The Thammasat University Libraries have newly acquired two copies of a book by a modern Indian author. One, given by the Embassy of India in Bangkok, will be shelved in the India Corner of the Pridi Banomyong Library. The other, acquired through the generosity of Professor Benedict Anderson and Ajarn Charnvit Kasetsiri, is shelved in the Charnvit Kasetsiri Room of the Pridi Banomyong Library. In an Antique Land is by the contemporary writer Amitav Ghosh, born in 1956. Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta to a Bengali Hindu family. As a youngster, he enjoyed reading adventure stories by Rafael Sabatini, some of which are in the collection of the TU Libraries. Professor Ghosh studied at Delhi University and Delhi School of Economics, before earning a doctorate in social anthropology at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. More recently he has been teaching at American universities. He has published many novels, but In an Antique Land (1992) is among his nonfiction books, relying on his studies of ethnography. The book offers an anthropological portrait of villages in the Nile Delta visited by Professor Ghosh in the 1980s, when he was writing his doctoral dissertation and afterwards. Also part of In an Antique Land is a history of a merchant from a thousand years ago, who did business in Cairo. Professor Ghosh’s own website notes that In an Antique Land has been described as history in the guise of a traveller’s tale, adding:

This book is the story of Amitav Ghosh’s decade of intimacy with the village community. Mixing conversation and research, imagination and scholarship, it is also a charged, eccentric history of the special relationship between two countries, Egypt and India, through nearly ten centuries of parochialism and sympathy, bigotry and affection.

In an interview in the publication Itinerario in 2012, Professor Ghosh notes that even in his student days,

in some sense, anthropology was never a social science as such for me. It was much more a sort of literary enterprise. And this was very fortunate because I was not at all interested in doing social science… My interest in Egypt was sparked during my time in Oxford. You were expected to choose a place to go to. I just had this peculiar experience where I found historical sources dealing with Indian and Egyptian links. Then I became interested in looking at these connections.  In  some basic way, my interest was always in history, specifically in historical connections… I was interested in writing. I wanted to write novels. At the same time, I was interested in history and in a number of other things. So they all came together. It was all part of my education and my processes of thought. In the first instance I think of myself as a novelist. I don’t think of myself as an academician at all. If you read my PhD thesis you will see it has hardly any footnotes, the bibliography must be two or three pages long.

He notes:

There is a huge difference between writing a historical novel and writing history. If I may put it like this: history is like a river, and the historian is writing about the ways the river flows and the currents and crosscurrents in the river. But, within this river, there are also fish, and the fish can swim in many different directions. So, I am looking at it from the fish’s point of view and which direction the fish swims in. So, history is the water in which it swims, and it is important for me to know the flow of the water. But in the end I am interested in the fish. The novelist’s approach to the past, through the eyes of characters, is substantially different from the approach of the historian. For me, seeing the past through the prism of a character allows me to understand some aspects of the past that historians don’t deal with. But, I must admit that doing this would not be possible if historians had not laid the foundations.

In a book out this year, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, not yet in the TU Libraries collection, Professor Ghosh discusses the problem of climate change, pointing out that few novelists deal with the subject:

It is a simple fact that climate change has a much smaller presence in contemporary literary fiction than it does even in public discussion. As proof of this, we need only glance through the pages of literary journals and book reviews. When the subject of climate change occurs, it is almost always in relation to nonfiction; novels and short stories are very rarely to be glimpsed within this horizon. Indeed, it could even be said that fiction that deals with climate change is almost by definition not of the kind that is taken seriously: the mere mention of the subject is often enough to relegate a novel or a short story to the genre of science fiction. It is as though in the literary imagination climate change were somehow akin to extra-terrestrials or interplanetary travel.

Professor Ghosh suggests that climate change is a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination. He argues that climate change is too big, scary, and strange for most literary writers to want to deal with it. He observes:

In a substantially altered world, when sea level rise has swallowed the Sundarbans and made cities like Kolkata, New York, (Mumbai) and Bangkok uninhabitable, when readers and museum-goers turn to the art and literature of our time, will they not look, first, and most urgently, for traces and portents of the altered world of their inheritance? And when they fail to find them, what should they — what can they — do other than to conclude that ours was a time when most forms of art and literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognising the realities of their plight? Quite possibly then, this era, which so congratulates itself on its self-awareness, will come to be known as the time of the Great Derangement.

Fortunately, even if most novelists are not discussing the subject, scientists are. The TU Libraries own many studies about the significance and effects of climate change from the Thailand Environment Institute Foundation and other authoritative sources. Some dating back for decades, they are also forward-looking, as the title of one book, Plausible Climate Change Scenarios for Thailand During the Period of 2045-2065, makes clear.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)