Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh

To read an Amitav Ghosh novel is not merely to get a glimpse of the best of contemporary Indian writing, but also a snapshot of an oft-ignored episode of history. The “Sea of Poppies” is no exception. After a somewhat lukewarm tryst with Sunderbans and the Gangetic Dolphin (Hungry Tide), the first novel of the [...]

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The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh

In his essay on the anti Sikh riots of Delhi (The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi), this is what Amitav Ghosh has to say about “The Shadow Lines”:
a book that led me backward in time to earlier memories of riots, ones witnessed in childhood. It became a book not about any one event but about [...]

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Incendiary Circumstances by Amitav Ghosh

Incendiary Circumstances is a collection of seventeen essays, written over two decades, on the many social and political crises besotting our world. Here, our world is mostly confined to South Asia, parts of South East Asia (Burma/Myanmar and Cambodia), and Middle East(Egypt, Kuwait), “Half-made worlds”, in the words of V.S. Naipaul, which Ghosh refers to [...]

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The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh

Title: The Hungry Tide Author: Amitav Ghosh Read: April 2007
A young Indian American marine biologist, Pia, travels to the Sunderbans to study the Orcaella dolphin. She encounters Kanai, a successful translator, who is visiting his aunt Nilima, a social activist running a hospital in the delta. Nilima passes on a legacy to Kanai, her [...]

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