A Brooklyn Bengali comes home - Times Of India

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2007-02-10/book-mark/278...

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A Brooklyn Bengali comes home

Sangitaa Advani, TNN Feb 10, 2007, 10.03pm IST

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Outside, it's a blustery New York winter afternoon, but inside Amitav Ghosh's studio, over coffee and conversation, spring has arrived. It's an exciting time for the 50-year-old author of acclaimed novels like The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, The Glass Palace, and most recently, The Hungry Tide. He's delighted that his wife, Deborah Baker, has finished her second book, The Blue Hand, an account of beat poet Alan Ginsberg's travels in India. He's proud of his 15-year-old daughter Lila's cameo role in Mira Nair's film adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri's book, The Namesake.
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On January 26, Republic Day, he was conferred the Padma Shri, and four days later, he learnt that he has been chosen for the Grinzane Cavour Prize, one of the most prestigious European prizes for fiction, awarded to literary greats such as Carlos Fuentes, Nadine Gordimer, Gnter Grass, Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison, Jos Saramago, Wole Soyinka, Mario Vargas Llosa, J M Coetzee, V S Naipaul and Anita Desai. There is a moment in The Hungry Tide, that says it all: Piyali Roy, a young, Indian marine scientist from America, while taking depth readings in the Bay of Bengal with her fancy GPS navigation system, realises that the crab fisherman working with her is achieving precisely the same result with a line weighted with pieces of broken tile and shark-bone. Ghosh's life too is at an ephiphanous point. After being a Bengali in Brooklyn for many years, like Piyali, he's now leaving the US to return home, to shuttle between familial Kolkata and his new Goa residence. The Padma Shri, he feels, couldn't have come at a better time. In 2008, Penguin India will roll out his ambitious, new project, The Ibis Trilogy. With international publishers coming to the country and the phenomenal growth in the book world, for Indian writers in English everywhere, the tide, at long last, is turning. Excerpts from an interview: Q. Congratulations on winning the Padma Shri. How does it feel to get the award along with other writers like Vikram Seth? A. Vikram is an old friend from the Doon School. He was a couple of years my senior and came back to teach when I was in my final year, so I was utterly delighted that he had won. Also, it gave me great pleasure to see that Khushwant Singh had got the Padma Vibhushan, He is a towering figure in Indian letters. My publisher, the late Ravi Dayal, was his son-in-law. He too got a posthumous Padma Shri which was richly deserved. So, it really felt like many circles had closed. As an Indian writing in English, I've often felt, as we say in Hindi, dhobi ka kutta, na ghar ka na ('a washerman's dog, not at home in the hearth and nor in the water). As I'm an Indian citizen, I'm ineligible for many things in the US and elsewhere. You get used to the idea that what you are doing is a fundamentally lonely thing. Suddenly something like this happens, it is an affirmation of what you are doing, and it's wonderful. Q. The thrilling news is that Penguin India has acquired the rights to your forthcoming books, The Ibis Trilogy, with the first one called Sea of Poppies. When is it out? What's it

IN-DEPTH COVERAGE Padma Shri Mira Nair Amitav Ghosh

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A Brooklyn Bengali comes home - Times Of India

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2007-02-10/book-mark/278...

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A. Well, it won't be out until May 2008 and I'm still working on it. I never like to talk about a project before it is finished. Things change, and you just don't know how anything will develop. It's certainly ambitious and exciting to be working on a continuous cycle of books which are closely interconnected. For about twenty years in India, I was published only by a small publisher, Ravi Dayal, and I was very close to him. After he died suddenly, I didn't do anything for almost a year. Then, last December, my agent and I met with all the major Indian publishers. I was impressed by the range and diversity of what's going onit's a very different scene from when I was starting out. The Landmark bookstore chain is launching a huge new imprint, East West Books, massively funded, with great editors. There's HarperCollins with a great new management team and Random House with a thoughtful new editor. There's Rupa Publishing and I really admire the way Mr Mehra has consistently published so many successful books over the years. But my agent and I thought Penguin's presentation was the best we had ever seen, anywhere in the world. It just blew us away. They're also going to honour Ravi's legacy, which is very important to me. Q. So for a writer in English, it's exciting being in India today? A. Without a doubt. Globally, people recognise that India is the only major remaining growth market in English. Every player wants a piece of it. When I started writing, the print run of a book used to be just 700-800 books; now the market has grown phenomenally. I'm told The Hungry Tide has sold about 50,000 copies in India! Besides writers and publishers, retailers like Crossword, Landmark and Oxford have played a huge part.
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