Amitav Ghosh and Margaret Atwood accepting the Dan David Prize

From the Outlook
THE DAN DAVID PRIZE SPEECH
'Writers Have No Armies'
The recipients of the prize on the controversy surrounding their acceptance of it: 'The more we were told to turn our backs, the more we wanted to see -- and to speak -- for ourselves'
AMITAV GHOSH , MARGARET ATWOOD


Dan David Speech, May 9

Amitav Ghosh: Because we are sharing this generous prize, we have decided to give a shared speech. We both thank you very much for the kind words you have said about us and our writing.

Margaret Atwood: This prize honours, not just individuals, but areas of achievement. This year you’ve chosen to invite two novelists, thus adding the art of the novel to a very distinguished list of many other disciplines, from astrophysics to medicine to music to statesmanship.

Amitav Ghosh: One of us comes from India, the other from Canada. Neither country is lacking in historical bloodshed and in present-day inequities.

Margaret Atwood: Neither of us can afford to be self-righteous.

Amitav Ghosh: Both of us were urged by some people and groups not to come to Israel on this occasion. We were told that no artist should attend any cultural event here – no matter how hopeful and moderate such an event might be – considering the unequal, unjust, and harsh and dangerous conditions of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Territories.

Margaret Atwood: When we said that we were very sympathetic but we felt the urgent necessity of keeping doors open -- as do several organizations we work with – we were informed that we were deluded, and worse.

Amitav Ghosh: But novelists are stubborn: when young, they refused to give up novel-writing, despite the worried advice of their families. The more we were told to turn our backs, the more we wanted to see -- and to speak -- for ourselves.

Margaret Atwood: Propaganda deals in absolutes: in Yes and No. But the novel is a creature of nuance: of perhaps, of maybe. It concerns itself, not with gods and demons, but with mortal people, with their flawed characters, their unsatisfactory bodies, their sufferings, their limited and often wrong choices; with the dubiousness of their own actions and the unfairness of their fates.

Amitav Ghosh: Writing a novel often requires you to see life through the eyes of those you may not agree with. It is a polyphonic form. It pleads for the complex humanity of all human beings.

Margaret Atwood: The public territory the novelist defends is very small, even in a democracy. It’s the space of free invention, of possibility. It’s a space that allows the remembrance of what has been forgotten, the digging up of what has been buried.

Amitav Ghosh: Worldwide, novel-writing is under constant pressure, both from political groups who want to co-opt it, and from powerful governments who’d like to silence it. Around the world, novelists have been shot, imprisoned, and exiled for their failure to toe somebody else’s line. But they continue to write stories.

Margaret Atwood: Perhaps this vocation of ours will soon be obsolete. For coming towards us is a frightening change in our planet. Floods and droughts, deserts and famines and epidemics – will they draw the world into ever more destructive conflicts?

Amitav Ghosh: Or will we band together freely in order to help one another, as so many organizations and religious groups and environmentalists and scientists and artists are now doing?

Margaret Atwood: We are both here as an act of good faith, because we believe that there are many people here and around the world who think as we do.

Amitav Ghosh: Hope is not out there, apart from us. Like the stories people tell, it comes from within. Like these stories, hope too must be passed on to others. Give up hope, and we are lost indeed.

The Context

It’s a crucial time in the Middle East. Proximity talks between Palestine and Israel are resuming right now, brokered by George Mitchell of the U.S.

All who truly want a chance for Palestinian people to be able to live a decent life, to be compensated for what they have wrongfully lost, and for the destruction of their infrastructures – and all those who hope Israelis will be able to live without rocket fire, bombings, and worse – can only wish these talks well, trust that those engaging in them are doing so seriously and in good faith, and hope that a fair and secure two-state solution will finally result.

Meanwhile, we two fiction writers find ourselves in Israel, having been awarded half each of the “Present” section of the Dan David Prize. You may read about the prize here

It is a prize founded by a private individual, and administered by its own office located at Tel Aviv University. Despite what we have been told by its attackers, it is not one and the same as the State of Israel. This year is the first time this prize has gone to two novelists. It’s worth pointing out here that neither of us is a member of any of the three religious groups that claim this part of the globe as their Holy Land.

We two fiction writers are very small potatoes indeed in the context of the momentous political events now unfolding. But writers everywhere are soft targets. It’s easy to attack them. They don’t have armies, they can’t retaliate. We have both received a number of letters urging and indeed ordering us not to attend, on the grounds that anything connected with Israel is taboo. We have both sent letters to many but not all of the urgers and orderers. (Not all, because in some cases the petitions etc. have appeared online without having been sent to us first.) The letters have ranged from courteous and sad to factual and practical to accusatory, outrageous, and untrue in their claims and statements; some have been frankly libelous, and even threatening. Some have been willing to listen to us, others have not: they want our supposedly valuable “names,” but not our actual voices.

In other words, the all-or-nothings want to bully us into being their wholly owned puppets. The result of such a decision on our part would be – among other things – to turn us into sticks with which to beat other artists into submission, and that we refuse to do. We are familiar with what other artists of many countries have been put through in similar circumstances.

Having read perhaps too many spy thrillers, we have even wondered if some of these hyperbolic correspondents have been agents provocateurs, bent on turning us against the Palestinian people. (As is often pointed out, on the Internet nobody knows who you really are.) Others have styled themselves our friends and admirers, whereas in fact they have never been any such thing. Some have urged us not to touch Israelis and their institutions, while themselves continuing to deal with them. Others, once we have stated our positions, have been understanding and helpful, and ready to facilitate meaningful exchanges. Some have let us know that although they endorse parts of the boycott, they do not endorse the cultural part, considering it a form of censorship. Some have signed public petitions—not shown to us -- for which they later –in private letters to us– apologized. Some have ordered us to give the prize money to various parties, including themselves, or else to various Palestinian organizations who would in fact not accept any such gift from us. Some have asked nothing more than our understanding and remembrance.

To all we say: We are not against fairness and the creation of a long-overdue Palestinian state. We are not “defying” or “rejecting” anyone just because we cannot endorse a particular tactical formulation, although we understand the pressures that give rise to such formulations. And we do not consider you bad, ignorant, stupid, hypocritical, or vicious because your view of means and ends is not the same as ours.

What then is our position? It may be summarized by this excerpt from a speech made by Anthony Appiah, President of PEN American Centre, on April 27.

“What you may not know is that both Margaret Atwood and Amitav Ghosh have been subjected to an …offensive urging them to reject the award as part of a campaign of cultural isolation against Israel.

The literary community in this country does not speak with one voice on the question of Palestine. But I want to be clear about where the PEN American Center stands on one aspect of this vexed issue. We have to stand, as we have stood from the very beginning, against the very idea of a cultural boycott. We have to continue to say: Only connect. We have to stick with our founding conviction that writers must reach out across nations. To stand anywhere else would be to betray our history and our mission.”

We are both PEN members. Margaret was a co-founder of PEN Canada, and is now an International Vice President. To do as our correspondents demand would be to destroy our part in the work we have been doing with PEN for decades – work that involves thousands of writers around the world-- jailed, exiled, censored, and dead. Writers have no armies. They have no militant wings. The list of persecuted writers is long, ancient, and international. We feel we must defend the diminishing open space in which dialogue, exchange, and relatively free expression are still possible.

Margaret Atwood & Amitav Ghosh

Confessions of a Xenofile

Amitav Ghosh in the outlook on this development as a writer and the influence of Egypt in his work.

Next to my own country, India, there is no place in the world that has been more important to my development as a writer than Egypt. It is now nearly twenty-eight years since I first landed in Cairo, on April 19 ,1980: I was then twenty-four years old, and I had come to explore what was to me a new, but not entirely unknown world. The immediate pretext for my journey was research: a short while before I had won a scholarship that took me from Delhi University to Oxford, to study social anthropology. My dream was of writing fiction, but like many an aspiring novelist I felt I lacked the necessary richness of experience. The writers I admired – V.S.Naipaul, James Baldwin and others – had gone out into the world and watched it go by: I wanted no less for myself. The scholarship was a godsend because it allowed me to choose where I wanted to go and in my case it was Egypt. Through the good offices of Dr. Aly Issa, an eminent anthropologist from Alexandria, I was soon installed in a small village in the Governorate of Beheira, near the town of Damanhour: in my book In An Antique Land I gave this village the name Lataifa. My home there consisted of a recently-vacated chicken coop on the roof of a mud hut; at the time there was no electricity, although there was, as I recall, a supply of piped water.

Lataifa and I were undeniably a shock to each other. There was the question of language to begin with: I spoke very little Arabic, and what I knew was of a laboriously classical variety. Thus even simple operations, such as asking for water, could cause great outbursts of laughter. In the process, however, my hosts and I discovered one medium of communication where we were on equal terms: this was the language of aflaam al-Hindeyya – that is to say, Hindi film songs. When all other efforts at communication broke down, we would burst into song – this was no small accomplishment on my part as I am a terrible singer. But many of the younger people in the village sang very well and knew innumerable Hindi songs. Indian filmi music thus became a shared language and opened many barriers and earned me many invitations to meals. The Hindi films that were best known in Lataifa were of the fifties vintage – films that featured such stars as Raj Kapoor, Nargis, Padmini, Manoj Kumar and Babita. The good-hearted vamp and cabaret dancer, Helen, was another well-known figure. Everyone in the village had a few favourite scenes and I would often be asked detailed questions about these episodes. This was a great trial to me, as I was by no means an expert on the films of the fifties. Often children would be called out to perform, which they would do with the greatest gusto. There were even minor specializations, some boys being regarded as particularly good performers of Raj Kapoor numbers, while others were experts in reciting dialogues and soliloquies. The performers were almost always boys as I remember, and it was quite a sight to see young jallabeyya-clad fellaheen attempting to imitate the dance numbers of scantily-dressed actresses like Helen. Even more astonishing were the recitations, for it would happen sometimes that children would recite large chunks of Hindi dialogue without knowing a word of the language. Hindi films also provided me with a certain name-recognition, for although the mega-star Amitabh Bachhan was not as well-known in the Middle East then as he is now, there were plenty of people who knew of him. It was thus not as difficult as it might have been to introduce myself.

Yet, while I had reason to be grateful to Hindi films in some respects, there were others in which they made my life exceedingly difficult. One of these was the matter of cows.

Amitav Ghosh

An intelligent op-ed in the NYTs by Amitav Ghosh.
He compares the reaction of Spain after the Madrid bombing to the U.S.
reaction after 9-11 and feels that India should respond the way Spain
did.

SINCE the terrorist assaults began in Mumbai
last week, the metaphor of the World Trade Center attacks has been
repeatedly invoked. From New Delhi to New York, pundits and TV
commentators have insisted that “this is India’s 9/11” and should be
treated as such. Nearly every newspaper in India has put “9/11” into
its post-massacre headlines. The secretary general of theBharatiya Janata Party, the leading Hindu nationalist political faction, has not only likened the Mumbai
attack to those on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but has
insisted that “our response must be close to what the American response
was.”


There can be no doubt that there are certain clear
analogies between the two attacks: in both cases the terrorists were
clearly at great pains to single out urban landmarks, especially those
that serve as symbolic points of reference in this increasingly
interconnected world. There are similarities, too, in the
unexpectedness of the attacks, the meticulousness of their planning,
their shock value and the utter unpreparedness of the security
services. But this is where the similarities end. Not only were the
casualties far greater on Sept. 11, 2001, but the shock of the attack
was also greatly magnified by having no real precedent in America’s
history.

India’s experience of terrorist attacks, on the other
hand, far predates 2001. Although this year has been one of the worst
in recent history, 1984 was arguably worse still. That year an
insurgency in the Punjab culminated in the assassination of Prime
Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. This in turn led to
riots that took the lives of some 2,000 Sikhs.

I was living in
Delhi then and I recall vividly the sense of besetting crisis, of
extreme fragility, of being pushed to the edge of an abyss: it was the
only time I can recall when the very project of the Indian republic
seemed to be seriously endangered. Yet for all its horror, the portents
of 1984 were by no means fulfilled: in the following years, there was a
slow turnaround; the Punjab insurgency gradually quieted down; and
although the victims of the massacres may never receive justice in full
measure, there has been some judicial retribution.

This has been another terrible year: even before the invasion of Mumbai, several hundred people had been killed and injured in terrorist assaults. Yet the attacks on Jaipur, Ahmedabad, New Delhi, Guwahati
and elsewhere did not set off chains of retaliatory violence of the
sort that would almost certainly have resulted 10 or 15 years ago. Nor
did the violence create a sense of existential crisis for the nation,
as in 1984. Thus, despite all loss of life, this year could well be
counted as a victory not for terrorism but for India’s citizenry.

The question now is this: Will the November invasion of Mumbai
change this? Although there is no way of knowing the answer, it is
certain that if the precedent of 9/11 is taken seriously the outcome
will be profoundly counterproductive. As a metaphor “9/11” is invested
not just with the memory of what happened in Manhattan and at the
Pentagon in 2001, but also with the penumbra of emotions that surround
the events: the feeling that “the world will never be the same,” the
notion that this was “the day the world woke up” and so on. In this
sense 9/11 refers not just to the attacks but also to its aftermath, in
particular to an utterly misconceived military and judicial response,
one that has had disastrous consequences around the world.

When
commentators repeat the metaphor of 9/11 they are in effect pushing the
Indian government to mount a comparable response. If India takes a hard
line modeled on the actions of the Bush administration, the
consequences are sure to be equally disastrous. The very power of the
9/11 metaphor blinds us to the possibility that there might be other,
more productive analogies for the invasion ofMumbai : one is the Madrid
train bombings of March 11, 2004, which led to a comparable number of
casualties and created a similar sense of shock and grief.


Amitav Ghosh is the author, most recently, of the novel “Sea of Poppies.”
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Articles in Opinion » A version of this article appeared in print on
December 3, 2008, on page A31 of the New York edition.

Amitav Ghosh relocating to India

Times Of India has an interesting article on Amitav Ghosh winning the Padma Shri, along with Khushwant Singh and Ravi Dayal.

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.