Mr. Ghosh is one of the world’s most celebrated authors and thinkers, best known for his historical fiction. He holds two lifetime achievement awards, and has been awarded the Padma Shri, the Jnanpith Award, the Dan David Award, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.



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Amitav Ghosh

<h4>
 AMITAV GHOSH
 is one of the world’s most celebrated and awarded authors and thinkers. In
 conversation with
 TARA KHANDELWAL and
 MICHELLE D’COSTA, he talks about his latest
 book,
 The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, a
 non-fiction story highlighting the origins of our current climate
 crisis.
</h4>

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 AG:
 Thank you for your very generous words of welcome.



 TK: Your latest book,
 The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, weaves
 history, colonialism, migration, superstition, and much more, to tell us
 an origin story of our current climate crisis. As a millennial, I am
 really interested in this very urgent issue. Why did you choose the lens
 of the nutmeg to tell this story?



 AG:
 The story of the nutmeg I take as an analogy for what is happening in the
 world right now. The nutmeg tree was a miraculous plant that existed only on
 the tiny Banda Islands and their surroundings in the Maluku province of
 Indonesia. For millennia, the nutmeg tree brought wealth and prosperity to
 these islands and the islanders. They became great entrepreneurs sailing
 across the Indian Ocean. Ultimately, the Dutch arrived and wanted to gain
 complete control of the nutmeg trade. So, what did they do? They wiped out
 the islanders. The islanders were destroyed because of their miraculous
 tree.



 It is an analogy for what has happened to our planet. We were given a
 beautiful planet full of all kinds of miraculous things. And now we have set
 about destroying this gift. The story of the nutmeg and the Banda Islands is
 one of the earliest examples of what’s now known as the resource curse, that
 is, a resource that ultimately creates devastation around it. Another
 example is oil in Iraq or Libya. In the same way, the vast gifts of the
 Earth have now been exploited to the point where the whole Earth is becoming
 subject to the resource curse.


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 MDC: That’s really
 heartbreaking. I will never see the nutmeg in the same
 way again after reading your book. The first chapter is one of my
 favorites, because you talk about how one small incident of a lamp falling
 changes the course of history. You were haunted by this particular
 incident while you were writing the book in Brooklyn during the pandemic
 amidst all the ambulance sirens. Will you please narrate this story to our
 listeners? And what did it feel like writing this book in the middle of
 the pandemic?



 AG:
 It was a very strange time. You’ve lived through the pandemic, so you will
 be aware how strange it was. Everything was changing in the world. New York
 City, especially Brooklyn, is a very lively, vivacious place, and suddenly
 everything went quiet. On the street you could hear a dog bark from blocks
 away, except for when the ambulances were racing through. And that was
 happening all through the night and day. My house is not very far from one
 of Brooklyn’s largest hospitals, and outside there were refrigerated trucks
 for all the bodies of the dead. It was a very eerie time of great fear, as
 you will remember from your own experience.



 I had been planning to write this book for a long time, and just as the
 lockdown started, I began work on what ultimately became
 The Nutmeg’s Curse. Very little is actually known about what
 happened in the Banda Islands in those days. I first learned about it from a
 very short book by an American historian, Willard A. Hanna,
 Indonesian Banda: Colonialism and Its Aftermath in the Nutmeg Islands. That’s where I read about the
 lamp that fell in Selamon on the night of
 April 21, 1621. It really caught my attention and I thought, “How does the
 falling of a lamp lead to this calamity?” I wanted to see what had happened
 in greater detail, and I discovered that the only book that addresses this
 history was written by a Dutch archivist, J.A. Van der Chijs, published in
 Dutch in 1886.



 I discovered this when, on impulse, I did a Google search and found a pdf of
 the book. I printed it, but it was in Dutch so I couldn’t read it. On
 another impulse, I typed some of the Dutch sentences into a translation app.
 Then mysteriously, miraculously, something comprehensible appeared. I began
 to spend hours, days, typing in paragraph after paragraph, page after page
 of this Dutch book until I was able to piece it together with some help.



 TK: I love the way you
 describe this in the book. Was this the most
 challenging part of researching this book, not having access to the
 language?



 AG:
 It was so frustrating, but I’ve dealt with many languages and I didn’t
 allow myself to be intimidated. I thought, “If I persevere I’ll be able to
 do it.”



 MDC: I think it’s also
 an intellectual challenge that pushes you forward
 in a way.



 Your book addresses some of the many violent ways in which Europeans have
 invaded places and impacted their original inhabitants. One shocking fact I
 learned was how the Lord Chancellor of England, Sir Francis Bacon, justified
 the massacres on the islands as having been willed by God. So, what did you
 discover when researching this book that was really shocking to you?



 AG:
 When I got into the historical sources about what had happened during the
 colonization of the Americas, the scale of the violence was absolutely
 unbelievable. Between 70% and 90% of the Indigenous populations were wiped
 out through extraordinary orgies of violence. What happened in the 16th
 and 17th centuries in the Americas was quite unprecedented. The
 scale of that violence really has no match anywhere, honestly.



 But I think it’s important to understand that climate change, the way that
 it is unfolding, is also a kind of violence. It’s the kind of mediated
 violence that has also unfolded in the Americas. The violence of the
 Americas was of a particular type; it was not like the Second World War
 where people were killed with machine guns – that technology didn’t exist
 back then. In fact, a large part of the violence of the colonization of the
 Americas unfolded via the environment. Environmental changes wiped out
 people’s ways of life. The environment itself became an instrument of
 violence. And this is what we are seeing today; the environment has again
 become an instrument of violence.



 For example, the people in Bengal are losing their lands, losing their
 livelihoods, to rising waters and intensifying cyclones. Climate change is
 not merely a thing of greenhouse gas emissions and policy decisions. Climate
 change is a kind of war. We’re confronting a form of ecological violence.


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<h4 class="text-center">
 But I
 think it’s important to understand that climate change, the
 way that it is unfolding, is also a kind of violence.
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 TK: And it’s so
 visceral, the changes that people deal with on a
 day-to-day basis. I’m really interested in the way you wrote about climate
 – this paradigm shift. It made me think very differently. You said that
 literature needs to change the way climate is written about. Michelle and
 I were trying to think of books in which climate is front and center or
 the plot vehicle. In all the books we came up with, either the genre was
 dystopian or it was self-help or non-fiction, like Bill Gates’ latest
 book, which gives suggestions like a manual. Yours was such an interesting
 paradigm shift. So, can you tell us how you feel fiction should address
 climate change? You mentioned that one way is to give voice to non-human
 entities. Can you elaborate on that?



 AG:
 Yes. The problem that arose in the 17th century is that the Earth came to
 be thought of as dead by elite westerners. Over time, across the world,
 people accepted this view. Farmers and fishermen don’t accept this view, nor
 do the Adivasis [Indigenous communities in India]. For them the
 Earth is alive and filled with many kinds of beings –
 Adivasis think of forests as living beings, and now we know that
 forests are living beings. But you can’t compensate for the loss of forests
 by planting trees somewhere else, because a forest interconnects the
 multiple species and entities.



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<h4 class="text-center">
 Adivasis
 think of forests as living
 beings, and now we know
 that forests are living beings. But you can’t compensate for
 the loss of forests by planting trees somewhere else, because a
 forest interconnects the multiple species and entities.
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 For me, the most difficult challenge facing us today is to do with ethics –
 what our ancestors did, what you read in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata,
 and so on. Those texts are filled with the voices of non-human beings of
 many kinds. The Mahabharata begins with snakes, and they are an important
 part of the Mahabharata. That is the greatest challenge facing us today –
 how we write about non-human beings of various kinds. In modern Indian
 literature there are writers who are giving agency and voice to these
 non-human elements.



 MDC: Yes, another
 Adivasi writer I’m reminded of is Hansda
 Sowvendra Shekhar. I absolutely love his writing, his stories are full of
 nature, everything comes to life. You don’t usually see that in stories
 that are set in urban spaces.



 You have addressed
 climate through fiction in your book,
 Gun Island, and through your non-fiction. So, what are the
 takeaways you want your readers to go away with about climate from fiction
 versus nonfiction, because they are two very different forms?



 AG:
 They are different, but they’re also not so different.
 Gun Island is a novel while The Nutmeg’s Curse is
 non-fiction, but in many ways there is a huge overlap. In
 Gun Island I wrote about migrants who are instances of the crisis,
 and I’ve written about the migration crisis in The Nutmeg’s Curse.
 They are interconnected in many ways. In order to really write productively
 about our situation, we have to forget some of these ironclad distinctions
 that were made in the past between fiction and non-fiction, and so on. There
 was always a lot of overlap between these genres.



 A famous example is the work of Herman Melville. Melville used huge amounts
 of non-fiction in his work. He was an ethnographer, so Moby Dick is
 filled with information about whales. In fact, the whole story is based on
 an historical incident. I think we are going to have to loosen the
 boundaries as we go ahead.



 TK: Your research also
 involves speaking to travelers, climate refugees.
 You’ve spoken about Bangladeshi migrants who move to places like Italy
 because of climate conditions in the Bengal region. Could you share an
 anecdote about this? What kind of things were foremost in their minds?
 What were they running from?



 AG:
 Well, I met many Bangladeshi migrants who told me the stories of how they
 left. Often, agriculture had become impossible in their villages, because of
 the erratic rainfall, because of changes in the seasons, and so on. That’s
 increasingly the case across the world. Many of them were forced to leave
 because of those reasons, but if I asked them, “Are you a climate migrant?”
 none of them would accept that. I was very struck by that because
 Bangladeshis are well educated about climate issues. The Bangladesh
 government and many NGOs in Bangladesh disseminate a lot of information. We
 would do well to study what Bangladesh has been doing in terms of both
 education and resilience measures.


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 It was very interesting talking to these guys. I would say, “Are you a
 climate migrant?” and they would say, “No,” because it wasn’t just climate.
 It was as Margaret Atwood said, “It’s not just climate change, it’s
 everything change.” There were political difficulties, family issues, and so
 on. In these Italian migrant camps, there were lots of Bangladeshis and
 Pakistanis, but very few Indians. I think the Indians who have been
 displaced by climate tend to migrate within India, except for the Punjabis.
 They are migrating on a large scale now, abandoning their lands. Other than
 that, most migration tends to be toward Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, or the
 West Coast.



 One story I particularly remember was of a young Pakistani boy from a
 farming family in the Punjab. I was speaking to him in Rome, and he had
 fought with his father. It happens all the time, everywhere. At any other
 time, he probably would have gone off to another village, or to a relative,
 and spent a few weeks there. Sooner or later, his father would have said,
 “Son, please come back,” and he would have gone back. In his case, he was
 sulking and he went to the railway station. There he met up with a group of
 migrants who were making their way to Europe and he fell in with them. He
 made this incredible journey, half walking, from Pakistan to Iran, then
 crossing Iran to Turkey, where he was shot at by Turkish soldiers. From
 there he finally ended up in Rome. This is one of the ways in which the
 world has really changed.



 TK: I just can’t wrap
 my head around that story! You know, I recently
 reread your book, The Hungry Tide. It’s amazing the way you
 brought the Sundarbans to life. You have also depicted the Sundarbans in
 other books like Jungle Nama and Gun Island. How have
 things changed in your portrayal of the Sundarbans from
 The Hungry Tide to Gun Island?



 AG:
 The Sundarbans is a landscape and ecology that is being absolutely
 devastated. Each of the cyclones that has hit the Sundarbans in the last ten
 years since The Hungry Tide has made the situation incredibly dire
 for the people there, much more than I imagined. Cyclone Aila was a
 devastating blow to many people, and every year it’s gotten worse. Cyclone
 Amfan in 2020 was completely devastating – a lot of the reclaimed land,
 which was fertile, rice producing, was submerged under seawater. Those lands
 may not be cultivable again for years. Many people have lost their
 livelihoods.



 MDC: Yes, it feels
 like a dystopian world, but unfortunately it is our
 reality, and it is something that we can’t escape.



 TK: On that note,
 thank you so much for being here today and talking to
 us, sharing your insights. The books you’ve written have changed the way I
 think, and they’ve added a lot to my life. Thank you.



 AG:
 That’s wonderful to know. Thank you very, very much.


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 To listen to the
 original podcast ‘Books and Beyond with Bound’, please
 go to
 <a href="https://boundindia.com/books-and-beyond-podcast/" target="_blank"
 rel="noreferrer noopener">https://boundindia.com/books-and-beyond-podcast/</a>


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