By Madhusree Chatterjee, IANS,
New Delhi : Master biographer and Pulitzer prize winner Deborah Baker-Ghosh, who is now threading together the life story of an American Islamist, says she wants to delve into the experiences of Americans outside their country.
“I have been going back and forth between India and America for several years, though I live in India. I am interested in the experience that Americans have in other countries, out of their elements, outside the comforts of home, outside their sense of themselves as Americans,” Baker-Ghosh told IANS in an interview.
The mother of two, who is in her mid-fifties, is married to acclaimed writer Amitav Ghosh.
“My husband talks to me about the subcontinent and Asia, to help me understand the region. But we work separately. We rarely speak to each other about our work,” said Baker-Ghosh, who is of American origin.
She has penned the biographies of American poets Laura Riding and Allen Ginsberg in the past.
“My first book was about American poet Laura Riding. Born in a Jewish ghetto, she became an upwardly mobile poet. My second book was on poet Allen Ginsberg – he went around the world and India affected him deeply. It in turn influenced America a great deal,” Baker-Ghosh said.
The book “In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding” earned the writer a Pulitzer prize while the “The Blue Hand: That Beats in India”, 2008, was received to wide critical acclaim.
She is now writing on American Islamist Maryam Jameelah in “The Convert: The Parable of Islam and America”. It is the story of how Margaret (Peggy) Marcus, an American Jew, stumbles upon Islam and becomes a hardliner.
The protagonist converted to the faith as Maryam Jameelah and endeared herself to the co-founder of Jamaat-e-Islami Maulana Abul Ala Maududi in Pakistan to become his “adopted child”. Jameelah authored nearly 30 books to support her pro-Islamist stand.
Deborah Baker-Ghosh captures the odyssey of Jameelah through her correspondence with her parents.
“In the spring of 2007, I found Jameelah’s letters to her parents and her papers in the general archive of the New York Public Library – the mainstay of my life as a writer. I wanted to know how her papers came to the library. Coincidentally, Jameelah found Islam in the oriental division of the New York public library,” Baker-Ghosh said.
Jameelah converted to Islam in 1961, a year before she went to Pakistan in 1962, the writer said. “She entered Pakistan at a time when Maududi had left his major battles behind,” Baker-Ghosh said.
In her books on Islam vs West, Jameelah “basically argued why Islamic civilization was superior to the Western civilization”, the writer said. “Basically, that was why she came to be known as the voice of Islamic critique in the West and of America in Pakistan,” Baker-Ghosh said.
Jameelah was one of the few women who argued that there existed a clash of civilizations, she said.
“Her letters to her parents were very detailed. They spoke of life in Pakistan, Maududi as the great Islamic leader, as the father of nine children and his daily writings. She expressed surprise how an American Jew could hold the same ideas on Islam as Maududi held. I wondered why he invited this woman to Pakistan and treated her as his daughter when he had nine children,” Baker-Ghosh said.
The biography will be published in 2011.
(Madhusree Chatterjee can be contacted at [email protected])