The End of the World As We Knew It

Renowned Indian writer Amitav Ghosh was awarded the 2024 Erasmus Prize for his powerful writing on climate change. Ghosh's 2004 novel, The Hungry Tide, set in the Sundarbans, was one of the early works of fiction by an Indian writer to chronicle the continuing saga of environmental degradation.

In his Ibis trilogy, Ghosh delved into the ecology and economy of colonial times, dissecting the imperial forces that shaped an unequal world. In The Great Derangement (2016), he explored the history and politics of climate change, and its links to colonialism. His recently released collection, Wild Fictions, features essays written over the last 25 years, in which he bears witness to a crucial rupture of time. Ghosh continues to "imagine the unthinkable" in his writing, preparing us to deal with a future that is deeply disrupted by climate change. He spoke to Vineetha Mokkil about the reasons for the planetary crisis and the need to take action without giving in to despair

As a keen observer of the planetary crisis do you have hope for humankind?

I don't believe in the hope and doom binary. There is a certain future coming up that's going to be thoroughly disruptive. It won't be anything like the world that we knew or the one that we are in now. For example, when I was growing up, the skies were beautifully clear over Calcutta at this time of year, the air was relatively clean. It was completely different. But the end of the world as we knew it doesn't mean the end of the world per se. We will have to learn to live with a new kind of world. And even if the future is profoundly disrupted, as we now know it will be, we have to carry on doing what we can. We should address these issues not because we think we can fix them and make everything all right, but because it's our duty. What we in our part of the world call 'karma' and 'dharma'.

Is this 'the time of monsters', when the old world is dying and the new world is struggling to be born?