Our Times. The Town By The Sea Records His Experiences In The Andaman And Nicobar Islands Just Days After The Tsunami; And In September 11 He Takes Us Back To That Fateful Day When He Retrieved His Young Daughter From School In New York, Sick With The Knowledge That She Will Be Marked By The Same Kind Of Tumult That Has Defined His Own Life. `Dancing In Cambodia Recreates The First-Ever Visit To Europe By A Troupe Of Cambodian Dancers With King Sisowath, In 1906. Ghosh Links This Historic Visit, Celebrated By Rodin In A Series Of Sketches, To The More Recent History Of The Khmer Rouge Revolution. Stories In Stones Considers The Iconic Significance Of Angkor Wat, Reputedly The Largest Religious Edifice In The World, As A Symbol Of Cambodian Identity. An Omnipresent Image, It Pervades Virtually Every Area Of The Nation S Life Except Religion And Amitav Ghosh Sets Out To Uncover Stories, New And Old, Associated With The Historic Monument. `At Large In Burma , Written After The Author S Visits To The Country In 1995 96, Provides A Window To One Of The World S Most Closed Societies. Ghosh Interviewed Aung San Suu Kyi, The Personification Of Burma S Democratic Struggle, And Also Visited The Camps Of One Of Burma S Many Minorities Fighting For Independence, The Karenni. Click Here To Visit The Website

The Entire Book Is A Masterpiece Of Travel And Interpretative Writing.

A new kind of Indian writing in English was in the air in the early 1990s. Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, I. Allan Sealy and Upamanyu Chatterjee had written their early books. The new current was promising, and Dharma Kumar, historian and editor of the famous Indian Economic and Social History Review, decided to publish a journal, along the lines of Granta and The New Yorker, dedicated to ferreting out the best literary talent. The journal, Civil Lines: New Writing from India, first appeared in 1994 and quickly attracted attention by publishing literary pieces that were a cut above, developing a cult following among readers of Indian writing in English. Till 2001, five issues had been published—totaling sixty-one individual contributions by thirty-eight contributors. Some of the contributors were then far from well known, and Civil Lines could be said to have given them a leg-up towards subsequent fame. Sheila Dhar, Susan Visvanathan, Raj Kamal Jha, Ruchir Joshi, Siddhartha Deb, Suketu Mehta, Amitava Kumar and Manjula Padmanabhan went on to become established writers after Civil Lines had published their smaller pieces. Ramachandra Guha’s first brilliant essay—a five-finger exercise in literary anthropology which seems with hindsight to presage his later work on Verrier Elwin—appeared in the inaugural issue. A little-known aspect of Amitav Ghosh is his interest in the short story. Ghosh contributed two pieces to the journal—a reflective essay on the Indian practice of the short story and a wonderfully fluent translation of one of Tagore’s most famous tales, ‘Kshudhita Pâshân’ (The Hunger of Stones). The present anthology comprises a selection of the finest essays, stories and poems that were published in the first five issues of Civil Lines. The original issues of the journal are difficult to come by. This anthology is a must for all those interested in the best practitioners of desi English.

The articles brought together here dare claim a diversity in the areas they belong to – from Shakespeare-Frost-Dickinson to Bhagat-Bhatt-Neelkanth via Ghosh and Mullen – an exposition to writers spatio-temporally and culturally different. Coming from a young researcher and college-teacher of English, they are, though not at their best, humble submissions summoned by various academic occasions. They naturally involved encounters, acceptances, rejections, frustrations and goings-on with Word and Meanings.

Opening in Calcutta in the 1960s, Amitav Ghosh's radiant second novel follows two families -- one English, one Bengali -- as their lives intertwine in tragic and comic ways. The narrator, Indian born and English educated, traces events back and forth in time, from the outbreak of World War II to the late twentieth century, through years of Bengali partition and violence, observing the ways in which political events invade private lives.

Sea of Poppies is a stunningly vibrant and intensely human work that confirms Amitav Ghosh's reputation as a master storyteller. At the heart of this epic saga is a vast ship, the Ibis. Its destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean to the Mauritius Islands. As to the people on board, they are a motley array of sailors and stowaways, coolies and convicts. In a time of colonial upheaval in the mid-nineteenth century, fate has thrown together a truly diverse cast of Indians and Westerners, from a bankrupt Raja to a widowed village-woman, from a mulatto American freedman to a free-spirited European orphan. As they sail down the Hooghly and into the sea, their old family ties are washed away, and they view themselves as jahaj-bhais, or ship-brothers, who will build whole new lives for themselves in the remote islands where they are being taken. It is the beginning of an unlikely dynasty.

The Imam and the Indian is an extensive compilation of Amitav Ghosh s non-fiction writings. Sporadically published between his novels, in magazines, journals, academic books and periodicals, these essays and articles trace the evolution of the ideas that shape his fiction. He explores the connections between past and present, events and memories, people, cultures and countries that have a shared history. Ghosh combines his historical and anthropological bent of mind with his skills of a novelist, to present a collection like no other.