AMITAV Ghosh, author of books such as The Hungry Tide and The Glass Palace visited Dhaka in February to give a series of readings and lectures. In an exclusive interview with New Age, he talks about the inevitable failure of the Iraq invasion, the absence of liberty and freedom of speech in the United States, and the fallacy that the Imperial Project is a thing of the past. Excerpts:
   
   In your essay published in the New Yorker in the wake of the US invasion of Iraq, you spoke about the concept of non-violence as a more successful means of resisting oppression, citing the example of the first Indian revolution in 1857 and the path of constitutionalism that the anti-colonial movement adopted afterwards. Do you feel that way even now, given that it is the Iraqi freedom fighters who have been most successful in resisting the US invasion?
   I actually wrote that essay before the invasion of Iraq, and I could see even then that it was going to be an absolute catastrophe, it was perfectly clear that it was a catastrophe in the making. And I must say that it was such a strange experience for me to write that piece, because when I sent it to the editor of the New Yorker, who is one of the most intelligent men in America, he called me and said ‘oh its wonderful’, and ‘we want to run it’... Then…I don’t know what happened, three days later he called me and he said, ‘we do want to run your piece but we want to put a paragraph in front of it which will say that the analogy of this article does not work because America is not like the Empires of the past, and the reason is that America is not acting in its own self interests’.
   It was such an astonishing thing for me! For days we argued over this, he wanted me to allow this paragraph and I said, ‘No, I won’t change the language…’ And they did publish it because they probably thought that it would be less trouble, but after that they have never published me again.
   
   What do you think made him change
   his mind?
   What I’m fairly sure of now is that, at that point the White House and the Pentagon were obviously watching the media very very closely, so I think someone got to him. I think he got a call over the weekend saying ‘we shouldn’t run this’ and in a way I don’t even blame him: it’s astonishing for people who weren’t there then, and for those of us who were, the degree to which there was a semi-authoritarian control of the press at that point. To me it was just utterly shocking how the media completely fell in line, the way in which they were able to manipulate news-making, because for better or for worse, many of us have believed that some sort of freedom of expression exists in America. And so indeed it does under most circumstances but it was just an astonishing discovery to see how easily that could be manipulated. There is nothing particularly angry or controversial about [that piece]: I am not a fool, I know what is sayable at what point in time and what I was saying in a very guarded way was that ‘you will never have any success here, because you don’t have an interlocutor,’ and everything I have said has come to be true.
   
   Does it make you reconsider how we think of free speech and the freedom of expression as being pillars of the US democracy?
   I think free speech and freedom of expression must be the centrepiece of any democratic state-building. And clearly by those standards, America fell short. We had more freedom of speech in India then, than was available in America.
   
   To come back to the original question: is non-violence and constitutionalism a way out in Iraq’s freedom struggle? Given that it is Iraq’s armed resistance that has been largely responsible for the failure of the US mission, does it make you rethink it?
   Not at all. The attack of Iraq happened in a context in which, both in America and England, there was a much broader rereading of Imperial history, where they began to cite India as the great example of Imperialism having been successful. So it was against that context that I was arguing, that in India there was this massive uprising in 1857, where they invented these concepts of ‘Shock and Awe’ and so on and so forth, and Indians came up with a different strategy of resistance to this: [in my essay] I was saying that this different strategy of resistance was not going to emerge in Iraq, ‘you’re not going to have constitutionalist or any kind of non-violent strategy of resistance happening; instead what you are going to have was violent resistance that you will not be able to withstand, it will overcome you’. I was, in effect, predicting defeat, and that is what happened. I don’t think Iraq is capable of producing a non-violent movement, I don’t think it will.
   
   Is that a uniquely Iraqi problem, or is it defined by the oppressors?
   I’ve spent a lot of time in the Middle East and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the Middle East, and it’s an unfortunate thing that the political reflexes in the Middle East are often such that they almost seem to be inclined towards the violent solution. That other forms of resistance and organisation are possible is something they don’t seem to explore. It’s hard for me to believe, for example, that if all the Arab nations were able to work together and create a consensus on what sort of project they want to put in place, in Palestine for one, that they couldn’t bring it about today. Any Palestinian would tell you the same thing. The thing about non-violence is that people often think it’s the easy way, while in fact it’s the more difficult way because it takes much more organisation and grassroots work and in effect that’s what’s missing in the Middle East. So in Iraq, I don’t think the conditions exist to put together a non-violent opposition they would need, to create a successful state after this. I would also very much caution against seeing the Iraqi resistance is creating anything like a victory in Iraq, even if they manage to confound the [US] project: because victory is not defeating your enemy, its also creating the possibilities of your own success. And that is what we cannot see in Iraq for the future. When you achieve your freedom out of something utterly bloodstained and horrible, it leaves a mark upon the future, and it’s the future that pays for it.
   
   So is it the clash of civilisations? Are you saying the Middle East is culturally or religiously inclined towards violence?
   I wouldn’t see it as cultural or religious. I think the Middle East and Europe have been so closely twinned for a thousand years that, in a way, they have almost fallen into a habit of mutual resistance. From long before the Crusades, they have created their history out of mutual opposition. Contrast that with, for example, Southeast Asia, say Vietnam – which emerged out of a much more horrible conflict, whether it be with France or America. At the same time as they were fighting these battles, they were also thinking: ‘Well, what are we going to do next?’ If you go to Vietnam now, the American war is a distant memory; they’ve fought so many wars in between. But most of all, they succeeded in creating a dynamic and workable presence, so there’s a pragmatism built into it. In Malaysia as well, there is a kind of pragmatism in the way they approach the business of life. I’m not saying it is a religious thing, because it is certainly beyond religion, but within the Arab world specifically, they’ve worked themselves into a situation where so much of their energy is invested in resistance and sometimes violent opposition that they’re not able to devote as much time to thinking about how they can make the present better.
   
   But this violence is largely a product of European and US interference in that region, isn’t it? The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was a social movement until Nasser’s West-endorsed oppression transformed it into a Jihadist movement. In Algeria the Islamist parties did pursue democratic politics and became radicals only after the Europeans had the 1991 elections scrapped because the Islamists won.
   That’s exactly what I’m saying. We cannot allow ourselves to think along those lines. The moment you start thinking about the genealogy of a conflict, you’ll never escape from it again. Whatever meddling the West has done in the Middle East is not even a fraction of what they did in Vietnam or Thailand, and these countries have resurrected themselves. If you consider what was left in Vietnam, not just after the 1950s but after the 1970s, it was flattened. At that point you have two choices: one is that you can nurture your grievances and think about all that went wrong, or say ‘yes, this is what happened, and it will continue to happen, they will continue to interfere,’ because this is what they do, ‘but I have to find a way of building a world which will survive and be strong despite that’. The moment you start saying to yourself, ‘my problems arise because of Western interference’ is the moment you’re also saying ‘I’m not an agent, I have lost my own agency, and I am only acted upon’. So, in effect, all of that is true, the West does it, they will do it, and they will continue to do it, but the moment we say our destiny depends on this, we make a dramatic concession of agency, and that is where we lose the battle. For me Gandhi has always been a great inspiration, and one of the things I so admire in him is that he clearly said our movement is not to seek retribution, our movement is an order that what has happened to us in the past will not happen again. And this has been a very important part of contemporary South Asia. In fact, in India even though our grievances go back a very long way that sense of grievance does not exist because of Gandhi.
   
   But when you talk about it like that, it makes me think that Iran is, in fact, the Middle East’s Vietnam, but there is one crucial factor that they have in common to help them move on: that the revolution was successful. So is the victory, no matter how bloody, essential in learning to moving on?
   No I don’t think so. Turkey and Iran are very good examples in the way that they have been able to create functional societies, but look at South Africa, Mandela has refused to sit and nurture a grievance. In real life, when you are trying to create a society, often it’s the case that you have to compromise with your oppressor. That’s really what the Gandhian idea of Satyagraha is: that you proceed in small steps. Don’t forget that the real problem is not a snapping victory, because in history there are no such things. The real issue is what are you going to do with what you have?
   
   You’ve written about the colonial experience. How far does it go in explaining how India has a moderately successful democracy on one hand, and Pakistan is sinking deeper and deeper into an abyss of dictatorial rule?
   It always amazes me when these British apologists claim that somehow the success of democracy in India is a validation of the Imperial project. Look around the world, look at where the British Empire has been; literally case by case, you can prove that democracy is precisely least successful where they have been. Their presence was felt most heavily in Bengal, and our part of Bengal has had communist rule now for 30 years. If you actually look around the map of the British Empire South Asia, you have Burma, you have Sri Lanka, you have Bangladesh – which has had an intermittent kind of democracy, but you look at Nepal, and you look at Pakistan…in what way is there a validation of the Imperial project in what we see there? And even within India, even though I think it’s a great achievement that we have been able to hang on to our democracy, that it is so deeply rooted within us, but you also have to remember that democracy is an epiphenomenon – that there need to be other things in place that make the democracy possible. And what makes democracy possible in India is some sort of pluralism, an idea of multiculturalism. And if you look around the [Indian] subcontinent, it is exactly those places that have tried to do away with multiculturalism that have run into disaster.
   
   You pulled The Glass Palace out of the Commonwealth Prize with the words, ‘I feel that I would be betraying the spirit of my book if I were to allow it to be incorporated within that particular memorialisation of Empire that
   passes under the rubric of “the Commonwealth”.’ Yet increasingly, we do read and write in English. Is there a contradiction there?
   No I don’t think so. Look at it from another point of view: I am writing in a language and I would not be writing in that language if I didn’t feel that it could express every shade of my opinion. Included in that is my opposition to the language, and the way it has been historically used. And it’s exactly because of that I pulled my book out of the Commonwealth Prize, because what is happening within that prize is an abuse of language to call this ‘The Commonwealth’, because it wasn’t a commonwealth. Just as the Japanese, when they captured Southeast Asia called it the Greater Asian Co-prosperity Sphere, the Commonwealth is just that: it’s just a renaming of Empire…why should I put up with it? I know perfectly well what Empire was; I’m not going to allow it to be defined as a commonwealth. And that’s where one has to see the agency within the language, and say, ‘I’m going to use the language for my ends, my purposes.’ The language is a reality neither you nor I can escape, so it is for us to bend it to our purposes. So I said to the Commonwealth Foundation, if you call it the Iris Murdoch prize or the Shakespeare prize, I’ll have no objections. But when you name it after a project which is clearly for the reinvention of Empire, how can you expect me to give my assent to it: you know that the only thing I can withhold is my assent. And I say ‘no, you can’t have my assent’: it’s my duty to do that, what else am I a writer for? One of the other things about this award that I greatly dislike is that it states explicitly as its criterion that it’s going to cut out all other languages [but English], it’s deeply suspect to begin with. Most of all, I wouldn’t have been as sensitive to that issue earlier in my career, but this was for The Glass Palace which emerged from my interactions with people who were deeply involved in resisting Empire. One of the interesting things for me was to discover how people who lived within Empire allowed their own vision of themselves to be dictated by certain words. To me that became a very very important lesson of Empire. So when we say it’s just a word, it’s not just a word, even if the Commonwealth organisation stayed in place, if the word were different, I would still find it acceptable. Because in the end this is the greatest power that inheres a language – which is the power to name. Don’t forget that in the Judeo-Christian tradition that’s God’s greatest power: the power to name. And as a writer what a word does in naming and not naming, in recognising and not recognising is at the centre of my praxis: that’s more important than any other power. You know, the degree to which the invasion of Burma and the invasion of Iraq is similar defies belief. Absolutely similar, and I’m sure they’ll have absolutely the same result. After the Burmese war, the British launched an incredibly vicious campaign of extermination for years, and what did they call it – ‘The Pacification Campaign’ – exactly what we see [in Iraq]. So it’s true, Empire relives itself and it’s alive and around us.