New Delhi: In one timeline of Amitav Ghosh’s Ghost-Eye, climate activists and locals are trying to save an island in the Sundarbans from a capitalist coal corporation. Tipu, whom we first met in Ghosh’s 2019 novel Gun Island, steps in with a plan. Explaining ecological fragility, biodiversity, or sea-level rise won’t mobilise people, he says. But faith will. Manasa Devi—the Hindu goddess of snakes—will draw crowds, and devotion will become a form of resistance.
In many ways, Ghosh does the same with the third instalment in his unofficial Sundarbans trilogy, after The Hungry Tide (2004) and Gun Island. He serves an age-old folklore of reincarnation, divine intervention, and memory across lifetimes as bait, drawing the reader into a story that is ostensibly about climate change.
What I assumed was a clever narrative strategy in the book gradually hardened into something else: a proposition that when institutions fail, politics stalls, and rationality runs out of answers, only the divine can step in.
This supernatural is not a touch-and-go theme of the novel; it sits at the centre of Ghost-Eye.
A long-time critic of Hindutva politics and the uses of faith in public life, Amitav Ghosh has consistently argued for reason, history and structural critique through his works and in public life over the years. Yet, faced with the scale of climate catastrophe, his confidence seems to falter.
No counterweight to fantasy
In 1969 Calcutta (now Kolkata), a wealthy, vegetarian three-year-old suddenly wants to eat fish—a blasphemous ask in a Marwari household. The child is taken to psychologist Shoma Bose, who counsels her and feeds her fish.
The child, Varsha, is the reincarnation of a 17-year-old tribal girl from the Sundarbans who died defending her land. What follows is a cascade of the fantastical: past lives recalled in detail, names and stories retrieved, even bodily memory—haptic, almost tactile—carried across lifetimes and lifeforms.
Indian storytelling is an expert of this terrain. From myth to cinema, reincarnation has long served as a bridge between the moral and the cosmic. The legend of Manasa and Behula’s journey to reclaim her husband from death lingers in the background.
Ghost-Eye leans into this inheritance: past life, present purpose, ultimate revelation.
Only here, the characters are not villagers and long-lost siblings, but PhDs, doctors, activists, and stockbrokers. Love is always the binding force. Here, the love is for fish.
Bangla has a popular phrase: Golper goru gaachhe othe. “In fiction, even a cow can climb a tree.” It is a generous allowance. Storytelling permits excess, improbability, even wonder. But it is also a warning. Just because something can happen in fiction does not mean it always should.
Ghosh continues his “environmental uncanny”—a form that integrates non-human forces, spirits, and ecological crisis into a single frame. But in Ghost-Eye, the integration tips into excess.
Legends and apparitions are introduced without much explanation. Premonitions and prophecies are rationalised with insistence. At first, one offers Ghosh the space for doubt, for the possibility that the fantastical and supernatural may have some counterweight, but not yet visible.
It does not.
Philosophical scaffolding is brought in to steady what might otherwise seem implausible. Pythagoras believed in reincarnation, more specifically, metempsychosis. Carl Jung appears in spirit, invoked to suggest that there are no coincidences, only synchronicities. Perhaps it’s the only way to justify how that one street in Southern Avenue in 1960s Calcutta was home to several people with extraordinary abilities.
Rationality is debated and then edged out. And instead of questioning faith, it privileges it.
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What about human agency?
The climate crisis in Ghost-Eye, the author indicates, is civilisational, even metaphysical. And the implied answer is not reform, policy, or resistance in any recognisable sense, but surrender to forces beyond comprehension and the acceptance that gods will descend upon Earth as divine protectors.
The irony is difficult to ignore.
An author who has spent decades critiquing systems of power and belief now arrives at a place where belief itself becomes the only viable force. Where institutions fail, gods must intervene. Where politics collapses, mythology must mobilise.
Ghost-Eye installs an equally totalising alternative and justifies it with reasoning and rationale, something that leaves little room for scepticism.
Heterochromia is shown to possess magical powers. A network of “ghost eyes”—individuals marked by extraordinary perception, connected across the globe, capable of premonition, telepathy, and divine intervention walk the earth in the book.
It is here that the cow is not just climbing the tree; it is being asked to fly.
Ghosh dismisses fantasies such as the babbling billionaires’ dream of colonising Mars. Yet, he asks the reader to accept a world where divine intervention and spiritually attuned collectives might succeed where institutions and politics have failed.
An “association of atheists and rationalists” is reduced to a convenient acronym—LIARS—while belief, in its most expansive form, is positioned as the only viable force.
This begs a question: If the crisis is so vast that only the divine can address it, what does that say about the role of human agency and accountability?
Ghost-Eye insists that we face a perceptual crisis: a failure to see, connect, and imagine beyond the obvious when it comes to nature. But the answer Ghosh arrives at risks slipping into fatalism.
Faith, which begins as bait in Ghost-Eye, becomes the entire mechanism. Climate change, which should anchor the narrative, is instead carried along by a swelling tide of the fantastical. The result is that Ghosh’s cow ends up flying too close to the sun.
Views are personal.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)