Appealing to Our Better Nature

Amitav Ghosh’s novels— The Shadow Lines, The Glass Palace, the Ibis trilogy—were always things of delight. We savoured his prose while losing ourselves in the expanse of the worlds he had imagined.

- Shreevatsa Nevatia

It was The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, published in 2016, that introduced us to a new Ghosh. No longer content to simply invent new worlds, Ghosh was urging his fellow writers to join him on a mission—the forging of a literature that will not just try and understand our reality, but one that might even better it. His 2019 novel, Gun Island, was a step in that direction.

Earlier this year, Ghosh released Jungle Nama, the verse adaptation of a Bengali folktale. Set in the Sundarbans, the book cautioned against human greed and excess. His latest, The Nutmeg’s Curse, employs a scholarly non-fiction framework to further those warnings. In telling the story of how Europeans robbed the Indonesian Banda Islands of its nutmeg, Ghosh shows us how colonialism exploited human life and nature, reducing both to inert resources. As he joins the dots between imperialism, capitalism and climate change, he demonstrates just how destructive a mechanistic view of the earth proves to be. The author explained his thoughts to Reader’s Digest.

The nutmeg doesn’t just look like a planet, it is also a stand-in for it. Given the hyper-nationalism and individualism of today, how hard has it been to try and begin a ‘planetary discourse’?