Eloquent lines from the past

Arabic writing has influenced Amitav Ghosh, who was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2008 for Sea of Poppies.

“It [the Arab world] is a very interesting region,'' he told Weekend Review during his visit to Abu Dhabi for the recent international book fair. “The parts people notice the least are often the most interesting.''

The Indian writer said he was worried that not much is known about Arabic writing either within the Arab world or outside.

“Apparently book sales are not over 2,000 to 3,000 [copies], which is very limited,'' he said. But he was happy the Emirates Foundation was “putting so much effort'' into developing literature and the arts.

Looking out of the window on the 18th floor of a hotel, the author said Dubai had not surprised him. “I expected pretty much what I am seeing,'' he said, as huge cranes below worked on a massive beachfront project.

Talking about multicultural societies, Ghosh said one work that interested him was The Trench by the Saudi Arabian writer Abdul Rahman Muneef.

The book, set in the early days of oil exploration, was “peculiar, interesting and exclusive''.

He also mentions Palestinian writer Gassan Kanafani's powerful book, Men in the Sun, on the trauma of life as a refugee.

Ghosh said he read the books in English even though he can read Arabic, too. “I am getting slower now and can't read it as fluently.''

His knowledge of Arabic dates back to the time spent in Egypt, first as a student of cultural anthropology at the University of Alexandria and then as a researcher in a farming village.

Ghosh's first work, The Circle of Reason, explored the theme of dislocation of people. It follows a weaver's travels from a village in Bengal through the Gulf and to North Africa.

Sea of Poppies is about the “first opium war'' — the British attack on Chinese ports from the Bay of Bengal — and how the British took Indian bonded workers to Mauritius, Fiji and Trinidad to cut sugar cane.

Ghosh said the future of the novel is hazy. “Writers have to realise that the physical book is on its way out. Books can be downloaded from the internet and more readers are going for e-books. How the revenue stream will be worked out is unclear.''

He believes television, internet and “texting, especially'' have affected reading. “In Japan people read on their phones. ... But I notice that the number of readers in India is growing fast,'' he said.

There is a huge international interest in Indian writing, Ghosh said. “It has happened over the last 30 years. I feel fortunate that my career coincided with that [interest].''

According to him, the “big Indian boom'' was preceded by a surge of writing in India. It was the first sign that something important was happening there.''

Ghosh got a doctorate from Oxford before he wrote his first novel, The Circle of Reason, which won France's top literary award. The Shadow Lines got the Sahitya Akademi Award, India's prestigious literary prize.

The writer said he comes from a generation “that was on the cusp of switching to computers''. He still writes with a fountain pen and gets his paper from a shop behind Al Azhar Mosque in Cairo.

Asked if being a bestselling author had changed his life, he said: “Things have remained pretty much the same. My life consists of looking after my family and writing.''

Ghosh is working on the next book in a trilogy, of which Sea of Poppies is the first.