As world burns, India's Amitav Ghosh writes for the future

Indian writer Amitav Ghosh has long chronicled the entangled histories of empire, trade and migration.

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But his recent work focuses on what he considers the most urgent concern: the accelerating unravelling of the natural world and the moral legacy left for the future. Author of “The Great Derangement”, “The Glass Palace” and the forthcoming “Ghost-Eye”, Ghosh speaks bluntly about our headlong rush towards disaster while treating the Earth as an inert resource rather than a living world.

“Sadly, instead of shifting course, what we're actually doing is accelerating towards the abyss,” he said from a bookshop in New Delhi. “It’s like people have lost their minds.” “We're hurtling down that path of extractivism,” he said. “Greenwashing rhetoric has been completely adopted by politicians. And they've become very skilled at it.” His latest novel, a mystery about reincarnation, also touches on ecological crisis, with the “ghost-eye” of its title symbolising the ability to perceive both visible and invisible alternatives.