Amitav Ghosh's Blog, page 25

Letter from a Photographer

      [The photographs in this post were taken by Krunal Palande: he sent them to me after I replied to this letter. The photographs are posted here with Krunal's permission.]         Dear Amitav, I’d been planning to write a letter to you for quite a while but either I was [...]

Are the Rich Worth a Damn or a Daam?

  On the cover of the New York Times Magazine this weekend was a question, printed in large type: ‘Are the Rich Worth a Damn?’ What does ‘damn’ mean here? The question is clearly not about which circle of hell the rich should be sent to (that would be a bridge too far for the [...]

Chitra Sankaran’s New Publications

  From Singapore Chitra Sankaran writes: ‘I wanted to let you know that the edited volume on your novels entitled History, Narrative and Testimony in Amitav Ghosh’s Fiction is finally out by SUNY Press. Please scroll down to see it featured in SUNY Spring collection. The initial responses to the volume have all been most [...]

More on Goa’s Slaves: There were also many Bengalis

    My post on Goa’s Japanese slaves has elicited some interesting responses. From Lucano Alvares, now in Merida, Mexico: ‘This is most fascinating, even more so because of its absolute plausibility and the fact that so few people have acknowledged it. ‘ From the Goan historian Fatima Gracias (author of Cozinha da Goa: History [...]

Heartbreaks of the Archive

    John-Paul Ghobrial, is a Cambridge historian who is working on the life of Elias of Babylon, a 17th century Christian traveler from Mesopotamia. He describes his project as ‘a microhistory about the first Ottoman traveller to South America, ca. 1670′ [see my blog post of March 22, 2012]. John-Paul has been following Elias’s [...]

Goa’s Japanese slaves

    I met Daniel Botsman recently in New Haven, Connecticut. An Australian by origin, he is a scholar of Japanese history and teaches at Yale. When he heard of my connection with Goa he asked if I was aware that Goa’s population had once included a fair number of Japanese. I suppose I should [...]

Opportunity for a working holiday in India

        Karina Corrigan is the principal curator for ‘Asian Export Art’ at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.   Karina in one of the museum’s spectacular galleries       This is the genre of art that was produced in the major ports of Asia in 18th and 19th centuries – [...]

Irrawaddy dolphin film clip

      This letter and the accompanying clip took me back to my own trip on the Mekong, in which I accompanied Isabel Beasley on a river dolphin survey (see my posts of Dec 2011 and Jan 2012). Despite the ominous commentary on the clip, the news is actually more encouraging than not. In [...]

Mosquitoes and malaria: where the link was discovered…

        From Kolkata Rangan Datta sends the letter below with a link to an interesting piece on the Ronald Ross memorial. There are several other interesting posts on his page, including an excellent piece on Kolkata’s Chinese temples and one on the Zoroastrian temple, which he visited when it was under renovation [...]

Sea of Poppies: The Film

        Anusha Rizvi and Mahmood Farooqui are a dazzling couple,     blessed with a superabundance of talent, energy and charm.               Anusha wrote and directed the hugely successful 2010 film Peepli Live (Mahmood was the co-director). The film was a critical and commercial success both in [...]