‘It would be a mistake to think that hyper-technological people don't live by stories': Amitav Ghosh

Scroll.in

03-05-2025

Some books rest quietly on the shelf, their voices barely a whisper. Then there are books like Wild Fictions, which pulse with life, dreaming and waiting. In his latest book, Amitav Ghosh does not merely tell stories, he releases them into the world, wild and ungovernable. Here, rivers speak, winds remember, trees mourn, and forgotten spirits rise to reclaim their place alongside history and myth.
Amitav Ghosh's long journey through memory and imagination, from the tidal creeks of The Hungry Tide, through the opium routes of the Ibis Trilogy, to the urgent ecological elegies of The Great Derangement and The Nutmeg's Curse, finds a new flowering here. Wild Fictions is not a retreat into fantasy but a deeper reckoning with it, a recognition that myth, spirit, and land are not things to be tamed or catalogued, but forces still alive beneath the cracked surfaces of modern life.
As readers, we know that Amitav Ghosh, never merely an academic or a polemicist, speaks with the cautious reverence of someone in the presence of something older, something alive. Storytelling, he reminds us, is not an act of invention but of listening, to land, to ancestors, to the long-forgotten agreements between humans and the earth.
Wild Fictions continues Amitav Ghosh's lifelong project, glimpsed in the blurred histories of In an Antique Land, the tender fractures of The Shadow Lines, and the haunting mysteries of The Calcutta Chromosome, of collapsing borders between fact and fable, between the visible and the invisible. It asks: What if the stories we forgot have not forgotten us?
In a conversation with Scroll, Amitav Ghosh explores memory, language, form, and the resurgence of storytelling. Excerpts from the conversation:
You've long resisted being confined to specific literary categories, novelist, essayist, public thinker. In this age of ecological and cultural disarray, how has your understanding of what a writer should or can do evolved?
I should say straight away that I don't think it's my business to tell other writers what to write. I can only speak for myself, and the reason I wrote my book, The Great Derangement, is that I found it increasingly hard to understand why I myself had been so blind to so many aspects of our changing reality, and to the fact that we are deep into a planetary crisis. Once one has seen these things, it becomes impossible to forget them and they inevitably inform every aspect of one's work and practice.
In Wild Fictions, you write of stories as living, ecological entities, beings rather than metaphors. Was this a gradual insight or did it come as a kind of revelation, a narrative visitation?
In Wild Fictions, I write about the story of Bon Bibi as a kind of living charter that guides the way in which people in the Sundarban interact with their surroundings. I think most people who live in close connection with their environments, have stories of this kind, which often permit them to find meaning in very difficult circumstances. But it would be a mistake to think that hyper-modern, hyper-technological people don't live by stories. Just look at all the talk about colonising Mars: the billionaires who go on about this are obviously reliving the stories that they read in their childhood. There is a deep pathos in this because, in their case, the Earth, having been stripped of so many of its gifts, has lost all its meaning, so they are trying to find meaning in fantasies of colonising another planet.
Your recent prose has grown more fluid, incantatory, even resistant to neat closure, a marked shift from earlier narrative structures like those in The Shadow Lines. How conscious has this transformation been, and how does it reflect the stories you're now drawn to?
The most difficult thing about writing a book is finding the right voice, the right pitch for it. This is often the most long-drawn-out part of the entire process. But once one has found that voice, one enters into a kind of bubble or dome where everything bears the imprint of that voice. When the book is finished and you have stepped out of the bubble, it is impossible to step back into it. It would be absolutely impossible for me to write in the voice in which I wrote The Shadow Lines. That's long gone for me now and that is exactly how it should be. I consider myself fortunate in that I have been able to reinvent myself and my work many times over my life.
There is in this work a subtle yet insistent critique of the literary forms we've inherited, those shaped, perhaps, by a certain Enlightenment rationality. Do you think our allegiance to these forms has limited our ability to imagine the non-human, the more-than-human, or what you call the 'wild'?
In my book The Great Derangement, I've analysed some of the constraints that Enlightenment forms of rationality impose upon literary structures. However, I think it needs to be noted that writers have always defied these structures as well, and that many writers have tried to go beyond them. Herman Melville's, Moby Dick, for example, is a great novel about non-human intentionality, something which falls outside the scope of Enlightenment rationality. So, it's not as if the writers haven't done the work. It's rather that the wider ecosystem of the literary world has tended to marginalise that work (fortunately that did not happen with Moby Dick). Generally speaking, I would say that the publishing world is extraordinarily conservative and still tends to value certain kinds of writing above others. For instance, we have long been told that the sine qua non of literary experimentation was to write in non-standard 'voices'. So enormous praise would be showered upon novels written in, say, the Scottish dialect, or a patois. I wonder what will happen to this aesthetic now that one can simply ask AI apps to write (or rather translate) long passages into Creole, or Irish slang, or AAVE, or Hinglish? It's rather amusing to contemplate.
In fact, I asked Deep Seek to translate one of the above sentences into Cockney rhyming slang and this is what it came up with: ' Straight up, the book game's still stuck in the Dark Ages, innit? They keep rabbiting on about how the bee's knees of fancy scribbling is just talking proper funny – ike that's the only tomfoolery that counts!' (And it signed off with: 'Would you like it more exaggerated or with deeper slang? Cheers, guv'nor!').
The same sentence in Hinglish: 'Bhai, seedhi baat hai, publishing waale log toh bilkul zamana ke saath nahi badle – woh abhi bhi khaas tarah ki likhaayi ko hi top class samajhte hain. Jaise ki, agar tum desi style mein nahi likhoge, toh koi value hi nahi denge!'
I think this is going to pretty much put paid to human linguistic pyrotechnics.
You've often spoken of a 'crisis of imagination' when facing environmental collapse. Do you see this as a failure of language or is it something more intangible, like the diminishing ability to envision a world that doesn't place the human at its centre?
It is both a failure of language and a failure of vision. Our metaphors feel worn out, inadequate to truly grasp the immensity of what we've lost. Yet, at a more fundamental level, we've failed to look beyond ourselves. Premodern traditions recognised a world teeming with its own forms of expression. Modernity extinguished these voices, viewing nature merely as something to exploit. To recover our ability to imagine and connect, we need to shed this human-centred pride. This isn't solely an environmental crisis; it's a crisis in how we understand and narrate our place in the world.
In drawing lines from Kalidasa to WG Sebald, you suggest a continuity of ecological consciousness across traditions. How do you build these connections without flattening cultural specificity?
Kalidasa's Meghaduta is not just a poem; it is a conversation between thecloud and the earth. Sebald's Rings of Saturn is a lament for a wounded planet. These threads are not the same, but they resonate – not because they share a single vision, but because they acknowledge the personhood of the world.
Ashutosh Kumar Thakur is the curator of the Banaras Literature Festival.