A walk on the wild side with Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh's new collection of essays and letters is marred by verbose writing and thematic incoherence

- Rahul Jacob

In the opening essay of Wild Fictions, which looks at migration through an altogether original prism, Amitav Ghosh observes that illegal immigration is often not by the destitute, but usually by people who have the means to pay for airfares and agents.

Ghosh quotes a report from National Public Radio, the US radio channel, which interviewed a Cameroonian immigrant to Madrid who confirmed that he was neither starving nor persecuted. He had migrated out of wanderlust. For me, these passages were both insightful and rang true. On a recent trip to Auckland, I had wondered why so many Uber drivers from India seemed to be from Punjab and on occasion Gujarat and indeed why India, often touted as a rising economic power, is the largest source of illegal immigration to the US after Mexico and Salvador, with some 15,000 being deported on military planes this month.

But Ghosh's essay has other profound insights. Smartphones and streetsmarts allow traffickers and migrants to outsmart developed world governments. Befitting the author of novels that empathetically dealt with indentured labour, he makes the point that, in the 19th century, the colonial state "knew everything" about the workers they shipped overseas: "It was the state that decided where, when and how they would travel," he writes. "The asymmetry of information has now been completely reversed."