Amitav Ghosh
Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956. He grew up in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan), Sri Lanka, Iran and India. After graduating from the University of Delhi, he went to Oxford to study Social Anthropology and received a Master of Philosophy and a Ph. D in 1982. In 1980, he went to Egypt to do field work in the fellaheen village of Lataifa. The work he did there resulted in In an Antique Land (IAAL 1993). Ghosh has been a journalist and published his first novel, The Circle of Reason in 1986, and his second, The Shadow Lines, in 1988. Since then, he has published IAAL, The Calcutta Chromosome, and The Glass Palace, done fieldwork in Cambodia, lived in Delhi and written for a number of publications. He currently lives in New York and teaches at Columbia University.
Books by Ghosh:
> The Circle of Reason. New York: Viking, 1986. 423 pp.
Ghosh's first novel opens with the arrival of a child "Alu" ("potato"-- for the shape of his head) in a small village and is divided into three sections: "Satwa: Reason," "Rajas: Passion," and "Tamas: Death."
> The Shadow Lines. New York: Penguin, 1990. (First published in England by Bloomsbury Press, 1988) 246 pp.
His second novel focuses on the narrator's family in Calcutta and Dhaka and their connection with an English family in London.
> In an Antique Land. New York: Vintage, 1994. (First published in England by Granta Books, 1992) 393 pp.
The cover proclaims IAAL "History in the guise of a traveller's tale," and the multi-generic book moves back and forth between Ghosh's experience living in small villages and towns in the Nile Delta and his reconstruction of a Jewish trader and his slave's lives in the eleventh century from documents from the Cairo Geniza.
> The Calcutta Chromosome (Picador, 1996)
This novel has been described as "a kind of mystery thriller" (India Today). It brings together three searches: the first is that of an Egyptian clerk, Antar, working alone in a New York apartment in the early years of the twenty-first century to trace the adventures of L. Murugan, who disappeared in Calcutta in 1995; the second pertains to Murugan's obsession with the missing links in the history of malaria research; the third search is that of Urmila Roy, a journalist in Calcutta in 1995 who is researching the works of Phulboni, a writer who produced a strange cycle of "Lakhan stories" that he wrote in the 1930s but suppressed thereafter.
> The Glass Palace (Random, 2000)
In a review in The New York Times, Pankaj Mishra describes Ghosh as one of few postcolonial writers "to have expressed in his work a developing awareness of the aspirations, defeats and disappointments of colonized peoples as they figure out their place in the world." The novel is set primarily in Burma and India and catalogs the evolving history of those regions before and during the fraught years of the second world war and India's independence struggle.
Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956. He grew up in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan), Sri Lanka, Iran and India. After graduating from the University of Delhi, he went to Oxford to study Social Anthropology and received a Master of Philosophy and a Ph. D in 1982. In 1980, he went to Egypt to do field work in the fellaheen village of Lataifa. The work he did there resulted in In an Antique Land (IAAL 1993). Ghosh has been a journalist and published his first novel, The Circle of Reason in 1986, and his second, The Shadow Lines, in 1988. Since then, he has published IAAL, The Calcutta Chromosome, and The Glass Palace, done fieldwork in Cambodia, lived in Delhi and written for a number of publications. He currently lives in New York and teaches at Columbia University.
Books by Ghosh:
> The Circle of Reason. New York: Viking, 1986. 423 pp.
Ghosh's first novel opens with the arrival of a child "Alu" ("potato"-- for the shape of his head) in a small village and is divided into three sections: "Satwa: Reason," "Rajas: Passion," and "Tamas: Death."
> The Shadow Lines. New York: Penguin, 1990. (First published in England by Bloomsbury Press, 1988) 246 pp.
His second novel focuses on the narrator's family in Calcutta and Dhaka and their connection with an English family in London.
> In an Antique Land. New York: Vintage, 1994. (First published in England by Granta Books, 1992) 393 pp.
The cover proclaims IAAL "History in the guise of a traveller's tale," and the multi-generic book moves back and forth between Ghosh's experience living in small villages and towns in the Nile Delta and his reconstruction of a Jewish trader and his slave's lives in the eleventh century from documents from the Cairo Geniza.
> The Calcutta Chromosome (Picador, 1996)
This novel has been described as "a kind of mystery thriller" (India Today). It brings together three searches: the first is that of an Egyptian clerk, Antar, working alone in a New York apartment in the early years of the twenty-first century to trace the adventures of L. Murugan, who disappeared in Calcutta in 1995; the second pertains to Murugan's obsession with the missing links in the history of malaria research; the third search is that of Urmila Roy, a journalist in Calcutta in 1995 who is researching the works of Phulboni, a writer who produced a strange cycle of "Lakhan stories" that he wrote in the 1930s but suppressed thereafter.
> The Glass Palace (Random, 2000)
In a review in The New York Times, Pankaj Mishra describes Ghosh as one of few postcolonial writers "to have expressed in his work a developing awareness of the aspirations, defeats and disappointments of colonized peoples as they figure out their place in the world." The novel is set primarily in Burma and India and catalogs the evolving history of those regions before and during the fraught years of the second world war and India's independence struggle.
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