“A bare two years after Vasco da Gama’s voyage a Portuguese fleet led by Pedro Alvarez Cabral arrived on the Malabar coast. Cabral delivered a letter from the king of Portugal to the Samudri (Samudra-raja or Sea-king), the Hindu ruler… — Amitav Ghosh Copy Share Image
“She had talked of this at length with Kadambari—Mrs. Dutt: Why should it not be possible for these freedoms to be universally available for women everywhere? And Mrs. Dutt had said that of course, this was one of the great benefits of British rule in India; that it had given women rights and protections that they’d never had before. At… — Amitav Ghosh Copy Share
“How was it that no one had ever told her that it was not love itself, but its treacherous gatekeepers which made the greatest… — Amitav Ghosh Copy Share Image
The government to you is what God is to agnostics--only to be invoked when your own well being is at stake. — Amitav Ghosh Copy Share Image
“There was a time when the Bengali language was an angry flood trying to break down her door. She would crawl into a closet and lock herself in, stuffing her ears to shut out those sounds. But a door was no defense against her parents' voices: it was in that language that they fought, and the sounds of their quarrels… — Amitav Ghosh Copy Share
“[C]apitalist trade and industry cannot thrive without access to military and political power. State interventions have always been critical to its advancement.” — Amitav Ghosh Copy Share Image
“He said: 'You don't understand. We never thought that we were being used to conquer people. Not at all: we thought the opposite. We were told that we were freeing those people. That is what they said—that we were going to set those people free from their bad kings or their evil customs or some such thing. We believed it… — Amitav Ghosh Copy Share
“already know by instinct we're not comfortably at home in our translated world.” — Amitav Ghosh Copy Share Image
“She remembered a word he'd often used, karuna-one of the Buddha's words, Pali for compassion, for the immanence of all living things in each other, for the attraction of life for its likeness. A time will come, he had said to the girls, when you too will discover what this word karuna means, and from that moment on, your lives… — Amitav Ghosh Copy Share
“And now, indeed, everything began to look new, unexpected, full of surprises. I had a book in my hands to while away the time, and it occurred to me that in a way a landscape is not unlike a book--a compilation of pages that overlap without any two ever being the same. People open the book according to their taste… — Amitav Ghosh Copy Share
“Contrary to what I might like to think,my life is not guided by reason;it is ruled rather by the inertia of habitual motion.” — Amitav Ghosh Copy Share Image
“Why don’t they complain?" "They do sometimes. But usually there's nothing in particular to complain about. Take the case of Hardy's appointment: Who was to blame? Hardy himself? The men? It certainly wasn't the CO. But that's how it always is. Whenever one of us doesn't get an appointment or a promotion, there's always a mist of regulations that makes… — Amitav Ghosh Copy Share
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