Amitav Ghosh's Blog, page 7

Parallel Journeys? Turkey’s experience of AKP rule and its portents for India under the BJP

  1. Back in March 2013, when I received and accepted an invitation to visit Bogazici University,[1] I did not for a moment imagine that my arrival in Turkey would follow hot on the heels of a historic election in India. But so it did: I landed in Istanbul on June 1, 2014, five days […]

‘We had to cross many hills and mountains': a censored letter about the Burma exodus of 1942

    Below is a rare example of a letter written by an Indian survivor of the exodus out of Burma, following the Japanese invasion of 1941-42 (a photocopy of it came into my hands thanks to my wife, Deborah Baker, who found it in the Special Branch Police Archive, Police Museum, Kolkata).     […]

Remembering the past: an unfinished conversation

      Last week my Twitter feed led me to a thought-provoking piece by Raghu Karnad on Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize-winning novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Karnad writes: ‘The subject of The Narrow Road is cruelty and survival along the ‘Burma Death Railway’, one of the worst Japanese atrocities in the […]

Schooning with Dragons 2

  Komodo is the kind of island           that inspires fantasy.     From a distance, the ridge that runs along it         has the appearance of the armoured spine of some gigantic Saurian creature.             As it happens the island did play […]

Schooning with Dragons 1

  The Bugis (or Buginese) are one of the great seafaring peoples of the Indian Ocean. Like those other great mariners, the Greeks, they are also great story-tellers: their epic, Sureq Galigo or La Galigo, is longer than the Mahabharata. The Buginese were converted to Islam in the 17th century and except for a few […]

From Yangon

    Dr Thant Myint-U is one of Burma’s leading contemporary historians.   His book River of Lost Footsteps is essential reading for anyone interested in Burma. His 2011 book Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia has also been widely acclaimed: he was recently named one of the world’s ‘One […]

My Foreword to ‘If I Die Here Who Will Remember Me?’

    Below is my Foreword to Vedica Kant’s fine new book: ‘If I Die Here Who Will Remember Me?’: India and the First World War published September 15, 2014, by Roli Books, New Delhi.         Of the many poignant images in this book none captures better the plight of the colonial […]

Eating Arakan-style

  Unnoticed by the world at large India has, over the last few years, made massive financial commitments to its eastern neighbour, Myanmar:       $9 million for the upgradation of hospitals in Sittwe (Akyab) and Sagaing;                     $6 million for industrial training centres in […]

An Arakan Angkor 2

      The Arakan coast was for millenia an important node in the trading networks of the Indian Ocean.   The wealth generated by the trans-Oceanic trade nourished a number of kingdoms in this region over the centuries. Mrauk-U was the capital of a kingdom that flourished between 1430 C.E. and 1785 C.E.:  most […]

An Arakan Angkor – 1

    Mrauk-U rises out of the misted hills and valleys of the Arakan     coast like a mirage,                     at the end of a long journey     over weather-worn roads,                 after innumerable swollen streams   […]