In a Land Far From Home

"Ali was a polyglot and lived a peripatetic life. He also opened up a whole new genre of writing in Bengali, which was non-fiction prose that resembled ‘storytelling’ in the sense that Walter Benjamin writes of the Russian writer Nikolai Leskov in his classic essay on modern literature, “The Storyteller”. In fact the only work of literature that Ali every translated into Bengali, that I know of, was Leskov’s novella, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk . Ali was one of the most erudite Bengali writers of his generation. He had a PhD in Comparative Religion from Bonn, had taught all over the world, and spoke over a dozen languages. But no matter what subject he wrote about, whether it was a war in Afghanistan or German philology, it seemed like he was just a guy telling you a story over a cup of tea at a cafe. In fact one of my favourite short pieces by Ali is an essay on the city of Cairo, where he had lived and taught, told entirely as an account of the happenings of the characters and conversations in one Cairo cafe. I learned a lot from him. His classic book, Deshe Bideshe (In a Land Far from Home) is about his stint in Kabul in the 1920s during King Amanullah’s rule. It shows you a whole alien society but its also fun to read and extremely funny. I haven’t read the translation, but I hope it’s good. Amitav Ghosh openly acknowledges his debt to Ali in writing In an Antique Land , which is his genre-defying travelogue on Egypt. In an Antique Land, and Ghosh’s early novel Shadow Lines , which is set in Calcutta and deals with Partition, both had a significant impact on me as a writer. So the Ali influence comes directly and also in this diffuse way through Indian English literature."