The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Amitav Ghosh, Penguin Random House ; Rs.399 ; Pages 275 After winning global acclaim for his path-breaking Ibis trilogy — Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011) and Flood of Fire (2015) — historical fiction novels which focused scathingly on the impact of commerce-driven Western imperialism on Asia, especially China and the Indian diaspora of the 19th century, celebrated US-based (but currently residing in Goa) writer Amitav Ghosh’s latest book is on the scary issue of climate change endangering Planet Earth. Not that this prolific Doon School, St. Stephen’s, and Oxford-educated novelist is new to writing non-fiction. Previous works of non-fiction include In an Antique Land (1992), Dancing in Cambodia and at Large in Burma (1998), Countdown (1999), The Imam and the Indian (2002) and Incendiary Circumstances (2006). Ghosh’s new oeuvre is an analysis of the cultural, historical and political repercussions of global warming, the impact of which is being experienced on an everyday basis by all worldwide — except America’s new president. “There never was a time,” writes Ghosh, “when the forces of weather and geology did not have a bearing on our lives — but neither has there ever been a time when they have pressed themselves on us with such relentless directness.” Despite this, purveyors of literature, history, politics and culture have not responded to the imminent catastrophe with any urgency. Indeed Ghosh finds the present day establishment complicit in “modes of concealment,” and warns they will have to answer future generations. The focus in the first section of the book, ‘Stories’ is on the novel as a genre and its inadequate interface with climate change. Spanning a range of fiction writers including himself, Ghosh argues that since the late 19th century, realistic fiction has operated within paradigms of probability and individual moral concerns. Several freak natural disasters were considered too melodramatic to find a place in fiction. Drawing on his reading of Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, and Indian writer Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Ghosh shows that the novel had adapted to the regularity of bourgeois life. The two key issues that he handles in this section are how the novel can re-emerge in new generic variations like sci-fi, and how it is imperative to address climate change concerns collectively through literary fiction. The author is also appalled by global complacency about urban planning. Indiscriminate colonisation in the post 17th century which created colonial cities such as Mumbai and Chennai, New York and Charleston showed “reckless disregard” for traditional knowledge about ecology management. Therefore, disasters are just waiting to happen. Irregular warming, cyclones and hurricanes, tsunamis and deluges will play havoc with civic systems and urban cityscapes, a prophecy already proven by cyclone Sandy in New York in 2012, and the deluges in Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata between 2005-2015. Across time and space, the global and the local, continuities of experience highlight the author’s critique of human apathy towards climate derangement worldwide. Ghosh compellingly argues that the root cause of the…
