Thanks to Facebook chance and my friend Gohar Palyan, one of the treats of my sojourn in Yerevan was a chance to hear Amitav Ghosh speak. If you are not aware of his writings, I commend them to you. As one of the Indian sub-continent's best and best known living writers, he invariably seeks truth through stories of people caught up in the mess of imperialism and other human and natural disasters.
Ghosh was the perhaps unwitting perfect pick for a keynote address to a conference (called "Strategies of (Un)silencing") that was otherwise so lost in the deep weeds of exclusive academic concepts and language that reading the summaries of what presenters would discuss gave me little to no clue.
I believe the organizers in their heart of hearts were looking for a way to challenge the historic Armenian and indeed Caucasus narratives of oppression, victimization, and revenge. But somehow they couldn't quite bring themselves to hit it head on in plain English. Ghosh did that. In a pre-lecture TV interview he dismissed the idea of identity (as in national identity) as compelling. And of course he has written about people with multiple identities, some lost, some gained, some changed, some not.
Ghosh took the occasion of the keynote to retell the story of a Bengali who volunteered to serve the British in WW-I. This young man survived and eventually wrote about his experience, using a diary he miraculously kept. Among many striking aspects of this work was the writer's surprise at being seen as a Hindu (a term that had little to no meaning at the time in Bengal but which was used to separate him from his comrades). He saw himself and his comrades as Bengali.Placing prisoners of war into groups by religion (Hindus and Sikhs together) was a tool of the Ottoman captors to divide and manage people they feared but did not understand. To add insult to injury, the Hindus and Sikhs were then treated more harshly than the Muslims or British from the same company of Bengali Ambulance Corps.
Even more striking is the humanistic view in this narrative. He treats his captors as human beings, they share cigarettes and food, enjoy a certain solidarity as men in a situation not of their choosing. He writes about them dispassionately--harbors no hate or anger toward them. By contrast British war memoirs and diaries are more often rife with questions of personal adequacy--Am I courageous? Did I acquit myself well? Largely egoistic or worse, jingoistic soliloquies, they seldom touch on fear or other emotions or acknowledge the humanity of the enemy or bystanders. This may be a contrast between oppressor and oppressed.
In support of this point, Ghosh mentioned a series of interviews with survivors of the labor camps in southeast Asia during World War II. One of the Indian indentured laborers who was made to work on the train line featured in the movie The Bridge on the River Kwai told him in response to his question, "What was it like?"..."What can I say? It was not that different than the rest of my life."
These contrasting narratives are a sharp reminder that language is social and that concepts we use to order our lives are social constructs--race, gender, religion, nationality, rich, poor. Human beings attach meaning to them out of our own experiences. While useful to a degree, they separate rather than unify. Today this is especially true with respect to nationalism, which Ghosh treated as largely counter-productive to human well-being. He cited Rabindrath Tagore's early 20th C. strident opposition to nationalism (obviously disregarded) as a movement that would destroy India.
Perhaps the one book by Ghosh that addresses this most directly is The Glass Palace, for which he rejected a place on the short-list for the Commonwealth Prize. When you read it, you will understand why. If you want to read more about the Bengali Ambulance Corps, Ghosh has promised to put something on his blog (timing not specified). Watch for it at: http://amitavghosh.com/blog/
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