Wild fictions
Amitav Ghosh
fourth estate/ harpercollins
Rs.799
Pages 469
Themes of colonialism, imperial violence, ecology, migration and loss are evident in all Amitav Ghosh’s works. Wild Fictions is no exception
Despite the remarkable range and volume of his work over the years, the core concerns of Amitav Ghosh’s writings have remained consistent. Themes of colonialism, imperial violence, ecology, migration, and loss are evident in all his works, and Wild Fictions is no exception. These preoccupations return with renewed urgency in this collection of essays of over two decades.
Any reader familiar with Ghosh’s oeuvre will recognize that migration and movement are foundational themes. It is fitting then, that Ghosh begins his text with migration: he ponders the fate of the South Asian migrants in Europe who left in pursuit of a better life. But Ghosh unsettles the reader by questioning what are the parameters of a ‘better life’ that drive so many to risk everything in South Asia for dreams abroad, only to be met with precarity.
Ghosh also remains one of South Asia’s most perceptive chroniclers of environmental concerns. While through fiction in Junglenama and The Hungry Tide, he explored the implications of ecological devastations wrought by human disregard, the essays here enunciate wariness that environmental catastrophes are hardly sudden, unfolding along the undulating terrains of inequality and capitalist power.
It is not just humans that populate Ghosh’s narratives; many of the essays carry poignant empathy for non-human lives. He laments the slow disappearance of the Irrawady Dolphins, Marco Polo sheep of Hunza, and Olive Ridley turtles which once populated the eastern coast. He turns his attention to the botanical as well, not as silent witnesses to human ambition, but as subjects caught in cycles of imperial disarray with protracted consequences for the future.
The essay ‘Spice Islands’ is a good example, tracing the journey of cloves and nutmeg from the volcanic islands of Indonesia to the markets of Europe where trade became synonymous with dislocation. Commercialisation of such botanical commodities is often inseparable from the displacement of people and reordering of ecosystems. One of the collection’s final essays brings this line of thought to a contemplation on the life of plants, their capacity for sentience, and the limits of human imagination to comprehend the intelligence of the rooted.
It is not difficult for the historian to trace the arc of colonial violence across the landscapes of the global South. The afterlives of Empire leave their marks everywhere: etched into soil, folded into language and embedded in law. The exploitation of clove trees in the Moluccas, the Indian state’s bureaucratic indifference to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the wake of natural disaster, the sleek lexicons of multilateral institutions that preserve the asymmetries they claim to redress, are all fragments of a world reordered by the greed of capital.
History is where Ghosh is undeniably at his most compelling. The section titled ‘Witnesses’ draws the reader into the seldom heard voices of two Bengali men in the medical corps of the Mesopotamia campaigns of 1915-16 during the First World War. Through excerpts from Kalyan Pradeep (1929), a biography of a young Bengali doctor Kalyan Mukherji by his grandmother Mokshoda Devi, and Abhi Le Baghdad (1957), a memoir by Sisir Sarbadhikari, Ghosh resurrects two incredible narratives that have been long forgotten.
What supersedes his ability to reproduce the archive is that, unlike historians, Ghosh inhabits the archive through the crutch of fiction. This is a method familiar to anyone who has read the Ibis Trilogy. He is attentive not just to what the archive says, but to what it fails to say: the tremors of race, caste, and class that shape lived experiences. A striking example is his account of a doctor stationed in Burma in 1942, whose arduous journey back to India is marked with racial humiliation, a very different tale from the narratives of survival penned by his white counterparts.
The theme of movement, of people, objects, and ideas, acts as an anchor across the text. From the lascars who emerge as the first global Indians, to present-day migrants in Europe, to his own peripatetic life, Ghosh shows how the act of moving across waters, borders, and languages is never without historical freight. In a delightful essay, ‘The Well Travelled Banyan’, he turns to the everyday Indian staple, the vest or banyan, as the protagonist of Indian identity amidst global flow.
Through such attentive readings of the archive Ghosh disrupts many of the foundational myths of the West. Ideas long tethered to the rhetoric of liberalism, progress, and sustainability are held up to scrutiny and catechized through the lens of indigenous knowledge, colonial encounter, and ecological devastation.
Woven through all the essays is a resolute call for empathy. In his readings of Priya Satia’s Time’s Monster (2020), Ghosh returns to an oft-repeated question: why do good people do bad things? The question is not as rhetorical as it is ethical. In recounting the memoir Abhi Le Baghdad, Ghosh points to how Sarbadhikari never lost the perception of humanity during the war, even in his enemies. Sarbadhikari’s account is not isolated; many of the essays remind the reader that in this age of conflict and hate, practicing compassion is not simply possible but a necessity. Morality is never unmediated in a capitalist landscape; it is imbricated in the very system it seeks to question. And it is precisely for this reason that perhaps now more than ever, an insistence on empathy, compassion, and a shared sense of humanity becomes all the more urgent.
Wild Fictions is, at its heart, a meditation on the making of a writer, on the conversations that shaped him, the travels that surprised him, and the realities that disturbed him. For a writer like Ghosh, it was perhaps long overdue. With measured tone that is never agitated, he charts the entanglements of empire, capitalism, history and ecology, allowing for quiet, anecdotal moments to root concerns of the mundane. These essays are not only insightful, but are essential reading today to understand our world in the shadows of peril.
Anidrita Saikia (The Book Review)
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