Amitav Ghosh's Blog, page 26

The Glass Palace and Recent Events in Burma

    Dear Mr Ghosh, My name is David, I am a middle-aged Englishman, and an avid reader. I recently, for the first time, bought a couple of your books. I started reading The Glass Palace a couple of weeks ago (I only ever have time for a good read at the weekends) and was [...]

Indian dies of Eating too Much Opium: London; 1903

  Dinyar Patel, a gifted young historian, has written several pieces about the catastrophic state of Indian archives: he has done more to bring this matter to public notice than anyone else. His pieces can be read here, here, here and here. His most recent article on this subject has just been published in the [...]

The Glass Palace and the Trail of the Last King of Burma

    Dear Dr. Amitav Ghosh, I presume you must be getting a lot of fan mail, my mail is no different. Ever since I got hold of The Hungry Tide (while on a visit to Calcutta), I have been reading your books. I’ve not read all your books but I’m reading them in intervals, [...]

The Mystery of the Meteorite in Bihar’s Opium Fields

    This correspondence alerted me to a subject that I had no inkling of: the role of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in collecting and studying meteorites. My correspondent, Kevin Kichinka, has published a well known book on meteorite collection. He is currently interested in a meteorite that landed in Bihar on Aug 25, [...]

The captivity of Burma’s last king and the fall of the Konbaung dynasty: a compelling new account

        I met Sudha Shah in Mumbai in 2008, at the launch of Sea of Poppies. We had a brief conversation in the course of which she told me that The Glass Palace had inspired her to work on a book of her own: a non-fiction account of the lives of King [...]

Hist 214, U Mass Boston: Glimpsing History through the Eyes of …

    I met John Mathew         in Cambridge, Massachusetts many years ago when he was working at Harvard's natural history museum while also working on his PhD. We discovered many common interests, particularly in the history of 19th century science in India. He is the only person I know who shares [...]

Hungarian Scholar Finds Bonanza in Kerala Church Archives

    Christianity is of course, in its origins, an Asian and African religion: it first took root and flourished in the regions that link the two continents. As it expanded the church also created connections between distant realms – Kerala and the Levant for example. This connection goes back to the infancy of the [...]

Kerala and Syria: An Enduring Connection

    Christianity is of course, in its origins, an Asian and African religion: it first took root and flourished in the regions that link the two continents. As it expanded the church also created connections between distant realms – Syria and Kerala for example. This connection goes back to the infancy of the faith [...]

Correspondence with a mathematician/zoologist

Dear Mr Ghosh: Extra-ordinary book – "The Hungry Tide"!It is everything the reviews and the blurbs make it out to be – and much more – it is certainly one of the most moving pieces of work I have read in a long while… I've already read it twice over (and now I am planning [...]

An Indian POW in Italy: Part 4 of 4

    Satyen Basu, a doctor from Calcutta, joined the Indian Medical Service (the army medical corps) early in the Second World War and served with the Allied forces in Iraq, Syria and North Africa. His unit surrended near Tobruk in 1942 and he was transported to a POW camp in southern Italy, not far [...]