New Delhi: One of the essays in Amitav Ghosh’s recently released book Wild Fictions describes a great wildfire engulfing Los Angeles. While Ghosh wrote the essays years ago, now, as he promotes his new book, the spectre of the actual wildfires in Los Angeles that have killed over 24 people weighs heavily in each discussion. And this isn’t the first of Ghosh’s premonitions.
“In my novel The Hungry Tide, I talk of a great wave that sweeps over the Sunderbans,” recalled Ghosh, while delivering a talk at the India International Centre on 14 January. “Months after my book was published, the 2004 tsunami struck the Bay of Bengal including the Sunderbans. The then-Governor of Bengal Gopalkrishna Gandhi called me and asked, ‘How did you know?’” he said with a laugh, nodding at Gandhi, who was seated in the audience.
Ghosh doesn’t see himself as a prophet or fortune teller. Instead, he attributes the world’s multiple environmental disasters to the end of the era of a certain Western-oriented idea of modernity, one that threatens to bring the world down with it.
Speaking at the 41st CD Deshmukh Memorial Lecture at IIC, in a jam-packed auditorium, the Jnanpith Award winner’s talk was titled ‘Time of Monsters, Time of Possibilities: Reflections on an Interstitial Era’. Aptly derived from Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci’s quote on the death of the old world after World War I, Ghosh’s definition of monsters in the 21st century differed slightly.
“The monsters in our era aren’t just political, like Gramsci’s. We also have to contend with the wildfires, storms, floods, and droughts—the natural monsters,” said Ghosh. “It would be delusional to still cling to the separation of the natural and political worlds. These natural disasters are by-products of our historical actions.”
In a blistering reproval of rapid industrialisation and Euro-centric modernity that characterised much of the 20th century, Ghosh managed to draw a direct link between those historical processes and the environmental and political consequences that the West is facing today in the form of natural disasters, climate change, and migration.
“The challenge facing Western civilisation today is how to preserve their hold over a disproportionate amount of the world’s wealth,” said Ghosh. “And they’re clearly losing this battle.”
New monsters, and AI
Much like his books, Ghosh’s talk was also peppered with historical references and personal anecdotes, from his fieldwork in Egypt and Mauritius to a talk he delivered in Sri Lanka during the civil war, and his experience of 9/11. When the terrorist attack of 11 September 2001 took place in New York City, Ghosh’s daughter was in a school right opposite the twin towers.
“My daughter said ‘Baba, I saw it all through the window of my history class’,” said Ghosh. Looking back now, he too thinks that he saw a new chapter turn in the history of the US, India and the Middle East in that moment.
Geopolitical events like the 9/11 attacks, the bombing of Libya, the US occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and natural events like LA wildfires, hurricanes in the US, heatwaves in Europe and floods in South Asia have one thing in common – the shared hubris of world leaders who think their actions will have no consequences. Now that the world sits on the precipice of fatal destruction in the form of irreversible climate change, Ghosh said that their actions still show no signs of changing.
“You can’t say that the West doesn’t have a plan for climate change. Catastrophe is the plan,” he said. “It is a well-thought-out decision to continue to sow chaos and believe that the consequences won’t hit in your lifetime.”
Prodding Ghosh to speak on other prescient issues, Shyam Saran, the IIC president and chair of the session, asked him about his thoughts on Artificial Intelligence. And whether it counts as one of the monsters of today’s era.
But the author did not seem to think so. While acknowledging the multiple governing and information challenges AI brought in, Ghosh’s concerns lay beyond it. According to him, the top brass in Silicon Valley was more worried about Gray goo scenarios where runaway nanobots threaten to take over the world. In comparison to that, AI seemed of little worry.
“I’m not scared of AI right now, honestly I just wish it would spell my name correctly,” laughed Ghosh.
Also read: Look for Amitav Ghosh, Rohinton Mistry novels not just on bookshelves, but on a map now
Age of possibilities and writing
All, however, is not lost. Harking back to the title of his talk, Ghosh explained that while this is an era of monsters, it is also one of possibilities that weren’t even conceived of before. New discussions, experiments and schools of thought are finally acknowledging that the world’s conception of modernity was founded on the wrong principles.
“Our modern world is too anthropocentric, in a way that has made us believe that the world can be easily manipulated to our advantage — that is not how the Earth functioned, and for the longest time, that isn’t how humans functioned either,” said Ghosh.
The author doesn’t consider his writing, or any fictional writing on climate change, to be the antidote or an awareness campaign that finally makes millions around the world see the truth. Art in any form should not be confused with scientific propaganda, even if it is true, he said.
“If this is indeed mankind’s greatest crisis then there will be a hundred different ways of thinking and opinions on it, and that is how it should be,” he asserted.
The information critical for surviving a climate catastrophe lies in indigenous wisdom and historical resilience. Be it the Sunderbans, Mauritius or Mexico, each region has a bank of historical climate knowledge passed down from generations that actually lived through climate-altering events before.
Ending his talk with a poem by Jagadish Chandra Bose, Ghosh echoed the famed physicist’s thoughts almost a century after they’d been written.
“In order to save the world, we must hear it. And in order to hear it, we must first love it.”
(Edited by Ratan Priya)