SHARJAH – India’s highest literary award winner, Amitav Ghosh, spoke about his latest book, his struggles as a writer during Covid-19, and his concerns about climate change on the penultimate day of the 40th Sharjah International Book Fair (SIBF).
“Sounds of ambulances piercing through my apartment walls in Brooklyn (at the height of Covid-19) was not the perfect stage for me to write fiction,” said Ghosh while talking about his latest book The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis published only last month.
“It began with a trip to the Banda Islands. It was amazing in ways I couldn’t immediately absorb, but all the work began afterward when I got home,” said the winner of the 2018 winner of the Jnanpith award for his body of work in English that includes best-sellers like The Calcutta Chromosome (1995), The Glass Palace (2000) and Gun Island (2019).
“I had to address questions I encountered (on climate change), and the effects I saw for the first time first-hand were closer home,” said Ghosh while talking about how his book on the climate crisis, The Great Derangement, is inspired by the situation in the Sunderbans in his native West Bengal – a mangrove area in the Bay of Bengal delta formed by the confluence of three rivers where, he said, rising sea levels were “gobbling up islands” in front of his eyes.
In Ghosh’s latest book – a successor to The Great Derangement – he finds the origins of our contemporary climate crisis in violent exploitation of the natural environment.
“Nutmeg and mace are endemic to the Banda Islands – a volcanic group of ten small volcanic islands in the Banda Sea in the Indonesian province of Maluku – thanks to their fertile volcanic soil. Because of the nutmeg tree, Banda became the center of the world and the Bandanese were very prosperous until the colonialists entered, plundered and left,” said Ghosh while talking about how an abundance of a natural reserve (the nutmeg trees) led to the elimination of their very preservers, the Bandenese.
“The planetary crisis is exactly the same. It’s a resource curse – take, for instance, what happened with fossil fuels in several parts of the world in recent history,” he said while explaining how the dynamics of climate change today are rooted in a centuries-old geopolitical order constructed by Western colonialism.
