Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma by Amitav Ghosh (Illustrated Hardcover)

Description

Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma (1998) is made up of three parts: the two longish travel-essays of the book’s title and a shorter Cambodian piece, “Stories in Stones”. Ghosh’s capacity to find patterns in apparently unconnected events is at its best in “Dancing in Cambodia”, which links the 1906 visit of Cambodia’s King Sisowath, his entourage, and a troupe of Cambodian classical dancers, to France, with the recent history of the country decimated by the Khmer Rouge Revolution. Ghosh interviews a number of figures who provide living testimony to the interconnectedness of these two narratives. They include a famous dancer, Chea Samy, who has first-hand knowledge of King Sisowath and his daughter Princess Soumphady as a result of having been taken to the royal palace in 1925, at the age of six, to be trained in classical dance under the supervision of the Princess. She is also – and the matter-of-fact manner in which Ghosh records this makes the revelation all the more chilling – Pol Pot’s sister-in-law. Palace revolution and the French connection are motifs that run throughout the essay.