Indian Writer to Lecture at W&L

Amitav Ghosh, one of the best-known Indians writing in English today, will speak on “Faith and Fundamentalism” on Dec. 4 at 7p.m. in in room 327 at Washington and Lee's Williams School of Commerce, Economics and Politics. His talk will address the impact of religious intolerance, especially on writers, and is jointly sponsored by the University Lecture Series and the department of religion's Schewel Fund. His writings touching on this subject include “The Fundamentalist Challenge,” in the Wilson Quarterly, Spring 1995 and “The Imam and the Indian,” in Granta 20, 1986.

Born in Calcutta in 1956, Ghosh studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria. He worked for the Indian Express newspaper in New Delhi and he earned a doctorate in social anthropology at Oxford, with fieldwork among the fellahin (peasant farmers) of Egypt, before he wrote his first novel. His acclaimed book, In an Antique Land, weaves together his search in synagogue archives for information about the life of the Indian slave of a 12th-century Egyptian Jewish trader, with reflections on his extended encounter, as a Hindu, with the society and Islamic culture of contemporary rural Egypt, in a narrative that juxtaposes history and travelogue.

His first novel, The Circle of Reason, won the Prix Medici Estranger, one of France's top literary awards. The Shadow Lines, the tale of a Bengali family caught in the hostilities between Hindus and Muslims during the 1947 partition of India, won the Sahitya Akademi Award, India's most prestigious literary prize. The book artfully evokes the complexities and interconnection of personal, religious, and national identities.

The Calcutta Chromosome, a science fiction thriller set in Calcutta and New York, won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for 1997 and is to be filmed by Gabriele Salvatores, the Oscar-winning director of Mediterraneo. In 1999 Ghosh was the winner of the 1999 Pushcart Prize and was a finalist in the reporting category for the National Magazine Awards, the most important magazine prizes in the U.S., for a story he wrote the previous year for The New Yorker, to which he is a regular contributor.

He is also author of Dancing in Cambodia and, most recently, The Glass Palace, a poignant story of three generations, beginning in Mandalay.

Last year Ghosh joined the faculty at Queens College in the City University of New York as distinguished professor in the department of comparative literature, teaching writing classes and courses on film and literature. He has previously taught at Columbia University, Delhi School of Economics, Center for Social Sciences in Calcutta, and the University of Virginia.