Human nature’s pitfalls

AMITAV GHOSH, a Bengali writer of wide and sympathetic experience, has mastered the art of expressing in calm English the inexpressible. He shows readers the horrors that can befall ordinary people in the course of an ordinary day, from Myanmar to the United States and beyond.

Ghosh is a novelist -- among his works are “The Hungry Tides” and “The Glass Palace” -- and a journalist. The writings compiled in his latest book, “Incendiary Circumstances: A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times,” have been published over the last 20 years in Granta, the New Yorker, the Nation and the New Republic.

In the piece “The Town by the Sea,” his long and gentle account of the aftereffects of the 2004 tsunami on the Andaman and Nicobar islands in the Indian Ocean expresses awfulness of an overwhelming force of nature and the instinctive drive of human survivors to push back against it.

His delicate sympathy evaporates when he encounters the quarrelsome and ineffective officiousness of Indian bureaucrats who make a perfect hash of rescue and reconstruction on these islands.

Here he moves beyond the descriptive to moral observation from a nation where each village has a shrine to Mohandas K. Gandhi. (Gandhi, Ghosh observes, is to India what Freud is to the West, a background vibration that no one can ignore.)

The short, pointed essay “Imperial Temptations” looks at the infatuation some contemporary Americans have with the idea of empire. But as an Indian whose history has been shaped by the British empire and his people’s struggle against it, Ghosh has no romantic illusions about the word.

He points out mordantly that the British, using all the finesse and wisdom at their command, spent more than a couple of centuries trying to subdue and bring order to a number of places where today’s fugitive leaders of Al Qaeda are said to have taken refuge: the Yemeni port of Aden and the Pakistani cities of Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar, Quetta and Rawalpindi.

“The British dominated these cities for centuries,” he writes, “and yet the antagonism in the West that simmers in them now is greater than ever it was in 1857,” the year of a murderous uprising of Indians that was brutally put down by the British military.

Ghosh, a professor at Harvard University, is married to an American; his book is warmly dedicated to his American in-laws. So it is not surprising that he eschews anger or exasperation with U.S. attitudes and policies with which he disagrees. Yet in words whose mildness scarcely disguises their moral force, he makes pointed observations about his adopted homeland:

“As George Orwell and many other observers of imperialism have pointed out, empires imprison their rulers as well as their subjects. In today’s United States, where people are increasingly disinclined to venture beyond their borders, this has already come to pass. But perhaps, in these accelerated times, it won’t be long before most Americans will begin to dream of an escape from the imprisonment of absolute power.”

Some of Ghosh’s longer reported pieces are especially fine: He writes of Egyptians in Iraq who performed the country’s work while the Iraq-Iran war raged, of Cambodia under the reign of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, and the sinister theater of contemporary Myanmar, also known as Burma.

Yet surely it is the heritage of Gandhi that gives Ghosh’s prose its weight. In “The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi,” his piece about Indira Gandhi’s assassination on Oct. 31, 1984, he reproves himself for not having written at the time about the deep revulsion he and so many Indians felt about such violence.

“It is when we think of the world the aesthetic of indifference might bring into being,” Ghosh concludes in that essay, “that we recognize the urgency of remembering the stories we have not written.”

*

Anthony Day, a former editor of The Times editorial pages, is a regular contributor to Book Review.