Evening of Wild Fictions

January 16, 2025

My turn for the autograph: Picture courtesy Bittu Sahgal

Amitav Ghosh’s conversation with Raghu Karnad turned out to be more than an ‘evening of wild fictions’. To many who are not old enough and haven’t followed the master’s craft from his early days – Wild Fictions Essays marks a convenient entry point. For someone like me, who started following him since his ‘campus notes’ days at the Delhi University – from the ‘Emergency’ era – this was about gathering the nuggets from the tweens. Whether between academics or the long list of books, while Ghosh metamorphosed as a great author.

“The pieces in this collection are about a wide variety of subjects, yet there is one thread that runs through most of them: of bearing witness to a rupture in time, of chronicling the passing of an era that began 300 years ago, in the eighteenth century” – writes Ghosh in the introduction.

“This was, of course, the period that saw the birth of modernity and industrial civilization, in which, under the leadership of the British empire, the west tightened its grip over most of the world, culminating ultimately in the emergence of the US as the planet’s sole superpower. Starting with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the ‘unipolar moment’ peaked at the turn of the millennium and then ran into a series of profound shocks that began in 2001.”

The book commences with six chapters on Climate Change and Environment, a cause Ghosh champions passionately and deservedly stays atop his list of priorities. In The Nutmeg’s Curse he narrates the extractive exploits of the European coloniser. The resulting terraforming has had significant climate implications for the planet. However, today the ways of life of much of humanity is extractive – we have all become colonisers of nature – pushing ourselves towards irreversible tipping points.

Despite the hubris, the Homo sapiens is at a crossroad. Howsoever compelling geopolitics may appear, are we missing signals of a sixth extinction – as the decibels rise?

“High modernity taught us that the Earth was inert and existed to be exploited by human beings for their own purposes. In this time of angels, we are slowly begining to understand that in order to hear the Earth, we must first learn to love it”.

Are we ready to accept this stark truth – as Ghosh concludes?