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Author Amitav Ghosh speaks during a discussion forum at the Frankfurt book fair in 2006 in Frankfurt, Germany. (Ralph Orlowski/Getty Images)
To say globalization has transformed the world is a cliché, and that includes literature and their narrators. Two India-born novelists Salman Rushdie and Amitav Ghosh have perhaps been the most successful in vividly portraying the lives of people transformed by globalization without explicitly using the word.
Since the early 1980s, Rushdie and Ghosh have written ambitious novels that give meaning to our globalized world without setting out to do just that. In their fiction, they have honored the individual’s survival instinct, cheering his ability to adapt and change his own self.
Novelists have often stepped outside the comfort zone of their birthplace. But in their imagined narratives, they rarely cease being themselves and guide readers at every step: Ernest Hemingway takes us to the Spanish Civil War, Paris between the Wars, an African safari or smuggling in Cuba; his protagonist may be Nick Adams, Jake Barnes or Francis Macomber, but Hemingway’s strong identity dominates the narrative.
Both men give meaning to globalization, showing how crossing borders is almost an instinctive act.
Graham Greene transports readers to Panama, Congo and Vietnam, but the leitmotif of strong Catholic guilt is never far. In more contemporary fiction, Toni Morrison and Don DeLillo have written about the universe around them, and Kazuo Ishiguro offers distilled observations of a society, as in an elegant miniature painting.
In DeLillo’s case, the novels capture global phenomena—terrorism, international crime, Cold War—and the reality from the vantage position of an American view of the world, from the top of the mountain. What happens to the individual in a world without borders, who crosses frontiers as he grasps to create his own universe, is not central to the concern.
Not so with Ghosh or Rushdie.
In the planned trilogy named after a merchant ship, Ibis, of which the first two novels are now published, Ghosh chronicles the ship’s voyage and tells the stories of large nations China and India; large companies, centering on the East India Company; the global trade of opium and indentured labor; and how the process of globalization affects individual lives.
Both novelists view the world as their canvas, ignoring borders. Ghosh’s first novel, The Circle of Reason (1986), was about a weaver fleeing to North Africa. In a later nonfiction work, In An Antique Land (1992), he traced the story of perhaps the world’s first overseas Indian, a slave sold to a merchant in Egypt.
In another novel, The Glass Palace (2000), Ghosh recounted the story of Burma during the last century, seen through the eyes of a young boy who grows up to become a trader. And now, with Sea of Poppies (2008) and River of Smoke (2011), Ghosh has recreated the saga of individuals tossed around the world by the waves of economic forces and how in the process they shape language and culture, linking indentured laborers in one part of the world with mercantilist traders in the city, who want to keep China addicted to opium.
Ghosh’s expansive vision views history from the perspective of the subaltern, the one at the bottom of the mountain, forced by circumstance to adapt to new surroundings.
While Rushdie remains the finest chronicler of India’s most hybrid city, Bombay, where he was born, he has deepened our understanding of migration and how people adjust and triumph. Rushdie admires the human spirit, the bravery of the individual who crosses the line. He revels in the heterogeneity and multi-everything nature of globalization, refusing to be overwhelmed by it.
Neither novelist actually uses the word “globalization”; neither claims that all consequences of globalization are positive. Both celebrate the vibrancy and diversity that hybridity brings to monocultural societies.
