Within the Chaos

Whe

n Amitav Ghosh clambers into a tiny relief plane in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, just six days after the 2004 tsunami devastated the area, he finds himself next to a loud, officious-seeming, irascible man in a safari suit, his hair carefully oiled. The visiting writer tries to sidle away, but soon his obstreperous neighbor is sharing his complaints with him. Only as they continue talking does Ghosh begin to realize that the man is, in fact, an epidemiologist, and has lost his wife, his daughter, the whole careful life he has built up, in the tragedy. The loudness, Ghosh comes to recognize, is only a lament for what words cannot convey.

Such moments of collapse, when the writer realizes what he cannot do—and what he has to do, as a citizen—are the center of the roaming anthropologist's new collection of essays, Incendiary Circumstances. The title comes from a piece in which Ghosh, sitting at his desk in Delhi, working on his first novel, in 1984, suddenly sees the tranquil world around him go up in flames in the wake of Indira Gandhi's assassination. Hours before, he was just another student and aspiring author, hovering over his notebook in a part of Delhi called Defence Colony; overnight, he becomes an activist of sorts, going out into the streets to shout Gandhian slogans with the other everyday citizens trying to quell the riots.

It is part of Ghosh's curious luck that he often seems to be in the thick of things: he was a schoolboy in Sri Lanka just before civil war broke up the island, and he was living in rural Egypt when villagers around him started going to Saddam Hussein's Iraq in search of jobs. He was in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001. The disappearance of seeming paradises has been his lifelong companion. More than that, though, he is an amphibian of sorts who knows what it is to be both witness and victim. Though he has a doctorate from Oxford, lives in New York and teaches at Harvard, Ghosh was born in India, and grew up in Bangladesh, before moving to Egypt for two years in later life. Where another writer with his formal standing might simply lament the chaos that broke out across Asia after the tsunami, or the aftermath of genocide in Cambodia, Ghosh writes from within the chaos, involved.

The balancing of these perspectives has been his gift ever since his second novel, tellingly called The Shadow Lines. His epic novel of 2000, The Glass Palace, excavated the imperial history of 19th century Burma in part to highlight the torn affections of an Indian in 1943, not sure whether to side with India, or against Britain, in the war. The theme of his most recent novel, The Hungry Tide, is, to some degree, its very setting: the swampy area of the Sunderbans, in west Bengal, now sea, now land, its shifting contours reflecting back to the uncertain allegiances of the characters who travel through it. How to be true to one's divided inheritance has always been his driving concern.

In the collection of reports from troubled places assembled in Incendiary Circumstances, Ghosh begins to find an answer in everyday humanity and its resilience. Faced by those rioters in Delhi in 1984, some women stood up to them and, miraculously, reversed the tide of violence. Following the destruction of their country by the Khmer Rouge, a handful of survivors in Cambodia in 1981 put on a dance performance, piecing their lives together like "rag pickers." Writers have to be solitaries, Ghosh recalls V.S. Naipaul saying, and yet, he seems to feel, to be useful they have to be participants, too.

Incendiary Circumstances traces, over and over, the perfidy of empires and the corruption of most governments, but it never loses sight of individual action and power. And navigating both sides of the shadow lines within him, Ghosh travels to some of the most difficult places on earth to bring their voices back to those in places of seeming comfort. Musing on Sri Lanka, he draws upon the words of Michael Ondaatje, not a colonizer surveying foreign ground, but a homesick exile looking back on the world he misses. Reading to a New York audience soon after Sept. 11, he shares the work of Agha Shahid Ali, a Kashmiri poet who has lived with civil war and terror all his life. Bringing a young republic a larger sense of history, and so of suffering, is not the least of the achievements of this sober and highly dignified book.