Latest news with #TheNutmeg'sCurse
Express Tribune
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
Hotter than literature
For too long, the literary gaze on South Asia's summers, especially through diaspora pens writing for white audiences, has leaned on sepia tropes: mangoes and melas, the year-long appeal of chai, ceiling fans whirring above midday siestas, and monsoon promises murmured by young lovers over sticks of kulfi. That version of summer still lives in memory, but on the ground today, the season has turned brutal. Now, summer in South Asia means WhatsApp warnings of 50 degree heat waves, rivers rising like beasts, mudslides swallowing homes, and air so thick with smog it feels like inhaling soup. The climate is morphing itself into something unrecognisable, barging into our homes like a burglar with a crowbar. And the worst part is that this region, among the most climate-vulnerable on the planet, barely caused the crisis, but is left choking on its consequences. Still, literature can help us breathe through the smoke; not with neat answers, but with a kind of imaginative truth-telling sharper than any policy paper. From speculative fiction to sharp reportage, here are six scorching, sweeping, and surprising books to read (preferably under a fan) as we confront the climate crisis head-on and ask, "Now what?" 'The Great Derangement' If you've ever asked, "Why doesn't literature talk about climate change more?", Amitav Ghosh beat you to it. In this fiery and frustrated polemic, he calls out the literary world for its complicity in ignoring the planetary crisis, while weaving in cyclones, colonialism, and carbon in prose that's part sermon, part TED Talk, part time machine. He argues that the modern novel, with its tight individualism and preference for psychological over planetary drama, just isn't built to accommodate climate horror. The real derangement is our failure to imagine the unimaginable. Ghosh writes, "The climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination,", weaving from this simple argument a potent read that feels even more urgent as the temperature dial cranks up every year. 'The Nutmeg's Curse' Don't let the dainty spice in the title fool you; The Nutmeg's Curse is Ghosh in full prophet-of-doom mode. A follow-up to his earlier manifesto, this book leaps from the nutmeg trade to fossil fuels, reframing colonialism as the original climate crime. If ypu think the East India Company was simply after flavour, Ghosh is here to tell you in 350 odd pages that the Company was laying the groundwork for extractive capitalism that treats land as loot. Ghosh connects the dots from the Banda Islands to Standing Rock to Bhopal, building a case that the climate crisis is colonialism in camouflage. In an interesting turn of events, he also argues for listening to spirits, ancestors, and non-human voices, which means if you're looking to delve into a séance with the planet, this one's for you. 'Tomb of Sand' A postmodern, feminist epic about Partition and grief in a climate reading list? This is the first topper for the hear-me-out cake I'm about to assemble. Geetanjali Shree's Tomb of Sand is a shape-shifting beast of a novel, and while it doesn't speak climate, it breathes it: the porousness of borders, the circularity of life, the quiet endurance of the earth, all translated carefully and sensitively into English by Daisy Rockwell. Set partly in the sweltering plains of Uttar Pradesh, the book captures heat not just as weather but as memory, backdrop, metaphor. It's a story about a woman refusing to die, a journey into and out of exile, and in many ways, the perfect companion for our overheated age. Of its many memorable scenes, one that sticks with me as the heat approaches is a grandmother figure lying under a neem tree, contemplating a world that has forgotten how to listen to nature. 'How to Avoid a Climate Disaster' Let's begin this with full disclosure; this book comes from Bill Gates' pen. Hear me out, part two. Yes, yes, it's a billionaire with a blueprint. But if you've ever found yourself frantically Googling "What can I do about climate change?" at 2AM, Gates' book is your mechanical, methodical friend. No soaring metaphors, no poetic despair, just clear-eyed math, solutions, and frameworks. South Asians often get left out of the centre-stage climate narratives (unless we're dying), but the innovations, energy models, and urban planning discussed here offer actionable insights for a region rapidly urbanising and boiling. Read it, if only to argue with it. As for some additional motivation on the side, if you take a sip of water every time he says "net zero," you'll be hydrated for days of this cruel summer. 'The Ministry for the Future' In this genre-defying techno-thriller-meets-policy-dreamscape, Kim Stanley Robinson experiments with a fictional voice which actually takes climate collapse seriously, imagining a world post-2025 where a deadly Indian heat wave kills millions, and kicks off global revolution. When this book came out five years ago, it still qualified as fiction; now, it's becoming increasingly hard to tell. The novel begins with an utterly terrifying chapter set in Uttar Pradesh, where a heat-and-humidity combination kills people faster than governments can tweet condolences. From there, it spirals into geoengineering experiments, rogue climate interventions, financial reforms, and a daring reinvention of diplomacy. It's grim. It's hopeful. It's utopian by necessity. And it shows that fiction can do what facts often can't: move us from paralysis to possibility. 'No Nation for Women' Once again, hear me out; while this is a book about gendered violence across India, its placement here is intentional. Climate change isn't gender-neutral; women, especially rural women, are disproportionately impacted by floods, displacement, droughts, and the long treks for potable water. Priyanka Dubey's relentless, ground-reported narratives, whether from the sands of Rajasthan or the ghats of Varanasi, show how bodies and geographies are both battlefields. In one particularly poignant section, a woman in a flood-ravaged village recounts how, after losing her home, she had to barter sex for rice to feed her family. This comes as no surprise because climate fiction can't afford to be polite. 'The Water Knife' This one's a wildcard, not set in South Asia, but what it imagines might be our shared future. In Paolo Bacigalupi's thriller, the American Southwest has run out of water, Las Vegas sends mercenaries to sabotage other cities' supplies and journalists get assassinated for asking too many hydrological questions. If this sounds too extreme, consider that Chennai, Karachi, and Dhaka have already had "Day Zero" water scares. In 2019, India's Press Information Bureau predicted that 21 cities would run out of groundwater by 2030. What this means is that water wars aren't science fiction anymore. Reading won't solve the climate crisis. But reading can do what governments often can't: prepare the imagination, cultivate empathy, spark resistance, and shift the cultural weather. South Asia's heat waves aren't just meteorological anymore; they're political, literary, existential. More than ever, every scorched field and overflowing drain is a question: what kind of stories do we need now? Maybe we need stories that dare to rewild the world, that ask us to slow down, that reject the myth of infinite growth. Maybe we need to centre the voices of those who've long lived at the margins: indigenous communities, fisherfolk, small farmers, women who know the land better than Google Earth. Maybe we need new genres altogether: cli-fi folk epics, speculative ecologies, bureaucratic horror set in urban planning offices. But mostly, we need to read with the fan on, the lights off, and a stubborn belief that literature, hot, messy, and urgent as it may be, can still turn the temperature down on our burning world.
Scroll.in
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scroll.in
‘It would be a mistake to think that hyper-technological people don't live by stories': Amitav Ghosh
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.
