A Lifetime Of Reflection

In a rare interview, India’s greatest writer tells HT Brunch what gets his goat.

- Ananya Ghosh

IT’S 2017, and Amitav Ghosh is entering his 31st year as a published author – quite a milestone in the life of a non-pulp writer. (His first book, The Circle of Reason, was published in 1986.) Perhaps that’s why he was recently honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Tata Literature Live! festival. His millions of fans in India and around the world, however, point out that they’re expecting many more books from their favourite author, thank you, so perhaps a lifetime award might have been a bit premature. Yet, at this juncture of his literary career – one that in the barren, pre-liberalisation days of 1986, he’d never thought he’d have – he’s a bit mystified by what’s happening in the world of the arts. Specifically, Ghosh is wondering why, despite the clear and present danger of climate change, few writers are focusing on the subject at all.

ALWAYS TAKE THE WEATHER WITH YOU

Ghosh’s own non-fiction work on the issue, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, published last year, is still a bestseller. But as he points out, though there are quite a few books available on nature, very few say much about the biggest danger the earth has been in since the dinosaurs were wiped out several millennia ago.

“Climate change is the greatest crisis that human beings, as a species, have ever faced,” says Ghosh. “Yet it is largely absent from the arts. I think this raises many serious questions.”