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Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956 and raised and educated in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Iran, Egypt, India, and the United Kingdom, where he received his Ph.D. in social anthropology from Oxford. Acclaimed for fiction, travel writing, and journalism, his books include The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In an Antique Land, and Dancing in Cambodia. Ghosh has won France’s Prix Medici Etranger, India’s prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the Pushcart Prize. He now divides his time between Harvard University, where he is a visiting professor, and his homes in India and Brooklyn, New York.

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Incendiary Circumstances

A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our TimesBy Amitav Ghosh

Houghton Mifflin Company

Copyright © 2007 Amitav Ghosh
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780618872213
THE TOWN BY THE SEA
2005

The Andaman and Nicobar Islands are one of those quadrants of the globe
where political and geological fault lines run on parallel courses. Politically
the islands have been administered from the Indian mainland ever since their
annexation by the British; today they are Indian "Union Territories," ruled
directly by New Delhi. But geologically the chain stands just beyond the
edge of the Indian tectonic plate. Stretching through 435 miles of the Bay of
Bengal, the islands are held aloft by a range of undersea mountains that
stand guard over the abyssal deep of the Sunda Trench. Of the 572 islands,
only 36 are inhabited: the Andamans is the name given to the northern part of
the archipelago, while the Nicobars lie to the south. At their uppermost point,
the Andamans are just a few dozen miles from Burma's Coco Islands,
infamous for their prisons, while the southernmost edge of the Nicobars is
only 125 miles from the ever-restless region of Aceh. This part of the chain is
so positioned that the tsunami of December 26, 2004, hit it just minutes after
it hit the coastline of northern Sumatra.
Despite the hundreds of miles of water that separate the
Andamans from the Indian mainland, many of the relief camps in Port Blair,
the islands' capital city, have the appearance of miniaturized portraits of the
nation. Only a small percentage of their inmates are indigenous to the
islands; the others are settlers from different parts of the mainland: Bengal,
Orissa, Punjab, Andhra Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh. If this comes as a
surprise, it is because the identity of the islands—and indeed the alibi for the
present form of their rule—lies in an administrative conception of
the "primitive" that dates back to the British Raj. The idea that these islands
are somehow synonymous with backwardness is energetically promoted in
today's Port Blair. Hoardings depicting naked "primitives" line the streets, and
I heard of a sign that instructs onlookers to "Love Your Primitive Tribe." In
most parts of the mainland, these images would long since have been
defaced or torn down, for the sheer offensiveness of their depictions; not so
on these islands, which are more a projection of India than a part of its body
politic. As with many colonies, they represent a distended and compressed
version of the mother country, in its weaknesses and strengths, its
aspirations and failings. Over the past two weeks, both the fault lines that
underlie the islands seem suddenly to have been set in motion: it is as if the
hurried history of an emergent nation had collided here with the deep time of
geology.
The mainland settlers in the camps are almost unanimous in
describing themselves as having come to the islands in search of land and
opportunity. Listening to their stories, it is easy to believe that most of them
found what they were looking for: here, in this far-flung chain of islands, tens
of thousands of settlers were able to make their way out of poverty, into the
ranks of the country's expanding middle class. But on the morning of
December 26, this hard-won betterment became a potent source of
vulnerability, for to be middle-class, in India or anywhere else, is to be kept
afloat on a life raft of paper: identity cards, licenses, ration cards, school
certificates, checkbooks, certificates of life insurance, and receipts for fixed
deposits. It was the particular nature of this disaster that it targeted not just
the physical being of the victims but also the proof of the survivors' identities.
An earthquake would have left remnants to rummage through; floods and
hurricanes would have allowed time for survivors to safeguard their essential
documents on their persons. The tsunami, in the suddenness of its
onslaught, allowed for no preparations. Not only did it destroy the survivors'
homes and decimate their families; it also robbed them of all the evidentiary
traces of their place in the world.
On January 1, 2005, I went to visit the Nirmala School Camp in
Port Blair. The camp, like the school in which it is housed, is run by the
Catholic Church, and it is presided over by a mild-mannered young priest by
the name of Father Johnson. On the morning of my visit, Father Johnson was
at the center of an angry altercation. The refugees had spent the past three
days waiting anxiously in the camp, and in that time no one had asked them
where they wanted to go or when; none of them had any idea of what was to
become of them, and the sense of being adrift had brought them to the end of
their tether. The issue was neither deprivation nor hardship —there was
enough food, and they had all the clothes they needed. It was the uncertainty
that was intolerable. In the absence of any other figure of authority, they had
laid siege to Father Johnson: When would they be allowed to move on?
Where would they be going?
Father Johnson could give them no answers, for he was, in his
own way, just as helpless as they were. The officials in charge of the relief
effort had told him nothing about their plans for the refugees. Now time was
running out: the schools in which the camps were located were to reopen on
January 3. Father Johnson had no idea how his school was to function with
more than 1600 refugees camping on the grounds.
Realizing at last that Father Johnson knew no more than they did,
the inmates reduced their demands to a single modest query: could they be
provided with some paper and a few pens? No sooner had this request been
met than another uproar broke out; those who'd been given possession of
pens and paper now became the center of the siege. Crowding together,
people began to push and jostle, clamoring to have their names written down.
Identity was now no more than a matter of assertion, and nothing seemed to
matter more than to create a trail of paper. On this depended the eventual
reclamation of a life.
Standing on the edges of the crowd was a stocky thirty-year-old
man by the name of Obed Tara. He was, he told me, from the island of Car
Nicobar and a member of an indigenous group whose affiliations, in language
and ethnicity, lie with the Malay peoples to the east. But he himself was a
naik (corporal) in the Tenth Madras Regiment of the Indian Army and was
fluent in Hindi. On December 10 he had set off from Calcutta, where his unit
was currently stationed, to travel to Car Nicobar. Like most Nicobarese
people, he was a Christian, a member of the Anglican Church of North India,
and he'd been looking forward to celebrating Christmas at home. But this
year there was something else to look forward to as well: he was to be
married on the first day of the New Year—the very day of our conversation.
On December 26, despite the celebrations and merrymaking of
the night before, Obed Tara, like most members of his extended family, rose
early in order to attend a Boxing Day service at their church. Their house was
in the seafront settlement of Malacca, just a few hundred yards from the
water. Their neighborhood was the commercial heart of the township, and
their house was...