The Circle Of Reason: Review

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Amitav Ghosh marked his debut as a creative artist with The Circle of Reason, which was published by Hamish Hamilton, London in 1986. Its French edition won for him the Prix Medici estranger, one of France's most important literary awards. Ghosh's hero Alu behaves as an odd inert hero, allowing the other subservient characters to initiate and carry on with the action while he himself lies in a dormant stage as an onlooker.

It is not unjust of Amitav Ghosh in portraying the truth to nature recidivism of the colonial rulers. Himself a victim of disastrous events of partition of Bengal, Lalpukur in the hands of Ghosh is artistically woven not nebulous to show the nefarious British tactfulness. Ghosh here is largely writing for a non-Indian audience about Indian situation and thus simply says that it is impossible for one who has not traversed through Indian socialism in 1960's and 1970's to understand his theme. He seems to suggest that one cannot apply rational solutions to problems while ignoring the history of the people you are practicing on. Indian socialism, he says, has always been more international, less rooted in its own soil, than European socialism-which perhaps partly accounts for its evident failure to turn India into a socialist country.

Ghosh has imposed in his novel a form- like a raga, he asserts-by dividing the novel into sections entitled Satwa: Reason ; Rajas: Passion; Tamas : Death. As the novel progresses Alu, the governing metaphor, comes alive only in the company of other live images and other active, associative metaphors/contexts. The characters use their powers like the magic wand of a sorcerer to conjure up weird things even as they fiercely attempt to grapple with reality. In the first section "Satwa: Reason", Ghosh sees the alienation of science from rationalism in our society in all its glorious irony.

In this section the lines of conflict between reason and bigotry are drawn with perfect precision. The first section, which ends in a violent sweep, paves the way of the ensuing section. " Rajas: Passion" where we come across a cross-section of Indians, all with no passports or work permits sailing under one roof in a fictional Gulf country named al-Ghazira. This section depicts the decaying and dying civilization, trapped in the vicious circle of materialism. The third section "Tamas: Death" sees the death of Reason where Alu finding no use in the practical utility of "Life of Pasteur" offers it to the pyre of Kulfi and also finds his hands to be suffering from a little muscular atrophy which is nothing serious .

Ghosh attempts a tentative link among the three sections with the debate at the end between Mrs Verma and Dr Mishra after the death of Kulfi. In the last section Ghosh surpasses all by his sentiments being apported with his fellow readers. Everyone cherishes the idea of dying in his native land.

By disallowing absolutes Ghosh is able to break free from the constraints of conventional realism. His prose is less lyricised and more responsive to the specificity of experience. Despite a repeated pattern of achievement and loss in all the three parts of the novel, there is no apparent cynicism and its stories create the impression that the urge to mould a better life remains undefeated. By borrowing his title from mathematics, Ghosh intentionally seems to underline precisely the inadequacy and insularity of a particular concept continually open to challenge and controversies. In respect of its protagonist Alu it can be said that if his creative abilities form the centre of his being, his strange obsession completes the circle.