Gitanjali: Rabindranath Tagore

The emergence of Rabindranath Tagore into the world of English literature coincides with the publication of the English version of Gitanjali for the foist time in November 1912. At that time it was profoundly praised by the best literary minds of England including Yeats, Bradley. In November 1913, he was awarded the noble prize by Swedish academy and this gave him a place among the greatest men of letters in the modern world. He won universal recognition through the monumental literary achievement Gitanjali. An appreciation of Rabindranath poetic genius in the west for a long time been based upon the assumption that Gitanjali is crowning achievement of his life but the truth that Gitanjali does not mark the summit as Rabindranath’s poetic career, it marks only the beginning. In a critical appreciation of his poetry Ajit Kumar Chakravarty says that Rabindranath, the poet of Sonar Tori and Chitra, is also the poet o Gitanjali and Gitmalaya.

Referring to his translation of Gitanjali into English Tagore observes: “once the unguarded movement, I translated my Gitanjali into English prose. At that time distinguished English writers accepted my translation as a part of their literature. May, they spoke so highly of it that I felt embarrassed as I thought to be an exaggeration. I am a foreigner. There was neither rhyme nor metre in my poetry. Even if they found some aesthetic pleasure in it, I could not accept their verdict. It occurred to me then that I lost nothing but by giving poems a shape of prose. On the contrary, if I had translated them in English poetry, they cold probably have been censured and looked down upon.”

The poems (song offerings) were written to be sung: but they sang themselves. The book has spoken to countless hearts, has been revelation of what they felt and experienced, and cannot ever forgotten. Edward Thompson says that “it bring us very close to a religious experience which is universal yet intensely individual; an experience which is one with the writer’s life, no alien dress but the natural growth of his days”. Further he goes on to say that “his poems have led him to find God; his sorrows and failures have shown him to God. His restlessness, of which the words speak, is in this book, deepening tee minor tone. His anxiety to mix with the simple life of men, wherever he can find it at its fullest, is also here”.

The songs of Gitanjali are songs mainly to the closet personal connection between poet and Eternal, as a lover and beloved, wife and husband, servant and master, friend and friend, as if the poet were trying to approach reality in a personal way through personal relationship. They are songs constructing out of themselves of their wondrous-world in, which dawns and eves ad languorous means, vagrant tints as the skies and glorious horizons, flowers and birds, beggar-maids, pilgrims and messengers with tiding—man and nature jestle, with one another and unite at a point in the inner heart of the poet and raise these persons of love, and longings for ever-far, and yet ever-near Master of the whole.

Gitanjali is a confluence of romanticism, mysticism and humanism. The deep subjective note characterising romantic poetry sounds through his songs and poems giving them the necessary emotional content without which religious poetry fails to make an impact. We find in his poems the Nature worship of Wordsworth, the reformist fervour of Shelley, the sensual verbal felicity of Keats, and the consummate artistry of Tennyson. His poems are remarkable for their simplicity and spontaneity, brilliant imagery and striking originality. In spite of his romanticism, Tagore is no scorner of the earth like Shelley’s Skylark, but he resembles Wordsworth’s skylark which is true to the “kindred points of Heaven and Home”. According to Tagore “spirituality does not mean an escape from the problems of a life or a complete negation of life. It is not where we begin but where we end, how we conclude and culminate the matters most. It is with this mystic vision that Tagore beheld God in tiller, the toiler, in the child on the sea-shore of endless worlds, and the panorama of nature’s beauties”.

Tagore’s Gitanjali spread his fame across the horizon of western life like a rainbow. Sarojini Naidu said that Gitanjali to the west went as a simple direct immortal and memorable message. Gitanjali thrilled Yeats as no other work of imagination had done, and he spoke of these lyrics as “a work of supreme culture. They yet appear much the growth of the common soil as the grass and the rushes”.

As Tagore approached the age of forty, life brought him many sorrows and this reflected itself in some of the poems of that period. They are contained in his Gitanjali. The attitude of the world becomes more profound. He begins to find God a comrade who soothes him by His healing grace. There is calm and joyous acceptance of Death as the Messenger of go. While on one hand his poems persistently proclaim that life is meant to be lived, on the other, he is always conscious of the deeper meaning of life. It is quite aptly that Dr. Gurumurthi says “the Gitanjali contains some of the finest expressions of his mystic experience and has a place equally in the mystic literature of the world as the finest poetry of our time”.

The communions of man with God, a new understanding of man’s relation to the world, are conveyed to us in masterly efforts which are intensely mystic. His religious poetry as found in the Gitanjali breathes a noble devotion. As Rabindranath Tagore interprets it, the religious man has to take a share of the world’s burden and not to try to run away from the world. In the very famous poem beginning with the line “leave this changing and singing and telling of beads’ he points out that God is to be found in the hard toil of daily life, and not away from the haunts of man.

Further we are able to see the poet communing with the divine essence of life in the spirit of a comrade, nature forming the background for human joys and sorrows. His joyous acceptance of death as the gateway to a fuller life links Rabindranath again with the greatest mystic poets. As an expression of the deepest devotion we may take the poem beginning “day after day, O lard of my life, I shall stand before Thee face to face” in another poem he says:

“in one solution to thee, my God let my all senses spread out and touch this 
world at Thy Feet. Like a rain cloud of July hung low with its burden 
unshed showers, let all my mind bent down at Thy door in one solution to Thee.
 Let all my song gather together their diverse strains into a single current
 and flow to a sea of silence in one salutation to Thee”.

Dr. Fallon feels that “the western Gitanjali, although lacking much of the musical beauty and evocative power of the Bengali, is yet ‘a jewel’ even a jewel of English religious poetry”. The Iselendic novelist Halfoe Laxness has also acknowledged the profound impression made on him by Gitanjali: “the form and flavour of he Gitanjali had the effect of a wonderful flower we had not seen or heard before.”

After the English Gitanjali was published, there was some discussion on the supposed influence of Christianity on Tagore’s work. Edward Thompson opines that direct influence was very slight, and his attitude towards Christian doctrine was hardly friendly. He seems to have made no direct touch of New Testament. J.H. Cousins says that “his religion is without the theology though not without personality; his philosophy is without argument though not without rationale. The outstanding quality that shows in every line of his poetry is life.”

Tagore’s sympathy for all the forms of life was real and rich. “God and religion” according to him, “got betrothed to each other long before he ever became aware of their existence in himself. But there is unmistakable message in his works.” The very first line of the opening song of Gitanjali seems to have the power to set the heart ablaze: “thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure”

The human body is considered the soul and the human soul is the temple of God, who is indeed man’s friend, lover and protector. Dr. Iyengar feels that “Gitanjali is verily the recordation of the vicissitudes in the drama of the human soul in its progress form the finite to the infinite. And the progress is necessarily conceived as a battle, a journey and as a continuing sacrifice, culminating in a total offering of all self surrender, so that by loosing all one may gain all”. Darkness involves ignorance and the approaching threat of Death but light brings knowledge and the promise of life’s renewal and immortality. God comes to rescue of man with His light and thunder when desires blinds the mind with delusion and dust.

Thus the best pieces bring enlightenment and heighten our sensibility and awaken men to the sheer delight of existence. The traditional Vaishnava element is evident in many of the Gitanjali songs. They are mainly poems of “Bhakti”. Tagore believes that tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection. He is not afraid of death because he loves this life; he knows that he shall love death as well. Tagore is a devotional poet and his Gitanjali is a devotional poem in its essence. The theme of the poem is the union with God. His heart longs to join His song, but vainly struggles for a voice.

Gitanjali shares richly the Renaissance spirit. All devotional songs are said to sung. The various moods in which Tagore is visualising God are vividly seen. Renaissance means the freeing of the mind from its bondage from gloominess and darkness. He thinks human life as a quest in the world and God as the only source of Light. The way achieve immortality is through the path of self surrender. When the human beings, develop unbounded love, they will realise the intensity of God. This sort of unlimited love is possible only through devotion towards God.

God with the golden touch of His feet has kindled the light of reason and the love in mankind. The light of God’s music illumines the universe. God is the life of life, truth of truth, power of power and king of kings. The songs of Gitanjali thus are songs mainly of the closet personal connection between the poet and the Eternal, as love and beloved, wife and husband, servant and master, friend and friend, as if the poet were trying to approach Reality in a personal way—through personal relationship.

The poet calls God the receiver of our offerings and asks him not to accept unholy sacrifices, through unclean hand, but accept only whatever sacred lover offers. God will be with the poorest, lowest and lost as they will be quite humble. God is within us. He is Omniscient and Omnipresent. The gifts given by God to the poet to go back to God again. The seeking of God is not the negation of God. While man bring sorrow as his offerings to God, who rewards man with His grace. He prays to God give him the strength to raise his mind high and above daily trifles, to surrender with love of his strength to His will:

“give me the strength to bear my joys and sorrows;

give me the strength to make my love fruitful in service;

give me the strength never to disown the poor”

All these songs from a mighty piece of prayer and pleading and exultation, idolatry and blind worship are castigated. If some people are blind and seek Him in wrong places or in the wrong way, others are crushed by their own cowardice. Faith from blow and grace from above, are needed to end the waywardness of man and human wretchedness. He articulates a prayer for India’s redemption, imploring the Father to let India awake into that heaven of freedom:

“where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;

where the knowledge is free;

where the world has not been broken into fragments of narrow domestic walls

where the words come out from the depth of truth;

where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection”.

We are conclude with Krishna Bagchi’s observation to it, “whatever may be the charges, as time pass, in people’s reaction to it, travelers again and again will hum Gitanjali’s songs on the highway, and men rowing upon rivers and lovers murmurs them, because the songs meet the need of the elemental man’s, the pure naked man’s soul. Its appeal would always be to the ‘essential man’; it may not be to a mind encrusted with thinking. The songs are there not to be intellectually understood, but to be heard and felt by the heart within; awareness is stirred by them to sense the touch of someone from afar.” W.B. Yeats rightly called the Gitanjali ‘a work of supreme culture’ and justly regarded the song “as much the growth of the common soil as the grass and the rushes’.

Gilbert Adair: And Then There Was No One

Gilbert Adair, in the third of his Evadne Mount novels, changes tack and disposes with the cosy Christie model subverted successfully in The Act Of Roger Murgatroyd and less so in A Mysterious Affair Of Style, by opting to throw himself into the mix and tell the story of And Then There Was No One (2009) as a fictional memoir. Set in 2011, Adair has found himself at a literary festival in a Swiss town by the Reichenbach Falls, setting for Conan Doyle’s attempt at ridding himself of his popular detective character.............
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Gilbert Adair: And Then There Was No One

And Then There Was No One

Gilbert Adair, in the third of his Evadne Mount novels, changes tack and disposes with the cosy Christie model subverted successfully in The Act Of Roger Murgatroyd and less so in A Mysterious Affair Of Style, by opting to throw himself into the mix and tell the story of And Then There Was No One (2009) as a fictional memoir. Set in 2011, Adair has found himself at a literary festival in a Swiss town by the Reichenbach Falls, setting for Conan Doyle’s attempt at ridding himself of his popular detective character.

The influence of Sherlock Holmes plays as much a part in And Then There Was No One as that of Agatha Christie has for the triptych of Evadne Mount novels, and fans of Holmes may be interested to know that Adair reproduces, in full from his fictional new book of Sherlock Holmes stories, his take on The Giant Rat Of Sumatra, first mentioned in The Adventure Of The Sussex Vampire (cf The Casebook Of Sherlock Holmes) as “a story for which the world is not yet prepared”.

The reason for this change in the style of the novels comes late, but is worth mentioning, as Adair regularly talks about his novels, past, present, and in translation throughout:

For all my efforts to have the second novel ring as many changes on the first as was organically feasible within the generic conventions I was pastiching, there remained a stubbornly samey something about A Mysterious Affair of Style which long afterwards nagged at me. And not only at me. One reviewer, praising the book, had also expressed disappointment that I had taken an ‘if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t fix-it’ attitude to the first of the cycle, and I couldn’t help agreeing with him.

Like that novel, Adair begins by playing with the conventions of the murder mystery genre. Where the murder didn’t occur until late in A Mysterious Affair Of Style, the murder has long since been wrapped up here. The victim is Gustav Slavorigin, a Booker Prize-winning author sent, after publishing a collection of incendiary anti-American essays, into hiding, Rushdie style, due to a contract on his head, courtesy of a rich Texan reactionary.

The prologue, seemingly extraneous to the mystery itself, fills in details that, to a first read, seem dry and dull, and in doing so recalls both the introduction to Eco’s The Name Of The Rose and the short foreword to Nabokov’s Lolita. This in itself is strange, given that Adair has mentioned in the past that Nabokov has “become something of an albatross about [his] neck”. The details of this chapter deal with the history of Slavorigin - his early days at university, with Adair, through the rise, fall, and infamy of his writing career. One notable book, and the reason Slavorigin is making a rare public pitstop, is his new thriller, A Reliable Narrator, which gives the game away without, if you catch my drift, doing so.

How to describe A Reliable Narrator? Its opening chapter resembles the concluding chapter of a whodunnit, one that just happens never actually to have been written. Thus the reader of Slavorigin’s book (I mean, the book which was written) cannot hope to comprehend the picturesque twists of this first-chapter denouement since, of the murder which has clearly taken place, the only detail to which he is made privy is the identity of the murderer, a murderer who has already been apprehended, charged, tried, found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.

The idea of a reliable narrator is played around with too, as is Adair’s playful style. Personal views come into the fray, such as calling the forty-five minutes of literary festivals “so much hassle for so little result” and his description of a book as being “a fat, virtuosically executed novel by one of that new breed of American wunderkinder who, I would be lying if I denied it, are positively bloated with talent but who are also just too fucking pleased with themselves.” As a fictional Adair, he’s able to get away with it, even if, with reference to Slavorigin’s book:

The first-person protagonist is no canonic unreliable narrator, such a tired old cliché of postmodernism now, but a perfectly reliable narrator, except that not a single soul is prepared to rely on him.

The usual alliteration, literary and cinematic in-jokes, and postmodern trickery are present and accounted for in And Then There Was No One. The unashamed use of puns (’Google Gogol’, a delicatessen named ‘Salvador Deli’ and a few more Nabokovian references, ‘Son of Palefire’ and ‘Adair or Ardor’) adds to the fun, and I’d like to think that only Adair’s style, like a British eccentric, could get away with a metaphor like “the train tranquilly unzipped the country’s flies from Oxford to London”.

One of the more interesting ploys in the novel is how, as a memoir, Adair manages to introduce his sleuth, the Dowager Duchess of Crime, Evadne Mount, into real events. As the last novel was set in the 1940s and this novel is seventy years hence, and she should be the one dropping dead, he pulls it off well, and humorously, too, introducing her into a book that she should never be written, as per a Q&A session after his reading of The Giant Rat Of Sumatra:

‘You wrote two pastiches of Agatha Christie, The Act of Roger Murgatroyd and A Mysterious Affair of Style? Will there be a third?’ Me: ‘Absolutely not. I have had my fill of cardboard characters and preposterous plotlines. What I desire to write now is something more personal, a work of genuine depth and ambition.

Amongst the answers at that session there are some interesting insights that, if we believe the reliable narrator, into Adair that show And Then There Was No One as being that personal work, bringing with it a few questions of its own:

‘I read a book, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Les Enfants terribles, Death in Venice, or whatever, I like it, I rewrite it. I am in short a pasticheur. Less by opportunism, though, than by superstition. I long ago discovered that I could embark on a new work of fiction only if its premise had already been legitimised by one of the writers in my personal Pantheon. Each of my novels is thus a palimpsest. Scrape away at its surface and you will find, underneath, another novel, usually a classic. I offer no apology for this.’

Apologies are not in order as Adair has produced his best novel since 1992’s The Death Of The Author. His funniest, too. It has more conceptual twists and turns than the labyrinth in Eco’s The Name Of The Rose, another novel that owes a debt to Sherlock Holmes, and probably why the Italian writer was also due to attend the same literary festival. In fact, in Eco’s essay, Travels In Hyperreality, he says that ‘once the “total fake” is admitted, in order to be enjoyed it must seem totally real’, and this is what Adair does with this novel, giving us a reliable narrator, so reliable that we can believe his every word, only to have the rug pulled out from under us, to see it for what it is, yet still believe.

Gifted: Nikita Lalwani

After the announcement of the Booker longlist, Giftedby Nikita Lalwani was the first of the thirteen that I picked up in my eagerness to find out what the chosen few were about. Had it not made the longlist I have no doubts that I would never have picked it up. The cover, you see, is rather ugly. If I were to hazard a guess at what it’s supposed to be then it’s a silhouette of a girl coupled with some stylized cumin, formed from numbers and other mathematical symbols. Gifted, it seems, does not extend to the minds behind this artistic faux pas...........
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Gifted: Nikita Lalwani

Gifted: Nikita Lalwani

After the announcement of the Booker longlist, Giftedby Nikita Lalwani was the first of the thirteen that I picked up in my eagerness to find out what the chosen few were about. Had it not made the longlist I have no doubts that I would never have picked it up. The cover, you see, is rather ugly. If I were to hazard a guess at what it’s supposed to be then it’s a silhouette of a girl coupled with some stylized cumin, formed from numbers and other mathematical symbols. Gifted, it seems, does not extend to the minds behind this artistic faux pas.

But, as the old adage goes, one must not judge a book by its cover so it was between the pages of this, Lalwani’s debut novel, that I went. At first I wondered if this may have been a chicklit novel, but then, I’ve never read chicklit, so I have no way of knowing. But, beyond such notions, there’s a powerful story half-heartedly trying to get out.

Rumi Vasi is a child prodigy who, from an early age, has shown an aptitude for numbers, something which her father, Mahesh, is only too keen to progress. Originally from India, having taken a university position in Cardiff, he views Rumi’s success in their new country with great importance. To him, it’s about making an impact on society. So it goes that Rumi’s studies are manipulated by her overbearing father to the point where she has no friends and even spends Saturday nights practicing arithmetic.

Gifted follows the Vasi family over the following nine years as Rumi grows up wanting to be like another other kid but being controlled by the strict rules of her Indian household. Eventually, as was her father’s aim, she attains a bit of celebrity by entering Oxford University at a young age. But the seeds sown by Mahesh come back to haunt him when he realises that trying to protect someone from outside influences can lead to them being damaged by smothering love.

Gifted’s prose has a personality to it, leaping from a series of paragrahs into sections of lists then back to straight prose. Through this Lalwani gives us the character of Rumi, initially excited about mathematics, although there are hints that this enthusiasm is never going to last:

Under the burning tube lights, she attacked the numbers with speed and ferocity, as though she were playing Space Invaders, devouring the figures with the hunger in her belly and spitting out the remains. She worked feverishly, chewing pen tops down to sharp points. Then she had looked up - looked at the bored librarian at her desk, at the old man reading the paper - seen the thin tall rectangle of black sky through the doors and trembled with loneliness.

The problem I had is that Rumi is probably the least interesting character in the book. As she sits down to some calculus or rebels against it, her passage to Oxford has an air of artificiality about it. I’m even surprised that she got into such an establishment as her father’s guidance was limited to mathematics and there’s scant mention of her ability in other disciplines, such as English and history:

She felt stupid, devoid as she was of vocabulary for history - architecture, epic battles, eras, wars, kings and queens - none of it understood.

The conflict between Rumi’s parents, Mahesh and Shreene, provide the interesting parts of the novel although when the focus finally switches to them it’s a case of too little, too late. While Mahesh want’s nothing more than Rumi’s success in their adopted country, her mother judges her actions against the customs of the India she loves. It’s a sad affair that Mahesh is portrayed as the stern, father of few words, when in his daughter’s company and it’s only when the device of Whitefoot, a Scottish contemporary of Mahesh, is brought into the story that we get him waxing lyrical and sharing his opinions.

As a debut Gifted introduces Lalwani to us as a writer of promise but certainly not the finished article. While this novel approaches an interesting topic in heavy handed parenting it is full of characters uncomfortably dropped into the restrictions of a predetermined storyline. I doubt this will feature in the eventual shortlist but if it does I’m ready to eat humble pi.

Amitav Ghosh

Dr.Ratan Bhattacharjee is at present the Chairperson of the Post Graduate Dept. of English and is also associated with teaching in the PG Dept of English of Rabindra Bharati Univesity , both in regular and distance.He is the Executive member in the International Advisory Board of International Theeodore Dreiser Society, USA. His articles and poems are published in numerous journals and magazines in India and abroad. He was associated with the Indian Association of American Studies (IAAS) as a member of the Executive Body and now he is the Founder Director of the newly inaugurated Dattani Archive and Research Association (DARA) , Kolkata. He edits the Journal Voice of Indian English Writers (VIEW). He is our special contributor in English Literature Section. ............

Amitav Ghosh

Ghosh' Earlier Novels & The Ibis Trilogy

Article From Dr.Ratan Bhattacharjee

Dr.Ratan Bhattacharjee is at present the Chairperson of the Post Graduate Dept. of English and is also associated with teaching in the PG Dept of English of Rabindra Bharati Univesity , both in regular and distance.He is the Executive member in the International Advisory Board of International Theeodore Dreiser Society, USA. His articles and poems are published in numerous journals and magazines in India and abroad. He was associated with the Indian Association of American Studies (IAAS) as a member of the Executive Body and now he is the Founder Director of the newly inaugurated Dattani Archive and Research Association (DARA) , Kolkata. He edits the Journal Voice of Indian English Writers (VIEW). He is our special contributor in English Literature Section. email- drrb07@gmail.com 

Amitav Ghosh  , in spite of his fixed home is an itinerant. By nature he  is a traveller, in his mind he is a voyager and he divides his time between Kolkata, Goa and Brooklyn.

Being one of India's best-known writers , he had to write for many publications. including the Hindu, The New Yorker and Granta, and he has served on the juries of several international film festivals, including Locarno and Venice. He has taught at many universities in India and the USA, including Delhi University, Columbia, the City University of New York and Harvard . Amitav Ghosh is a rare breed.He bade adieu to teaching long back.He is now busy in reading and learning.  Every book means  a lot of research for  Amitav Ghosh. He studies the place. What he did in his youth is important. But even in his old age he gives equal importance to hard work  and research for writing a book. Just imagine, for writing the book, River of Smoke  at the age of  55 he  took nearly three and a half years  travelling and reading. It is to write the second book of his Ibis trilogy he spent several weeks in Guangzhou and learnt some Cantonese to depict the background of the novel which is set in Fanquit town. This explains why Amitav Ghosh  writes history and fiction equally well. In his novels  he creates an entire world out of an even a small village. In the same way he wrote book after book. His books include The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, Incendiary Circumstances, and  The Hungry Tide. His first  novel, Sea of Poppies, is the first volume of the Ibis Trilogy and his recent one is River of Smoke

Amitav Ghosh's debut novel The Circle of Reason is an indication of great things to come. The novel does not have much of a story. It has great characters, won the Prix Medicis Etranger, one of France's top literary awards, Portrayal of memorable characters and to  weave a neat plot out of them  is now the forte of Amitav’s novel, but it was his Achiles’s heel in The Circle of Reason. He has created memorable characters and situations in that  debut novel, but has failed to string them together in a meaty story .The storyline veers around a local would-be scientist who is in love with phrenology and goes around measuring all the villagers' heads, and a small boy .It  turns tragic, hilarious, and profoundly philosophic . True to Amitav's style, his characters are well etched, although he has tended to stretch the uni-dimension that he fixates on a little more this time. His attention to detail was immaculate as in his later novels, though occasionally distracting. The  boarder town hosting refugees  serves as seting for this  vivid and magical story.  The novel traces the misadventures of Alu, a young master weaver in a small Bengali village who is falsely accused of terrorism. Alu flees his home, travelling through Bombay to the Persian Gulf to North Africa with a bird-watching policeman in pursuit. This is a strange novel. In fact in this magical realism  Amitav makes a claim on literary turf held by Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie.

Amitav’s narrative represents a prodigious feat of research and the novels that follow are excellent examples of it. With a Calcutta background, Amitav who studied in Dehra Dun, New Delhi, Alexandria and Oxford and his first job was at the Indian Express newspaper in New Delhi developed a broad minded progressive anti-colonial  approach . His scholarly self mingled with the writer’s self in him.  He earned a doctorate at Oxford before he wrote his first novel, which was published in 1986.The Shadow Lines and The Glass Palace, which deal movingly and powerfully with post-imperial dislocations in Bengal and Burma. The characters are delineated  with integrity and dignity. He makes historical perspectives  real and yet the fictional depiction  of  reality has about it a contemporaneity. The Shadow Lines won the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Ananda Puraskar. Incendiary Circumstances,and  The Hungry Tide also earned a great critical acclaim. The Calcutta Chromosome won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for 1997 and The Glass Palace won the Grand Prize for Fiction at the Frankfurt International e-Book Awards in 2001. The Hungry Tide won the Hutch Crossword Book Prize in 2006. In 2007 Amitav Ghosh was awarded the Grinzane Cavour Prize in Turin, Italy.

But the shift in Amitav Ghosh’s writing occurs with his master plan of writing the Ibis trilogy.The Sea of Poppies,  the first in his Ibis trilogy has great characters and an interesting plot. The novelist focuses on the British traders’ hypocritical and self-justifying espousal of the doctrine of free trade .The theme is based on  the opium trade down the Ganges to Calcutta and towards Mauritius. The  novel  is ,however, written upon a much larger canvas than ever before, with a multitude of characters and an epic vision.There is a  colourful array of seamen, convicts and labourers sailing forth in the hope of transforming their lives. Apparently it seems that the characters are his targets. The Brits whom he depicts are basically scheming, perverse and ruthless to a man , but Ghosh has portrayed them not as  round characters who grow. They are  largely caricatures. At the end of The Sea of Poppies, the clouds of war were seen looming, as British opium interests in India pressed for the use of force to compel the Chinese mandarins to keep open their ports, in the name of free trade. Symbolically , the novel thus ends  amidst a raging storm, rocking the triple-masted schooner, the Ibis.

River of Smoke is essentially self-contained, its narrative not needing familiarity with what has gone before. The author’s sympathies are largely with the Chinese In the River of Smoke , the writer’s focus  is now shifted to the opium trade with China, centred on the coastal port of Canton. As in The Sea of Poppies, two other vessels have also been caught up in a similar storm.The Anahita, a sumptuously-built cargo vessel is here shown as  owned by the Bombay Parsi merchant Bahram Modi . Bahram Modi is the successful entrepreneur with the best view from his office, the only Indian member of the Committee of the Western-led Chamber of Commerce in Canton and the lover of a Chinese boatwoman, Chi-Mei, through whom he has fathered a son he cannot acknowledge.The ship called Anahita is  his biggest shipment of raw opium for sale in Canton. The other vessel is Redruth, a Cornish vessel with a cargo of unusual flora . The Cornish botanist who looks for rare plants ,particularly the mythical golden camellia in China is also there in the vessel. The  rounded  portrayal of characters is most  interesting aspect of the novel while in the earlier novels there is a tendency towards caricature.

Ghosh’s purpose is clearly both literary and political. His descriptions are vivid and  a lost world is revived to life. There is the air of a Victorian epistolary novel when we find the chatty letters of the gay Eurasian painter Robin Chinnery. At times, between the vivid descriptions of a riot on the maidan and the delightfully chatty letters of the gay Eurasian painter Robin Chinnery. At the same time there is the flavor of Conrad’s story especially reflected in the  stunning reversal of perspective.The author’s fine feel for nautical niceties, reminds us of the romanticised vision of writers like  James Clavell, but those writers, placed the white man at the centre of their narratives. Amitav deliberately relegates his colonists to the margins of his story.

The focus is entirely on the colonialism’s impoverished, and usually non-white, victims.They are given the central position, not the white masters. Amitav Ghosh took nearly three and a half years to write the second book of his Ibis trilogy. He spent several weeks in Guangzhou and learnt some Cantonese to depict the background of the novel which is set in Fanquit town. Most of the action occurs in Guangzhou .  Like the Sea of Poppies ,the novel which deals with opium trade in China  is also not a single linear .Like Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, the relationship  between Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke  is a ‘tangential one’ as Amitav Ghosh himself describes it.The  mash-up of fact and fiction works, coalescing into a narrative shaped by cataclysmic historical events but inflected with small-scale personal drama beautifully works here in the novel.

Amitav Ghosh is particularly good at representing the distinctive voices of his characters; what sometimes seemed forced in the earlier book is natural and convincing in River of Smoke, He exquisitely reproduces the new hybrid language resulting from the mongrel mating of tongues.For this he learns Cantonese with arduous efforts. Sometimes he does go overboard with his Hobson-Jobson; his prose is littered with words the average reader has rarely encountered, “swadders”, “buttoners”, “mumpers” and “mucksnipes”, all heard on the Canton maidan. Terms like “cumshaw”, “gubbrowed”, “girmitiyas”, “mudlarking” and “linkisters” are used so often along with words used by Indians in diverse contexts , chuck-muck as any in the city, with paltans of nokar-logue doing chukkers in the hallways and syces swarming in the istabbuls. There is even an Indian restaurant in Canton, run by a boatwoman who had grown up in Calcutta’s Chinatown. She utters  Achha  to ensure that  it would contain neither beef nor pork. River of Smoke is deliberately  written in an almost old-fashioned style, its prose straightforward and unadorned, its emotions deeply affecting. Despite the varied nationalities of his characters, the Indian reader can be left in little doubt about the author’s basic allegiance. This is an Indian novel, but one written by a 21st-century Indian, one who is both cosmopolitan and conscious of his heritage. “Democracy is a wonderful thing”, Bahram observes to a British merchant. “It is a marvellous tamasha that keeps the common people busy so that men like ourselves can take care of all matters of importance. I hope one day India will also be able to enjoy these advantages — and China too, of course.”

This is the realistic tone of Amitav in the two novels of his  Ibis trilogy, Ghosh has come a long way from the magic realism of his first novel. After  Song of Poppies, Amitav Ghosh’s second novel The River of Smoke is going to be one of the masterpieces of twenty first century Indian English literature. He is now keen on writing the third part of his Ibis trilogy. 

German Romantic

Good stuff, bad weather. "Whenever a storm with thunder and lightning moved over the sea he would hurry out to the top of the cliffs as if he had a pact of friendship with the forces of nature, or even go on into the oakwood where the lightning had split a tall tree from top to bottom, and murmur, 'How great, how mighty, how wonderful!'" Thus a friend remembered the wanderings of Caspar David Friedrich, as a young painter on the island of Rügen in 1802. Man among the unchained elements, drawing a sense of his own mingled littleness and grandeur from their convulsion: it is the archetype .............
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German Romantic

The wandering exile is a common Romantic figure. But why was it so inspiring to 19th-century German artists? Robert Hughes on how a nation rediscovered itself.

Moonstruck... Caspar David Friedrich's Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon, 1818/1824. Photo: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Good stuff, bad weather. "Whenever a storm with thunder and lightning moved over the sea he would hurry out to the top of the cliffs as if he had a pact of friendship with the forces of nature, or even go on into the oakwood where the lightning had split a tall tree from top to bottom, and murmur, 'How great, how mighty, how wonderful!'" Thus a friend remembered the wanderings of Caspar David Friedrich, as a young painter on the island of Rügen in 1802. Man among the unchained elements, drawing a sense of his own mingled littleness and grandeur from their convulsion: it is the archetype of Romantic scenarios, Byron on the ocean, Turner in the Alps, and any number of alert, soulful young German idealists contemplating their travels north to the Baltic or south to the Bay of Naples. Romanticism was the primal urge of high German culture in the early 19th century. Nowhere can the force of this, as reflected in painting, be better appreciated at present than in Dublin, where the National Gallery of Ireland is celebrating its 150th anniversary with a wonderful loan show from the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, A German Dream: Masterpieces of Romanticism .

It sometimes happens that a great cultural movement goes hand in hand with the self-discovery of the country in which it takes place, and so it was with German Romantic painting. The early 19th century in Germany was tough on intellectuals; in the wake of the Napoleonic wars and the Congress of Vienna came a fierce persecution of democratic ideas and those who held them, so that to assert one's "German-ness" as an artist, one's allegiance to folk culture and local history, was in some ways a radical act. If a painter portrayed himself or others in altdeutsch (old-fashioned German) costume, that too was a political statement. Gothic was traditional, Greek was modern. "We are not Greeks any more," wrote Goethe, and the implications of this thought went deep.

You see them, for instance, in the extraordinary landscapes with Gothic churches, attended by devout pilgrimages from the whole region, back-lit in all their staggering complication of tracery, by the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841). Beyond comparison the greatest neo-classical German architect of the 19th century, Schinkel simply vaporised the boundaries between the classic and Romantic sensibilities; Prussia might think of itself, through his architecture, as a reborn Doric Greece, but his paintings equally celebrate the nationalist continuity of the Gothic past.

You can see Schinkel's paintings as a call to nationalist self-confidence. But there was also an inwardness, whispering and pleading to be let out. So the exemplary Romantic was partly an enraptured patriot and partly an exile within his own culture. This chimed with the preferences of Romantic painting for the wanderer, the solitary figure turning his back on his society to better contemplate the distant moon, the silent bay or the landscapes of a foreign land.

And that was where Caspar David Friedrich came in, quiet, clear and (eventually) dominant. Friedrich was the son of a soapmaker, born in the insignificant provincial seaport of Griefswald in 1774. He died obscure and more than slightly mad in Dresden in 1840.

His modernity isn't due so much to the "look" of his paintings, carefully composed, thinly laid and breathlessly static, as to the ideas behind them. The question they ask is the one asked by his contemporary, the philosopher Friedrich Schlegel: "Can mankind be understood divorced from nature, and is it so very different from other manifestations of nature?"

The answer from Schlegel and Friedrich, as from a congregation of ecologists and earth people since, was no and no again. Friedrich did not believe he, or anyone else, was "outside" of nature, and when he painted images like the Nationalgalerie's Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon , 1818/1824, that was the point he was making. The human pair, in their "Old German" clothes, are scarcely different in tone or modelling from the deep dramas of nature around them, the leaning rocks and the half-uprooted, venerable tree in silhouette. They gaze enraptured at the moon - significantly, when Friedrich was asked what they were doing, he ironically retorted: "These two are plotting some demagogic activities."

If there is one word for the mood of Friedrich's pictures it is "longing": the desire, never satisfied, to escape from the secular conditions of life into union with a distant nature, to be absorbed in it, to become one with the Great Other, whether that other is a mountain crag, an ancient but enduring tree, the calm of a horizontal sea, or the stillness of a cloud.

Sometimes actual symbols of formal religion do appear - a gothic spire, a cross on a mountain pass. But they are not really necessary, since the object of Friedrich's worship is nature rather than its creator. The watchers in his paintings, turning their backs to us, gaze at nature on our behalf; it is a form of vicarious prayer, and that was how Friedrich's rather small audience interpreted it.

Sometimes the painting doesn't even need the watcher. Carl Gustav Carus (1789-1869) went to Naples in the travelling party of Prince Friedrich Augustus of Saxony in 1828, and his reaction to his quarters in the Casino Reale would strike a chord with any later tourist who has ever had unexpectedly good luck with a hotel. Led upstairs by an elderly chamberlain, "I enter, and in front of me lie Vesuvius, the sea, the castle, and the blue distance! I thanked God profusely. Not only had He graciously led me to my destination but He had considered me worthy of such a room!"

The mood is very different from the indignant whining about bedbugs and inedible food of a Smollett on the non-so-grand tour, and in Balcony Room with a View of the Bay of Naples , 1829, Carus painted what may be the first visual prayer of thanks to the Almighty for a concierge's kindness ever done by a gratified tourist - the archetypal blue view past the shutters, a neo-classical Matisse almost, with a guitar propped against the doorframe echoing the slant of a felucca's rigging just beyond it.

German Romanticism did indeed carry a strong religious streak. Some of its exponents saw themselves as spiritual reformers, sent by the zeitgeist to reform a culture muddied, as they thought, by relativism and realism. Like the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in England, they would remind viewers of the lost (but regainable) piety and innocence of an earlier world, that of the New Testament. They called themselves the Nazarenes. The squeaky-clean, idealised form of Christian representation they went in for - only a hair away from pious kitsch, and sometimes not even that, to modern eyes - is summed up in Friedrich Overbeck's Christ in the House of Mary and Martha , 1812-16, a highly coloured but rigidly frozen pastiche of Raphael. A little of the Nazarenes' cloying, self-conscious pietism goes a long way, and their idea of turning themselves into a sort of monastic order of art-priests (who lived in a sort of commune until 1820 in an actual monastery in Rome, that of San Isidro on the Pincio) now seems absurd. Yet you can't doubt the sincerity of their enterprise, or the intensity of their cult of friend ship. In 1811, when Wilhelm and Ridolfo Schadow, the artist sons of the Prussian neo-classical sculptor Johann Gottfried Schadow, caught their first distant glimpse of the Eternal City, they swore an oath that they "would rather stay dead in Rome than return to our home city as unknowns". Four years later, Wilhelm painted one of the classics of German group portraiture: himself and his brother clasping hands in manly resolution, while their friend and mentor, the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorwaldsen, seals the bond with his left hand on Ridolfo's shoulder and a laurel wreath in his right. It's almost an artworld version of David's picture of heroic brotherhood, The Oath of the Horatii . The Schadow boys are clearly bound to win the battle for Noble Art, and they will do it with their pals as a band of brothers.

The most startling picture in the show is not a Friedrich, packed as those are with metaphysical symbolism; nor is it a view of those crags, lakes and sunsets beloved of German romantics. It is by Johann Hummel (1769-1852), a professor of perspective and optics at the Berlin Academy of Art, and it depicts The Grinding of the Granite Bowl , 1832. It is an early example of the Technological Sublime, celebrating the wonder of man's power over the natural world.

The bowl in question was destined for the square in front of Schinkel's Altes Museum on the museum island in Berlin. It was cut, hollowed out, ground and polished from an enormous piece of granite found in Brandenburg. It was very consciously meant to be a world's wonder, like the gigantic basins of hard stone that were such monumental features of ancient Egypt and Rome - condensations of human skill, of incredibly laborious triumph over raw, resistant nature. But the size of this bowl and the technical challenges it posed were beyond anything from antiquity, and Hummel produced three pictures of its creation: first the enormous basin, upside down, being ground and polished in a Berlin workshop, then the job of turning it over (a wondrous spectacle to Berliners, as the erection of the Egyptian obelisk in St Peter's Square had been to Romans years before), and finally the bowl on its plinth in the Lustgarten.

With his view of the bowl in the workshop, Hummel achieved a near miracle of detailed and layered perception, recording not only the natural colours of the stone but also the hues and shapes of the workshop reflected in its surface: we see windows distorted by the curvature, and even a fragment of landscape through a window picked up on the glassy granite, every detail of the ponderous bracing that keeps the stone in place and of the geared turning apparatus. The basin becomes an apparition, rigorous in its technological truth but also surrealist in its strangeness and intensity. If Hummel had never painted another picture, this one would have assured him a small but distinct place in the history of European sensibility.

· A German Dream: Masterpieces of Romanticism is at the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, until January 30. Details: 00 353 1 661 5133.