“The literary challenge of this moment is restoring voice and agency to non-humans”: A Conversation with Amitav Ghosh

As a writer whose work focuses on the intersection of literature, power, place, and migration, Amitav Ghosh and his critically acclaimed work have been a staple of my teaching and research for many years. So when he announced his latest book of nonfiction, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, on social media, I was obviously excited. The book promised to be a sequel of sorts to his 2016 book of nonfiction, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable—a scathing critique of European colonialism, its historic and literary legacy that would account, in many ways, for both global warming and a demise of literary imagination.

As a reader, I’m no stranger to stories of colonization, more so in the Indian Ocean region by whose edge I grew up, within the archipelago city of Mumbai. Yet, when I read the first chapter of The Nutmeg’s Curse, I gasped and took a deep breath before continuing. It had been a while since the opening of a book had pulled me in so viscerally with its marriage of storytelling and historic depth as well as breadth.

The book’s chilling overture transports the reader a few centuries back to a small island in the Indian Ocean region that specializes in the production of a spice called nutmeg. Here, the Banda archipelago in Southeast Asia becomes the locus through which Ghosh rewrites a history of Western power, capitalism, border-crossing, and globalization that spawns a cycle of global devastation and alters man’s relationship to not only Mother Earth but also to literary storytelling and imagination itself. Like many of Ghosh’s books, The Nutmeg’s Curse is planetary in scope. It weaves politics, history, literature, folklore, a history of global travel, entrepreneurship and epistemology, Black Lives Matter as a pioneering social movement, and a commentary on Covid-19, among other things, to talk about our shared environmental and literary crisis, and offers an urgent blueprint toward a more sustainable future.

Ghosh and I spoke about his new book through email, but before I proceed, a brief introduction to the author and his oeuvre that has been translated into more than thirty languages.

Amitav Ghosh is the award-winning author of several books of fiction and nonfiction including The Ibis Trilogy, consisting of three novels—Sea of Poppies, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize; River of Smoke; and Flood of Fire—and the nonfiction book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, winner of the inaugural Utah Award for the Environmental Humanities in 2018. He holds two Lifetime Achievement Awards and four honorary doctorates. In 2007 he was awarded the Padma Shri, and in 2018 the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary honor. In 2019 Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the most important global thinkers of the preceding decade. Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. He studied in Delhi, Oxford, and Alexandria, and currently lives in New York City.

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Namrata Poddar: You’re one of the rare public intellectuals I know within a contemporary community of literary artists who are also formidable fiction writers. Your 2016 book, The Great Derangement, was a rich and incisive commentary on our global environmental crisis. What inspired you to write The Nutmeg’s Curse, another nonfiction book on climate change, that too within a global pandemic?

Amitav Ghosh: I am always a little uncomfortable with the term “public intellectual” because it implies a certain level of activism and I make no claim whatsoever to being an activist. It is something I have no talent for, even though I really admire those who do.

As for The Nutmeg’s Curse, it grew out of some of the ideas that went into The Great Derangement and Gun Island. Many of these ideas had been swimming around in my head for a long time, and I needed to bring them together. In a way, the pandemic was the perfect opportunity: the lockdown created a circumstance that made a kind of obsessive focus possible. The lockdown was, of course, especially severe in New York from March to August 2020, and that created a kind of urgency. This was especially so because it was clear to me that the pandemic and climate change are not distinct; they are, in many senses, two different manifestations of the planetary crisis created by the relentless acceleration of the last few decades, in production, consumption, movement, and so on. Because of these various reasons I worked with an urgency and speed that was, for me, completely unprecedented. A book usually takes me a few years but I wrote The Nutmeg’s Curse in eight months.

The lockdown created a circumstance that made a kind of obsessive focus possible.

NP: Your book begins with the nightmarish story of the Dutch arrival in the Banda Islands of the Indian Ocean where nutmeg was known to flourish like nowhere else in the seventeenth century. Here is a historic moment when European powers are competing to take possession of the East and gain monopoly over the trade in spices, coveted in Europe as high luxury products. Your book shows how a marriage of capitalist ambition, colonization of both eastern lands and the New World, of Christianity in service of empire, and genocide—human and environmental—perpetrated across the globe altered man’s relationship to nature forever. This history of Europe colonizing about nine-tenths of the earth’s land surface by the early twentieth century is, surely, a multilayered one, and like most historic phenomena, without enough documentation that centers the colonized. What led you to begin a story—about colonialism and an epistemic violence it inflicted upon our planet—with the Banda Islands and the nutmeg?

AG: It has become customary, especially in the West, to think of climate change as a specifically contemporary problem, which can be addressed through a range of technological policies. I take a completely different view. I see climate change as only one manifestation of a historical dynamic that goes back to the earliest period of European colonization. In my view, it was the extraordinary, indeed unprecedented violence of that period, which resulted in the extinguishing of innumerable flourishing civilizations, and the greatest depopulation event in human history, that made it possible for elite Europeans to think of the world in a certain way: as an inert repository of resources that existed primarily to be exploited by those who were powerful enough to do so. This world-view is commonly thought to have emerged in relation to “Nature.” But I think this epistemic shift arose, in the first place, out of conflicts that were specifically human. It was the process of subduing and conquering humans that made it possible for elite Europeans to think of doing the same thing with the non-human world. It is important to remember that European colonists did not, for a long time, accept that the Indigenous people of the Americas were fully human. Indeed a great debate was convened in 1550 in Valladolid, Spain, to debate this issue, but it could not come to a conclusion. So the idea of “Nature” during much of its evolution actually included the great majority of humanity as well as the non-human world. Nor is this ancient history. Through much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries elite Westerners continued to think of their human Others as less than human (“half-devil and half-child” as Kipling famously put it). To properly reorient our thinking about Nature will therefore also require a profound reorientation in how humans think about each other. In other words, the same violence that made it possible for elite Europeans to think of their human Others as purely material beings—lacking in reason, thought and agency—also made it possible for them to think of the Earth and its gifts in the same way. Both non-humans and human Others were represented as being fit to be “subdued” (a word that recurs often in colonial texts).

In my view the Banda genocide is a particularly vivid illustration of how these two processes of subduing intersected. In order to gain control of the trade in the products of the nutmeg tree, the Dutch effectively decided to exterminate and enslave the entire population of the islands.

Just to put this in context, seventeenth-century Dutchmen would never have said to themselves: “Well, down in Burgundy they make some nice wines, which could be very profitable. So why don’t we just go down there and kill or expel all the people and grab their land and their grapes?” This would not have occurred to them because they would have understood that the wines of Burgundy would not be what they are if not for the specific properties of the land, and the technical knowledge of the people who live on and cultivate the terrain.

It is important to recall, I think, that many if not most of the Earth’s products were once thought of in the way that we now think of the wines of Burgundy or the cheeses of Parma. So, for instance, over millennia the Banda Islands attracted traders from many distant places: China, India, the Arab world, and Africa. Many of those traders spent years living in the Bandas, and they would have been perfectly familiar with the techniques for the cultivation of nutmeg trees; nor would it have been at all difficult for them to smuggle out seeds and seedlings, to grow in their own countries. Yet none of them ever did that. Instead, for centuries, they undertook the difficult and dangerous journey across the Indian Ocean to the Banda Islands. The reason for this was simply that a nutmeg wasn’t a nutmeg unless it was from the vicinity of the Banda Islands, grown or processed by the Bandanese, just as the wines of Burgundy aren’t Burgundy wines unless they are grown by people who are intimately connected with the land and its products. It is exactly these connections that come to be ruptured by colonialism, as it evolved after the conquest of the Americas.

To properly reorient our thinking about Nature will therefore also require a profound reorientation in how humans think about each other.

NP: To linger on a colonial invention of nature as a mute entity, ever available to be exploited for profit, your book reminds us how western literature with its cult of “morbid individualism” was a key player in emptying nature of its vitalism. A belief in nature’s vitalism was once embraced by many in different parts of the world including poorer European communities and women across the planet who bore an alternative relationship to land. Your book offers a way out of our current climate crisis through alternative storytelling that debunks the myth of the Anthropocene and allows nature to tell her own stories. How can this happen if “serious literature,” especially in the West, has come to be associated with realism where nature in the name of verisimilitude cannot do much more than play the role of a passive setting?

AG: Yes, I think new forms of storytelling are absolutely essential, and I don’t think it is at all a coincidence that much of the most interesting writing of this kind is being done by women, often Indigenous women. In the book, I’ve referred several times to the work done by Leslie Marmon Silko and Robin Wall Kimmerer, for instance; both these writers have had an enormous impact on me.

NP: From white colonial politics to brown neocolonial politics in growing economies like India, all scrambling for land and displacing people for profit, the lead actors in your book’s ecological drama are male. When women offered resistance to this History, white or brown, your book reminds us how they were silenced. European witch-hunting, for instance, hit a peak during the rise of European colonial ambition. As a way forward, your book wonders if a sharing of power—psychological and political—amid the world’s superpowers can truly happen, even if it’s crucial to redistributing resources for a sustainable future. I wonder then: when it comes to key positions in political or thought leadership that will necessarily impact our global relationship to the environment, do you see a sharing of power across gender to be as urgent, even if gender is a construct? If yes, how do you think this will happen, especially in the United States—one of the world’s most lauded democracies and think tanks on climate change—which still awaits a woman president?

AG: In my view, inequalities of various kinds are at the heart of the climate crisis. One very important aspect of this is geopolitical inequality. But gender inequalities are also vital. One of the saddest aspects of the crisis is that the voices of the women who have to walk farther and farther to fetch water, because of intensifying droughts, have never been properly heard. At the highest levels, climate politics and climate discourse continue to be largely centered around the old, gendered power elites.

NP: Finally, if you had to distill your book’s multilayered narrative of eco- and cultural criticism to one idea our readers today can take away with them, what would it be?

AG: In my view, the fundamental literary challenge of this moment, for writers, is that of restoring voice and agency to non-humans. That is really the basic thrust of my book.

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