Amitav Ghosh's Blog, page 4

Letter from Kolkata: ‘The Great Derangement’ and a recent storm

On August 17, 2016, Kolkata (Calcutta) was hit by an unusual storm. I received this letter on August 19. It is reproduced here with the writer’s permission. Dear Mr. Amitav Ghosh, I am Deeptesh Sen, pursuing my M.Phil. in the Department of English, Jadavpur University. I have always been fascinated by your novels — every […]

Letter from novelist Aruni Kashyap re ‘The Shadow Lines’

The letter below is from novelist Aruni Kashyap, author of The House With A Thousand Stories  (Viking/Penguin, 2013). It is posted here with his permission.               Dear Amitav, I have told this to numerous people and have also written briefly about it but strangely, never told you that The Shadow Lines is […]

Extreme Reading

Rarely has a novel seemed as timely as Tabish Khair’s Jihadi Jane.[i] As the title implies, this is the story of a radicalized young British-Muslim woman who goes to Syria to join the jihad. The narrative is presented as a first-hand account, recounted to the writer by the protagonist, Jamilla. The form is ingenious: it […]

A window into the new China: Lijia Zhang’s ‘Lotus’

    I first met Lijia Zhang in 2010, at a literary event in Beijing.               She had then recently published a memoir (Socialism is Great!’ A Worker’s Memoir of The New China, 2008) about her extraordinary personal journey. Born into a working-class family in Nanjing she spent several […]

Indian Merchants and Trading Houses in 19th and 20th century Japan: A Correspondence

  Earlier this month I received the following inquiry from a PhD candidate at Japan’s Keio University.   Dear Professor Amitav Ghosh,   I am a researcher of Indian merchants to Japan in the nineteenth and twentieth century and I would like to take advice from you on some specific aspects of my research as […]

Chennai Floods 2015

  Chennai (formerly Madras) was hit by epic floods in November 2015. Although the floods were covered extensively by the media at the time not much has been written about them since, at least in English. This is in stark contrast to the Mumbai deluge of 2005 which occasioned a great deal of writing, in the Economic and Political Weekly and elsewhere. In a […]

A Voice for the Anthropocene

  Because of my recently-concluded lecture series at the University of Chicago the Anthropocene has been much on my mind of late. It was serendipitous then that I happened to read Swimmer Among the Stars, Kanishk Tharoor’s debut collection of stories, at just this time. Not that these stories address the Anthropocene as such: what caught […]

Some Recent Reading Recommendations

  Elena Ferrante: The Days of Abandonment (Penguin, 2005): A novel of extraordinary power, written in a voice that is at once lucid and half-crazed with rage; the words explode off the page. This is a performance of astonishing virtuosity. Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate (Simon and Schuster, 2014): is a work […]

Yangon’s ‘Kachin Land Traditional Restaurant’

      The Jing Hpaw Myay Restaurant (or Kachin Land Traditional Restaurant)             is  in Sanchaung Township, close to the Myay Ni Ghone neighbourhood of Yangon (Rangoon). The restaurant has two premises, a couple of doors apart.               The restaurants are tiny,         […]

Yangon’s ‘Kachin Land Traditional Restaurants’

      The Jing Hpaw Myay Restaurants (or Kachin Land Traditional Restaurants)             are in the Mynaygone (or San Chou) neighbourhood of Yangon (Rangoon). There are two of them, right next to each other, which is convenient because it doubles the chances that one of them will be open.   […]