February 9, 1998
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DANCING IN COLUMBIA, AT
LARGE IN BURMA Poignant Journeys Amitav Ghosh's travel writings show a rare erudition and an obsession with the past. By Binoo K. John DANCING IN COLUMBIA, AT LARGE IN
BURMA
It is with a trepidation of accosting something monumental that one goes through an Amitav Ghosh book. Novelists sometimes resort to travel books as a cathartic breather between works of fiction. For Ghosh, however, a travelogue is much more than travelling from one station to another. Travel for him is a journey into ethereal zones, full of bizarre twists and stunning coincidences. While travelling, Ghosh is constantly searching for something of cosmic or galactic dimensions. Interestingly, he finds them.
The latest Ravi Dayal offering, a collection of three short travel pieces, again serves to set apart Ghosh from most of the contemporary travel writers. The pieces are on Cambodia and Burma and takes us through the convulsions that these traumatised, strife-ridden nations have been through. He searches out the people who still cling on to some links from the past and with them drags us back to a blood-soaked past. "Dancing in Columbia", the lead piece, takes off from a rather cute historical anecdote: the arrival in France of Cambodia's King Sisowath along with his entourage in 1906. It is not the king who is in focus, but the dancing girls who accompanied him. It might be in order to say that it was actually the dancing girls in the entourage who helped immortalise that journey to Marseille. The immortal sculptor and painter Rodin fell in love with the little girls and followed them around and sketched them. So enamoured was Rodin that he even asked one of them to place her dainty feet on a piece of paper which he placed on his lap so that he could sketch the outline. True to style, Ghosh traces out one of those dancers, Chea Samy, who was said to be one of Cambodia's greatest dancers and a national treasure to boot. Samy also turned out to be Khmer Rouge dictator Pol Pot's sister-in-law. The link with a sordid history established, Ghosh unreels before us a story of bloodshed and tear-soaked upheavals that the country witnessed. In Burma, too, Ghosh takes us to the days past, when General Aung San was murdered, but he meshes history beautifully with the present. He leaves Burma not too optimistic about democracy taking root and seems a wee bit disappointed with Aung San Suu Kyi. Miraculous coincidences -- he even met Ko Sunny, an "insurgent" of Indian origin, fighting for the Karenni insurgents -- always help Ghosh along on his journeys. Not all travel writers have been as fortunate. What Ghosh lacks in ornate descriptions of the landscape -- the staple of any travel writer -- he makes up for with his perspective. But which travel writer has either the depth or the erudition that Ghosh brings to his writing? |
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Ghosh has given us enough indication of
his inclination to often ignore the place and instead look at the weathered pages from its
past. He showed it in In An Antique Land which was his way of expanding the dimensions of
a travel book. In chronicling the history of the 12th century slave Abraham Bin Yiju,
Ghosh was opening new vistas for the travel writer. Part fiction, part history, part
nerve-tingling anecdotes that only an anthropologist can lay bare, Ghosh transported us to
a primordial past and made it breathtakingly real. 
