Discuss Amitav Ghosh as a writer of travelogues.

 ‘Dancing in Cambodia, at Large in Burma’ is a pure travelogue. With an anthropologist’s eye for accuracy and authenticity, Amitav Ghosh’s studies life, art, social culture, and political institutions of the places he visits.

Thematically speaking, displacement has been a central concern of Ghosh’s work. Coming and going, departures and arrivals have always been relevant symbols of his narrative structure. Ghosh’e book is divided into three parts:

(i) Dancing in Cambodia, 

(ii) Stories in Stone and

(iii) At Large in Burma.

It is a small book where the first and third chapters are of about fifty pages each and the middle one is literally sandwiched into eleven pages. The first chapter begins with an anthropological description of the sea journey of King Sisobath, the last king of Cambodia before Pol Pot took over. Cambodia as we all know had been colonized by the French. It was King Sisobath’s lifelong dream to visit the land of the colonizers i.e., France. We can see Ghosh’s reconstruction of the mind set of the colonized. His journey started on 10th May, 1906 in the afternoon. 

He was abroad a French Liner, Amiral Kersaint. We can only smile at the child like joy of the king and his group, The king, who had been crowned two years before, had often spoken of his desire to visit France, and for him the voyage was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream’. For other members also it was a cherished opportunity to step out of their cloistered existence. They were going to perform for the colonizers. They were going out of their country for the first time.

As Ghosh touchingly writes about the royal dancers, ‘It was said that the dancers entered the palace as children and spent their lives in seclusion ever afterwards; that their lives revolved entirely around the royal family; that several were the king’s mistresses and had even borne him children; that some of them had never stepped out of the palace grounds until this trip to France’. The colonized situation of dancers is sensitively portrayed. Their excitement and joy at visiting the ‘superior land on one hand and their inferiority complex and anxiety on the other have been described in a very delicate fashion.

There is no doubt that Ghosh is a master in the craft in weaving words. It is almost impossible to change or replace his words. Precision is his supreme attribute. When he describes these dancers there is no sexual undertone as might be expected. He describes them just as they are. We can almost pity the dancers, […] with their hard and close cropped hair, their fingers like those of striplings, their thin, muscular legs like those of young boys, their arms and hands like those of little girls, they seem to belong to no definite sex.  They have something of the child about them, something of the young warrior of antiquity and something of the woman’.

Accompanying these excited dancers, as their guide and head is King Sisobath’s eldest daughter princess Soumphady. An elegant lady with an immense presence, royal manner and style, she has an electrifying effect on the audience at Marseille. We shall see later that her impact on the art and culture of Cambodia has been of a permanent nature. She is her own woman. A woman of substance, we might call her in current terminology. She admires the French women, their clothes and head dresses but nevertheless declines to dress up like them. She holds her ground, “No! The princess said after a moment’s reflection. No! I am not used to them and perhaps would not know how to wear them. This can also be taken as an indirect hint at the Indians’ fascination for Western style of dressing.

Almost a century back these Cambodian women had a sense of pride about their distinctive attire suited for the variety of their dances. Conversation with the associates of Pol Pot is a major and effective research device adopted by Ghosh. He learns about the remaining story of the journey to France and other aspects of the Pol Pot regime through CheaSamy, a sister-in-law of Pol Pot and a teacher at the school of fine arts in Phnom-Penh, in 1993. Chea-Samy is the main agent who tells the author about the tearing apart of Cambodia by tyrannical Pol Pot years from 1975 to 1978 and the incessant turmoil thereafter. Ghosh meets the members of Pol Pot’s family.

He also visits the village where he was born to gain insight into his background. Ghosh tries to assess the impact of Pol Pot’s brutal regime on Cambodia. What is striking is the power of dance and music and the vital force of these arts operating upon the Cambodian collective psyche. Howsoever hard it may be for believing, but it is these art forms that hold Cambodia intact after the traumatic years.  In this saga of cultural courage, the importance of dance in Cambodia has been paramount even when the country is on the brink of destitution. The tenacity of Cambodian people is touching. The Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot died of heart attack in April 1998 at the age of seventy-two. His real name was Saloth Sar. He grew up in a comparatively prosperous farming family at the hilly area of Kompong Thong province. This area was the very centre of the then French protectorate. He got a scholarship in 1949 and studied Radio Electronics in Paris. His political career began in 1950 when he joined the underground communist party.

He became its general secretary in 1962. He finally came to power in 1975. As soon as he came to power, he started implementing his dream of turning Cambodia into an agrarian utopia where there would be no city, no money, no property and no religion. He held all these things to be the corrupting forces. He started setting up rural collectives. He was completely ruthless in the implementation of his vision of a perfect society. Whosoever was even remotely sensed as being ‘liberal’ or against his views was executed. He was the architect of Cambodia’s killing fields. He is held responsible for the deaths of two million Cambodians! It was only in his death in 1998 that international community shook in the commotion and tried to inquire about his motives and methods.

Since then, many people have tried to know the reasons and aftereffects of Pol Pot’s terrible graduation from electronic engineering to social engineering. He was held possessed by the idea of social cleansing. Pol Pot’s activities amount to one of the worst genocides in the twentieth century. Dancing in Cambodia’ is an answer to all questions regarding Pol Pot’s regime of isolation. Chea-Samy had entered the palace in Phnom Penh in 1925 as a child of six. She began her training in classical dance under princess Soumphady’s guidance. Ghosh also meets Molyka, a mid-level civil servant.  Ten members of Molyka’s family had been murdered by Pol Pot, including her father! We can only imagine the depth of torture, sorrow and the mental damage caused by Pol Pot.

Pol Pot’s ideas of Social Utopia were shaped by his early life among the hill tribes in remote northeastern Cambodia. The tribe was called Khmers. These early Khmers were self-sufficient. They lived a sort of ideal community life or so it must have looked to Pol Pot. Their raw culture was unaffected and untainted by Buddhism. They had no concept of money. It was somehow Pol Pot’s umbilical attachment with his childhood that resulted in all that bloodshed and horror. Pol Pot went about his plan in a systematic manner. He targeted the middle class. Chea-Samy’s personal connection with Pol Pot also has an interesting story. It is through her we get the famous lines of Pol Pot, “The Revolution does not recognize families.

During his regime he bestowed no favors on members of his family, not even Chea-Samy’s husband who was Pol Pot’s elder brother.  When King Sisobath died in 1927, his son Monivong became the king. But his love for his favorite mistress Luk Khun Meak changed everything. The palace in Phnom Penh and its regime underwent complete change. In place of princess Soumphady, Meak became the supervisor of all girl folk. Meak knew how to exercise her power. She brought many of her relatives to the palace and gave them important charges.

One of her young relatives later became Chea-Samy’s husband. Her husband’s youngest brother was a six-year-old boy called Saloth Sar. He was later to become the terror god of Cambodia, Pol Pot. But what Chea-Samy says almost amounts to irony for us, ‘He was a very good boy, she said at last, emphatically. In all the years he lived with me, he never gave me any trouble at all’. Ghosh also explains how terror was essential to the exercise of power by Khmer Rouge. All the old comrades were executed for betraying the Revolution. Pol Pot’s ally Khieu Samphon planned ‘the mass purges of the period, meaning thereby the killings. They had ideas like purging the land of all sinners. They believed in a moral, religious tone of their activities, ‘Terror was essential to their exercise of power. It was an integral part not merely of their coercive machinery, but of the moral order on which they built their regime’. As someone has said that human beings commit crimes so happily in the name of religion. 

Pol Pot’s hero was Robespierre. What he loved most about this terror icon from France was his line, “Terror is an emanation of virtue’. The author systematically goes on to show how the Revolution began to devour itself. But it did not end before damaging Cambodia so badly. When Vietnamese broke Cambodia in 1979, the country became like a shattered slate,’ before you could think of drawing lines on it, you had to find pieces and fit them together. And what actually did the fitting in was nothing else but the traditional Cambodian art forms. We usually do not give much importance to music and dance in our day today prosaic lives. But music lies deep in human psyche. Only reading this book is believing this truth. It is a wonder how Ghosh creates the impact of music on the mind of the reader through this book. I, for one, will always welcome Cambodian music. 

In the post-revolution period, the Cambodian ministry of culture launched a project to relocate and gather the trained classical dancers and teachers. The results of this search were shocking. Almost ninety per cent of the artists had been killed in the Pol Pot regime. Anyone who survived found living to be a miracle. If one dancer found out another dancer they would shout, you are still alive! And then they would cry thinking of all those who had died. One well-known surviving dancer described her condition during the Pol Pot time, I was like a smoker who gives up smoking […]’I would dream of dance when I was alone or at night.

You could get through the day because of the hard work. It was the nights that were really difficult; we would lie awake wondering who was going to be called out next. That was when I would dance, in my head’. Ghosh describes the worth of art. Ghosh describes the response of a Catholic relief worker from Italy, Onesta Carpen. When first music concert was organized, there was electricity crisis, The city was in shambles; there was debris everywhere, spilling out of the houses, on to the pavements, the streets were jammed with pillaged cars, there was no money and very little food. I could not believe that in a situation like that people would be thinking of music and dance. But still they came pouring in and theatre was filled far beyond its capacity. It was very hot inside. gather the trained classical dancers and teachers. The results of this search were shocking. Almost ninety per cent of the artists had been killed in the Pol Pot regime. Anyone who survived found living to be a miracle.

If one dancer found out another dancer they would shout, you are still alive! And then they would cry thinking of all those who had died. One well-known surviving dancer described her condition during the Pol Pot time, I was like a smoker who gives up smoking […]’I would dream of dance when I was alone or at night. You could get through the day because of the hard work. It was the nights that were really difficult; we would lie awake wondering who was going to be called out next. That was when I would dance, in my head’. Ghosh describes the worth of art. Ghosh describes the response of a Catholic relief worker from Italy, Onesta Carpen. When first music concert was organized, there was electricity crisis,  “The city was in shambles; there was debris everywhere, spilling out of the houses, on to the pavements, the streets were jammed with pillaged cars, there was no money and very little food.

I could not believe that in a situation like that people would be thinking of music and dance. But still they came pouring in and theatre was filled far beyond its capacity. It was very hot inside’. Another foreigner Eva Mysliviec, a Quaker relief missionary, who also witnessed the first performance, recalls it thus, ‘when the musicians came on the stage she heard sobs all around her. Then, when the dancers appeared, in their shabby, hastily made costumes, suddenly everyone was crying: people wept through the entire length of the performance’. Here music and dance stand for life itself. It is as though the collective Cambodian voice is saying, ‘to live is to sing and dance. The sudden and spontaneous bouts of joy only strengthen the belief that artistic heritage is the very life and soul of a nation. The tears at the first performance are the tears of finding life again. It is as though. I’d thought I’d died but no, I’m alive I’m living.’ In fact Ghosh develops the passion for dance and music as symbols of politics of resurgence in Cambodia.

These art forms gave the beleaguered Cambodian people an identity and certitude, a badge of authenticity. The author sums up the mood as, a kind of rebirth: a moment when the grief of survival became indistinguishable from the joy of living. Womanhood, as has been described by some philosophers, is a state of being while manhood is that of becoming.’ While manhood implies effort and achievement, womanhood means being what you are.  It is only when complete osmosis has been achieved with the state of being that one gets a feel of life, ‘real life. Ladies like Chea-Samy are the real heroines. Ghosh writes, ‘Like everyone around her, Chea-Samy too had started all over again-at the age of sixty, with her health shattered by the years of famine and hard labor.

Working with quiet, dogged persistence, she and a handful of other dancers and musicians slowly brought together a ragged, half starved bunch of orphans and castaways, and with the discipline of their long, rigorous years of training they began to resurrect the art that princess Soumphady and Luk Khun Meak had passed on to them in that long ago world, when King Sisobath reigned. Out of the ruins around them they began to create the means of denying Pol Pot his victory’. The second chapter of this book is devoted to the description of various aspects of the twelfth century Cambodian temple Angkor Wat. This temple is actually much more than a temple in the traditional sense to Cambodians. Many stories are carved on these elegant structures. Cambodians call Angkor Wat, ‘A Monument to the Power of the story. This monument is sort of a gigantic abacus of story telling. It is a big, huge architectural device.  It is said to be the largest single religious edifice in the world. It seems to be self-sufficient and complete in its setting and dimensions where each part is complementing the other. The setting is Mountain Meru. It is a mountain in Indian mythology.

The seven graded tiers of the mythological hill provide the blue print for Angkor Wat. The entire pantheon of gods, deities, sages and prophets is cast. We are pleasantly surprised that Ghosh offers one of his own discoveries regarding the temple. Ghosh says that he noticed the paradoxical nature of the reputation this temple has among Cambodians and the people of the rest of the globe view Angkor Wat as a unique powerful symbol of the romance and glory of a lost civilization. But for Cambodians, it is a symbol of modernity. Although Angkor Wat is undisputedly a temple, yet it does not figure in anything that has to do with religion or any thing old-fashioned. Many factory-produced commodities bear it as a logo. It is stamped on uniforms. “[…] It figures on the logos of large corporations, like bank, indeed, the erstwhile Kampuchea Airlines even succeeded in transforming this most earth bound of structures into a symbol of flight, by lending it a pair of wings’.

Ghosh’s training as an anthropologist really helps him here. He comes to know about the legend of accidental finding of this temple by French explorer Henri Mohout. It is one of those types of miracle stories where structures are supposed to have come up. The contradictory nature of this temple further gets a boost when Ghosh comes to know how this temple was restored with all latest available scientific and technical method were also called for help.  Thus this central cultural symbol of Cambodia is also a symbol of change and modernity,Ghosh writes, ‘For an entire generation of Cambodians, including politicians as different in ideology as Prince Sihanouk, Son Sann and Pol Pot. Angkor Wat became a symbol of modernizing nation-state. It became the opposite of itself: an icon that represented a break with the past-a token of the country’s belongings, not within the medieval, but rather the contemporary world. Thus, the bear, banks, airlines and of course flags’.

The last part of the book At Large in Burma’ is mostly a linear narrative. As expected, its topic is struggle for democracy in Burma. But Ghosh has a personal link to Burma as well. He says that writing about Burma is an attempt on his part to get to his roots. He wants to explore places his parents and relatives had lived in or visited before the birth of the Indian Republic in 1947. He writes, To me, the most intriguing of these stories were those that my family carried out of Burma. In his family, memories of Burma were kept alive by an aunt and her husband nicknamed Prince who left Burma in 1942 and came to Calcutta just before the invasion of Rangoon by the Japanese army.

Basically, at the time of author’s visit to Burma and even prior to that, two forces were working in Burmaforces of orthodoxy and status quo represented by the army and democratic forces, seeking change that have been headed by Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. Suu Kyi’s father Aung San was Burma’s acknowledged leader during the freedom struggle. On 19th luly, 1947 he was assassinated. At the time of her father’s death. Suu Kyi was just two years old. She rose to be an eminent human rights activist and spearheaded a peaceful nonresistance mass movement to restore democracy and civil liberties in her country. At the time of the author’s visit she was still under house arrest.

Ghosh analyses the political situation in today’s world. Politics goes by symbols. If you have strong symbols, you will remain in public memory, otherwise not. He correctly writes, ‘In the post-modern world, politics is everywhere a matter of symbol and the truth is that Suu Kyi is her own greatest political asset. It is only because Burma’s 1988 democracy movement had a symbol, personified in Suu Kyi, that the world remembers  it and continues to exert pressure on the current regime. Otherwise, the world would almost certainly have forgotten Burma’s slain and dispersed democrats just as quickly as it has forgotten many others like them in the past.

Ghosh is conscious of the double standards adopted by erstwhile colonizers and developed nations. In theory they support democracy, freedom of speech and liberty for people of all races, but for political and economic gain support dictatorial and terrorism inclined regimes. Burma has been fighting civil wars since its Independence in January 1948. There has been a communist uprising. Military coups have decided the order of the day. Ghosh tries to analyze as to what went wrong in Burma and where did things go wrong? It used to be one of the richest countries in Asia and yet now it lists in UN’s ten least developed nations on earth. Burma has become the byword for repression, xenophobia and civil abuse. About two third of the country’s population is Buddhist. But during the colonial rule, the British favored minorities over ethnic Burmans.

Even the army had units named after the minorities like ‘Karen Rifles, ‘Shan,’ Mon’ and so on. But things were to change and change for better, ‘It takes a military dictator to believe that symbols are inert and can be manipulated at will. Forty years after his assassination, Aung San had his revenge. In a strange, secular reincarnation, his daughter Suu Kyi, came back to haunt those who had sought to make use of his death.  In 1988, when Burma’s decades of discontent culminated in an anti-military uprising, Aung San Suu Kyi emerged from obscurity as one of country’s most powerful voices, the personification of Burma’s democratic resistance to military rule’.         Without undermining Suu Kyi’s greatness, we can also see the role of circumstances and the times in creating a great personality.

Suu Kyi is a product and a necessity of the age in which she is placed. We, Indians, very well know her tools non-violence, peaceful resistance. Ghosh realizes how popular this frail lady is. She held rallies at her residence. She answered questions ranging from food and health to politics and literature. The only reason how the army succeeded in grabbing power for so long is its wide and deep surveillance system. Suu Kyi is meek, conciliatory and patient. But she is not weak. Her firm belief that sooner or later, the army rule would go is amazing. So, like so much of Ghosh’s work, this part of the essay presents a self-contained micro-history of a group, which can also be read as a metonym for a larger global debate.       It holds a mirror up to late-twentieth-century cultural theory on the nation state, which both reflects and reverses commonly held assumptions when it suggests that in the case of the Kanneni the historical borders are probably best left unaltered.

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