Amitav Ghosh links climate events to ‘political monsters’ in new book

Amitav Ghosh reflects on 9/11's impact and discusses his new book, "Wild Fictions," addressing climate change and societal issues in a "time of monsters."

For writer Amitav Ghosh and his family, September 11, 2001 was an important day, as his 10-year-old daughter Lila was set to join a new school, one that faced the World Trade Centre. From her history class, little Lila, on her first day of school, witnessed an act so monstrous that the world shuddered – two planes hijacked by terror outfit al-Qaeda crashed into the twin towers of the WTC.

Ghosh unveils his book “Wild Fictions (Essays)” with former foreign secretary, Shyam Saran, at IIC on Tuesday. (Vipin Kumar/HT)

Twenty-four years later, at the India International Centre (IIC), Ghosh recalled how he frantically rushed to pick her up, and said, “On that day, I felt like I was watching another turn in a cycle of history that I had observed from many angles — India, the United States and the Middle East.” At the launch of his latest book, Wild Fictions (Essays) at IIC, where he also delivered the CD Deshmukh Memorial lecture on “Time of Monsters, Time of Possibilities: Reflections of an Interstitial era,” Ghosh quoted Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, and said that the world was entering a “time of monsters,” with the old era dying and a new one struggling to be born.

In a packed hall on a cold January evening, Ghosh stated that the book was a collection and reflection of his experiences and learnings from the last 25 years. He said that the theme of his new book fits well with the lecture’s topic, and that the last 25 years have been marked by several tragedies where “monsters” in the form of human beings and climate change have emerged prominently. “Since this is the official release of my new book, Wild Fictions, which is a collection of essays written over the last quarter century, this strikes me as a good time to reflect on the era we are presently in,” said the Jnanpith award winner.

Ghosh is known best for his novels The Hungry Tide and The Shadow Lines, and his non-fiction books In an Antique Land and The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, where he wrote on climate change and how it is not being adequately addressed. Last year, he won the coveted Erasmus prize

“What is distinctive about our time is that its monsters also consist of weather events that would have been thought of as improbable or freakish in Gramsci’s lifetime: super-charged storms, mega droughts, catastrophic rain-bombs and wildfires. Back then, these monsters would have been considered ‘natural,’ but knowing what we know of anthropogenic greenhouse gases and their role in intensifying climate disasters, it is no longer possible to cling to the fiction of a strict division between natural and the political,” said Ghosh.

At a time when historic wildfires ravaged parts of Los Angeles – footage of which was played on phone screens and TV screens across the world – Ghosh’s remarks on wildfires resonated with all those seated in the auditorium. “These wildfires and rain bombs are deeply political creatures... They are by-products of historical processes that have only benefitted a small minority of humans, at the expense of a great majority. The same could be said about policies and administrative actions through which landscapes have come to be divided between the ‘natural and the ‘social’. This is indeed the theme of the essay from which the title of my new book, Wild Fictions is taken,” Ghosh said.