‘Fiction and Non-Fiction Are Two Sides of the Same Coin,’ says Amitav Ghosh

BY THE END OF the 1970s, Amitav Ghosh, a 23-year-old Oxford student, already knew that he wanted to be a novelist. But he wasn’t willing to venture into it until he had the material inside him and that would only come through experience. In this, he had as models, writers like VS Naipaul and James Baldwin. In the essay, ‘The Making of In An Antique Land: India, Egypt and the Cairo Geniza’, he reminisces how that led him to anthropology and in 1980 brought him to Egypt to a small village called Lataifa. In another essay, ‘Confessions of a Xenophile’, he writes extensively of his time in the village—knowing almost nothing of the language and the only thing connecting him to the people there being their fascination with Hindi movies and imported Indian water pumps. Ghosh also began to maintain a journal then. “Not only did this teach me to observe what I was seeing, but it also taught me how to translate raw experience onto the page. It was the best kind of training a novelist could have and it has stood me in good stead over the years. Much of my writing has been influenced by this time in my life,” he writes. It would still be another six years before his first novel The Circle of Reason was published in 1986. In an email interview, he says, “It was a gradual process of realising that fiction does not require a complete mastery of experience but rather a willingness to engage with the world imaginatively. By the mid-1980s, I had accumulated enough stories, observations, and reflections to feel that I could give shape to them in a novel. Writing The Circle of Reason was a leap of faith, but it was also a culmination of years of thinking about the world in a way that only fiction could capture.”

Both essays are part of Wild Fictions (Fourth Estate; 496 pages; ₹799), a collection of his non-fiction spanning 25 years, and to go through them is to trace the journey of Ghosh in his many hats—writer, intellectual, traveller, scholar—and the mind that underpins them. He is most identified with literary fiction but, as these essays show, his non-fiction is no less substantial. Someone who is not just a teller of stories but also a collector, both enterprises feeding each other. He says, “Fiction and non-fiction are two sides of the same coin. Fiction allows me to explore the inner lives of characters and the emotional truths of history, while non-fiction gives me the space to grapple with ideas and realities in a more direct way. The research for my novels often leads me to write essays, and the essays, in turn, deepen my understanding of the themes I explore in fiction.”

For illustration, take the essay, ‘Of Fanas and Forecastles’, published in the Economic and Political Weekly in 2008. It is about lascars, 18th and 19th-century sailors from the Indian ocean region. They ranged from Indians and Arabs to Chinese and East Africans. Describing them as the progenitors of the “globalised workforce” of these colonised parts, he writes, “They were among the first to travel extensively; the first to participate in industrial processes of work; the first to create settlements in Europe; the first to adapt to clock-bound rhythms of work-time…and the first to be familiar with emergent technologies.” They even came up with their own language and Herman Melville mentioned them in his novels. The essay stems from research that went into Ghosh’s seminal work, the Ibis trilogy, the novels Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and Flood of Fire, where he reincarnated a forgotten swathe of history these lascars populated.

Another instance of fiction and non-fiction interweaving can be found in ‘Wordless Pasts: The Indian Exodus from Burma and the Writing of The Glass Palace’. The Glass Palace published in 2000 is a historical saga running across a century of Burma, from the deposition of the king towards the end of the 19th century by the British, to the Japanese invasion during World War II that led to the long march of lakhs of Indians back across perilous trails over many months. The question asked, and one which Ghosh had to grapple with himself, is how does a writer negotiate with those in history who are silent. Most who did the march left no account or what was written did not survive. “We might ask why the writers did not publish their accounts—and here again I think the answer is simply that Indians did not see themselves as ‘making history’,” he writes. Ghosh did however find an account by a Bengali doctor. It is extracted at length in the essay and the nature of what transpired during the exodus jumps up from it. But it is an exception. He says, “In The Glass Palace, I confronted the silence of history by imagining the lives of those who were left out of the official record. The novel is filled with characters whose stories are not documented but whose lives are no less real for that. I used fiction to give voice to these silences, to create a narrative that could bridge the gaps in the historical record.”

How does one give that voice? Is there a difference between being historically authentic versus accurate? ‘Storytelling and the Spectrum of the Past’, first published in The American Historical Review, is an exploration of a writer of contemporary historical fiction filling in the blanks of history. He says, “Historical authenticity is about capturing the spirit of a time, its textures and emotions, rather than adhering strictly to factual accuracy. For instance, in The Shadow Lines (his second novel published in 1988), I used personal memories and imagined histories to explore the partition of India, not as a historian would, but as a novelist seeking to evoke the emotional and psychological impact of that event. Similarly, in the Ibis Trilogy, my focus was on creating a narrative that felt alive and immediate, while remaining true to the broader historical context.”

GHOSH’S TRAINING as a social anthropologist has a big role in setting him apart as a novelist in India because it gives him access to hidden worlds. In the novel Flood of Fire, a character, Havildar Kesri Singh, is part of the British army that fought the First Opium War of 1840-42. In asking what the inner life of such soldiers would be, Ghosh realised there were not many first-person accounts, so he turned to later periods and came across the diary of Sisir Sarbadhikari, who joined the Bengal Ambulance Corps during World War I. Sarbadhikari made detailed entries about life on the front and eventually becoming a prisoner of war. The essay, ‘Abhi Le Baghdad’, is a vivid curation of his thoughts and experiences. Ghosh says, “Anthropology has taught me to pay attention to the granular details of human experience—the rituals, the stories, the silences. The memoir on which ‘Abhi Le Baghdad’, is based is not just a historical document but a window into the lived experience of war. Anthropology has given me the tools to approach such material with empathy and curiosity, to see the individual within the larger historical and cultural context. This discipline has also instilled in me a respect for the multiplicity of voices and perspectives, which I try to bring into my fiction and non-fiction alike.”

Three themes—migration, environment and history—run like a spinal cord through Ghosh’s writing life. He finds them central forces that 0are defining realities of the world. Wild Fictions was a consequence of “a need to reflect on the interconnectedness” of these themes. “Migration is not just a contemporary phenomenon; it is a historical constant, shaped by environmental and political forces. The environment, in turn, is the stage on which human history unfolds, and today it is under unprecedented stress. History, for me, is not a distant abstraction but a living force that shapes our present and future,” he says.

The first line of the first essay in the book, titled ‘The Great Uprooting’, begins with “Much, if not most, of my work is about migrants and displaced people…” It was written in 2021 and is about the influx into Europe that has for the past decade been shaping its politics. Ghosh, after extensive interviews with migrants in Italy, brings in unexpected insights, like the cellphone being the icon of migration in place of what were once bundles and battered suitcases. Or migration not being always driven by desperation but unrealistic fantasies encouraged by social media and the internet. Or people even from stable societies stepping onto a ‘migratory conveyer belt’ that reaches out across oceans and continents. He says, “This moment feels particularly urgent because we are living through a time of profound global upheaval, where the past, present, and future seem to collide in ways that demand new narratives. The essays in this collection are an attempt to grapple with these collisions and to offer a way of understanding the world that is both rooted in history and attentive to the ruptures of our time.”

Amitav GhoshbooksenvironmentmigrationpoliticsWild Fictions