When I sit down to write, I need to visualise, I need to be able to see in my mind what I'm writing about.

This book had to be dedicated to Lila. I wanted to write about a young girl like her who comes to India yet cannot even speak the language.

The Indian-born novelist, journalist and professor, revisited familiar shores on the eve of the release of his latest title, The Hungry Tide. Chilling out with close friends and family in Goa, in between bouts of tennis and squash, he allowed voracious reader, Rahul Bose, rare glimpses into his muse and mind.

Author, Amitav Ghosh in conversation with the actor-director

I first read Amitav Ghosh in 1993. I was producing a radio programme, Between The Lines, which explored the creative connection between books and music. I would read passages from one of my favourite books and play the music I thought captured the mood of the piece preceding it. Amitav's Circle Of Reason fascinated me. Its travel across different worlds; Aloo, possibly Amitav's most lovable protagonist, the impossible lumps in Aloo's head and how phrenology is used to explain them. The gliding dance between different geographical spaces and the more personal stories couched inside was superbly controlled, gentle, funny and poignant - things I had felt most about all of Amitav's novels.

We met for the first time more than a year ago and since then our peripatetic lifestyles have, astonishingly, intersected more than once. It's always been fascinating talking to him, always been fun. This conversation took place in Goa where Amitav and his family were holidaying. They were staying at photographer, Dayanita Singh's house - a glorious, stately, old Goan home that had an almost surreal resonance with the Italian villa in the The English Patient. But that's another story. Our chat, however, took place in between bouts of tennis (Amitav's a tennis fanatic) and squash, in the silent, pristine, air-conditioned confines of the Taj Holiday Village in deference to the demands of the Dictaphone.

RAHUL BOSE: Clearly, there is an anthropological slant in the stuff that you write about. It comes from a scholarly perspective that not just anyone can have; yet there is so much in the micro so to speak - in relationships, in characters, that is so emotionally nuanced - this merging of the head and the heart…

AMITAV GHOSH: I found anthropology very interesting in many ways, especially because it allowed me to travel which has always been very fundamental to my work. But, I think I also found it (anthropology) very limiting. You can learn about things in anthropology, but people are absent…human beings, characters are absent, and that's why I was very drawn towards writing fiction, which is, and always has been, my first love. As soon as I finished my PhD, literally from the day I finished, I started writing fiction. For me, it's the most comprehensive form. You can put everything in it. It can contain anthropology, it can contain history, geography, ecology, you name it.

RB: Do you think it's an effortless mix while writing, or is there a battle between the anthropological side and the deeply personal side…

AG: At this point in my life, and I would say this has been true for me for at least ten or 12 years, anthropology has not been part of my mind at all. I mean I don't even think about it really…but you know, things interest me, like when writing The Hungry Tide, little snippets of history really interested me - like the history of the small town called Canning, how did it come to be, what happened to it. So in that sense, yes, I'm always drawn by these little resonances that lie behind people's lives.

RB: And you start with a little bit of trivia about a place, an age. There is a little thread that you pick up…like the story of the single isolated revolt in The Hungry Tide and then you can slowly see a flower blooming but, I don't think the flower would have bloomed if it hadn't been for Fokir, Kanai and Piya, the vibrant characters in the novel.

AG: You're absolutely right. The same facts put together in a compendium of information is boring. I mean, who cares?

RB: The book is dedicated to Lila, your daughter. Any significance?

AG: Oh, this book had to be dedicated to Lila. I wanted to write about a young girl like her who comes to India yet cannot even speak the language. How does she communicate? What language does she find?

RB: The whole idea of how Fokir saves Piya…you didn't write it with a manipulative edge to it. It was…elliptical…and that shy indirectness of something that is so evocative…that's so tender, that's the killing part…

AG: As a writer, the best thing I can ever hear is that people have been moved by my book…moved either to tears or to laughter, I mean, that's so important, such a crucial part of what one does as a writer, so I'm really, really happy to hear that.

RB: Burma, Egypt, Cambodia, Algeria, England, India…in the novels…any special affinity to any of these countries that resonates even now?

AG: (Laughs) You know, in the end it's true that I have been very interested in discovering other parts of the world, but I tell you, frankly, in the end what really holds me is India, and even more than that, it is Bengal. I find that my mind is in the end, completely sort of, so engaged with Bengal and with India, really, that everything else pales…

RB: There's something about The Hungry Tide that is so deep and so true, your writing about the Sunderbans…there's something about it that is so, so beyond anything else…

AG: I'm very interested in what you say about The Hungry Tide, because you're an actor and a director. You're in films, you live in Mumbai and that's very much one side of India, you know, this sort of, throbbing popular culture, this sort of exciting, changing, dynamic India and that's never what I write about.

What I've been writing about for years and years is really the parts of India that are kind of outside the public eye. Like, if you went from Mumbai to the Sunderbans, to a village in the Sunderbans, it's hard to believe that you're in the same country…it's in another epoch of time almost, where you really have to go out there, and all you can eat is crab, there's nothing else, people have no rice, almost…I mean, just the level of deprivation that you see there…something that I think people who live on the west coast, in Mumbai, cannot imagine…it's literally unimaginable. It's interesting to me that you feel so drawn to it.

RB: It's the Bengali side of me…. The sweet sadness I feel when I'm in Kolkata…its people, the landscape, the humanity…driving through North Bengal…I certainly feel the tug for sure. Is it in the songs that Aparna (Sen) and Konkona (Sen) used to sing while driving back from shooting (Mr And Mrs Iyer) in Jalpaiguri? Songs that would immediately resonate within me?

This is a good time to ask you a question that I find inevitable. Why have none of your books been made into movies?

AG: Every now and again, people have been interested in making movies out of my books. (Laughs shyly.) Most directors have been drawn to The Shadow Lines. Aparna (Sen) wanted to make it at one point. Calcutta Chromosome is the other one...actually the option is out on that. An Italian filmmaker is working on it.

RB: Do you feel cinema has been an intrinsic part of your creative life?

AG: Cinema has been a very powerful influence on me, and I think it's not just on me but on my entire generation of writers…Satyajit Ray, I think more than almost any other artist. Ray profoundly influenced me. In some way what you're saying is absolutely right, you know, when I sit down to write I need to visualise, I need to be able to see in my mind what I'm writing about. I think that's perhaps what you're referring to.

RB: Last night you were talking about how writers were once at the centre of society and how their position has moved...

AG: The 20th century was the century of novels. Novelists were very much at the centre of a culture. A person like (Ernest) Hemingway so much defined American life in the way (Rabindranath) Tagore defined Indian life. But all that's really changed. Writers have slowly been displaced by the moving image - television, films, in the last 20-30 years.

Today, movies occupy the similar position that novels did earlier. I often notice when one is sitting to dinner with six writers you talk about books, but not everybody will have read the same books. But everybody will have seen the same movies and you'll have an argument or a debate will follow. Yet even though our culture thinks that movies have taken over, the fact is that's very far from being true. Movies themselves are often led by books, whether it's Harry Potter, or The English Patient….

RB: I think Ray would have, at least I think he would have, been the ideal director to make a movie out of one of your books, because there is that same mix of head and heart in his work, the same held-back quality to show an achingly tender moment, the constant eye on the larger picture, the underlying comment… there are so many parallels in the way he approached his work and the way you write.

AG: That's so well put, because it's exactly that. I mean when you see a movie like Shatranj Ke Khiladi. The way that it begins by setting up the historical circumstance…it's such a profound commentary on Indian history and its relationship with colonialism. Similarly, you know I think my interest in anthropology is somewhere derived from Ray because, you know in Agantuk the central figure is an anthropologist. Ray was very drawn to anthropology. Even as early as Apur Sansar you see the boy running out of the house with an African mask.

RB: I want to get back to The Hungry Tide. In the hands of say, Stanley Kubrick, this might have been made into a movie of contradictory psychological impulses, or Francis Coppola might have explored the Sunderbans as an area, a heart of darkness. But whenever I think about the novel I keep thinking of the oscillation between the past and the present. The character, Nirmal, is from another time. But there is an echo of that time in Kanai's discoveries in the present. Then you have the almost hypnotic chemistry between Piya and Fokir, two people from different ends of the earth, literally and figuratively.

AG: When I thought of this book I was in the Sunderbans. I was on a boat and the idea suddenly came to me. I was so captivated by the image of Piya, Fokir and his son on a boat. And the book keeps returning to it.

RB: And what keeps happening is an almost seamless meeting between the two, Piya and Fokir. It doesn't seem like it's been contrived by the writer at all.

AG: Thank you. I can't really think of anything to say. The images that captivated me have also communicated themselves to you. And I do think I would be very interested to see its transition into a film, and if it happens, I hope you'll be in it!

RB: (Laughs) That's the reason for this interview, actually!

AG and RB then went on to play squash and tennis. RB was very happy with the result in squash. As for the outcome of the tennis match…RB was happy to drown his sorrows in many beers in that house of photographer, Dayanita Singh with the almost surreal echoes of the villa in The English Patient.

[ Multifaceted Rahul Bose, who has written and directed the film, Everybody Says I'm Fine, pens a fortnightly column for the news magazine, Tehelka. A passionate rugby player, Bose's White Noise is due for release soon. He also works with the Mumbai-based NGO, Akshara and is on the advisory board of the New York-based NGO, Breakthrough.]