Amitav Ghosh in a panel discussion at Harvard

I attended the panel discussion entitled "Otherwise, America: Expatriate Writers in the United States" at Harvard on Tue, Feb. 21. Amitav Ghosh, Claire Messud and Peter Carey made up the panel. I thought Ms. Messud seemed a little out of sorts in the beginning as the moderator (she was a participant, too)..., or maybe she was just being the normal spaced out artist...yet, she did a fine job later. While Peter Carey was all flourish, Amitav Ghosh impressed with his understated humor and strong views.

All issues dealing with the expat writer and his/her country of location can be vexed in many cases... The basic question posed here was: What brought you to America and what is keeping you here?

[I'll deal largely with Amitav Ghosh's response here]

Ghosh felt that America had offered him a "neutral space" when he had come here, in contrast to the India of the 80s which was overly politicised (which he was leaving behind). But he felt America today had become like the India of the 80s: very polarised, politically. As to what was keeping them here, both Ghosh and Carey were less precise: their "American" children who are growing up here, they offered...[tho' Carey was unequivocal about his love of New York and Ghosh seemed to enjoy Cambridge, Ma...]

In an answer to a question Messud posed as to whether he felt the need then to engage politically with America, Ghosh observed, quite tangentially, that it mattered to him now that his books were being read quite differently in India today that here in the United States. He did not elaborate how and why that difference in reading arose...

He recounted how his essay in the New Yorker several years ago about the empire-like ambitions of the US had been vindicated in the current situation...yet, at the time of publishing, he had been locked in intense debates with the editors of the New Yorker who could not quite "get" his arguments...they did not seem to understand the reference to the US as an empire.

Ghosh also made a point that much of the immigration today was quite unlike the immigration that this country saw earlier: these days, immigrants did not really sever links with the mother country (not all of them immigrated lock, stock and barrel) but maintained very close contacts with "home". In fact, for many recent "immigrants" the act of coming to America was an open-ended decision, with an option of going back to their mother country .

When asked whether he will ever write a novel about America or "of America" Ghosh said that such a probability was low as he had never been "that engaged with America." Quizzed about the Asian-immigrant writing today in the US and its heavy gender imbalance what with mostly women writers leading that charge (obvious reference to the Bharati Mukherjees and Chitra Divakurnis)...Ghosh, with a slight smile, parried the question somewhat by stating that he had wondered about that, but he felt that all such Asian immigrant writing today was like the Jewish immigrant writing of the 30s and the 40s.

...

A thoroughly entertaining and enjoyable discussion with Carey often peppering his answers with delightful anecdotes and observations, Messud acting with perfect grace in letting Carey and Ghosh express themselves, and Ghosh dwelling on all questions with that concerned, thoughtful look of his and limning his answers with gentle humor.