In the current climate of booming Indian fiction, six-time novelist, Amitav Ghosh, is interviewed on Guernica. His internationalist perspective comes from a background in journalism and his PhD in social anthropology from Oxford, all working in conjunction to uniquely inform his writing.
“What does an anthropologist do, really? You just go and talk to people, then at the end of the day you write down what you see. So what it really does is trains you to observe, and it trains you to listen to the ways that people speak. So it’s really a very important thing to teach yourself: to observe, as a writer. And I think basically that was where I learned that. The other thing was that I also read a lot when I was there, and that also very influenced me.”
