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The Hindu
11-08-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
Save rivers, pleads Robert Macfarlane
In his latest book, Wild Fictions, Amitav Ghosh writes about the role of a novelist as opposed to that of a historian. 'The historian's past has a sweep that the novelist's doesn't. The difference is between observing the flow of a river from the shore and from within the waters: the direction of the current is the same in both cases, but a swimmer, or a fish, has at every moment a million different choices and options.' The point that Ghosh, reflecting on his own work as a novelist is making, is that of immersion. Novelists have to respond to what characters feel, touch and fall into, unlike historians who may discuss wider trends. Natural spirits Robert Macfarlane's Is a River Alive? is not a novel, yet he dips into the waters, novelist-style, of the characters that pepper the pages, mycologists, musicians, activists, grieving friends, hermits, and rivers. The book takes us in close proximity to three rivers, and the perils they face – the mist-shrouded Rio Los Cedros in Ecuador, the deadened Adyar in Chennai, and the turbulent Mutehekau Shipu in Canada. What Macfarlane attempts is more than a simple personification of rivers. By visiting each river, navigating them, and staying by them, he attempts a character sketch which is at once bewildering and animated. To save a river, one might expect a tabling of their ecosystem services, their PH values, their gallons of water, irrevocable proof. Yet the book offers something different: it suggests that rivers are too much of the 'other' to be neatly tabulated. Macfarlane makes the political choice of rebelling against human-made boxes, painting a complex picture that is beyond simple objectivity. It suggests older ways of knowing rivers. Ecologists might call this 'ecological character,' a word that exists in India's Wetland rules (2017). The author suggests an animacy of the river beyond human-centring: this isn't anthropocentric, it is enlarging the meaning of life, he argues. In 2017, the High Court of Uttarakhand delivered a landmark judgment, emphasising the 'physical and spiritual sustenance' of the rivers Ganga and Yamuna, making them legal persons. This was later stayed by the Supreme Court. Life at Ennore creek The book takes us close to the people who think in this manner and defend rivers. The mist-laden Los Cedros is threatened by gold mining, yet this is a reserve that was protected by law in a landmark judgment that upheld the Rights of Nature and protected the reserve from mining. We meet Giulina Furci, who finds fungi new to science in the shadow of the river. The Adyar river and Ennore creek are polluted beyond belief, yet the author finds life struggling through while walking with environmentalist Yuvan Aves. The eddying Mutehekau Shipu is threatened by a dam, yet we see why the river means so much (a legal person with a right to live as per Innu declarations) even as the human party gets bitten by blackflies. This book is entirely show, not tell. There are no sermons on why you must protect nature, only monographs on what, or who, the rivers mean. In the tradition of Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass, the book offers a view of the world where the person and the river, or the person and nature, are seen in relation to each other. 'To be is to be related,' as Aves says in the book. New ways of seeing The author offers a vocabulary for this new way of seeing the world, a world-building, so to speak, in which rivers write time and features: he cites the Maori phrase—'Who are your waters' (mine, for example, would be the Yamuna), he writes on the Los Cedros: 'River and cloud can't be separated—each authors the other.' When a river spiral throws him upstream, he suggests he is going back in time. In a dream, he sees 'grief-cutter ants,' a play on leaf-cutter ants. Macfarlane thus moors his identity around rivers, the riverbed and the catchment—'everyone lives in a watershed.' Each character we meet is carrying grief: the death of a parent, the death of a sister, the death of a friend, the death of landscapes. It is the river that heals them, gives them purpose, buoys sinking spirits. Returning to Wild Fictions, one more parallel rings true. Ghosh writes: 'High modernity taught us that the earth was inert and existed to be exploited by human beings for their own purposes… We are slowly beginning to understand that in order to hear the earth, we must first learn to love it.' Love, grief, and hope flow through this book. Let the author lead you downstream, let the river toss you and nourish you, and then you can answer the title's question for yourself. The reviewer is a conservation biologist and author of Wild and Wilful - Tales of 15 Iconic Indian species.
Indian Express
14-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
Amitav Ghosh's Wild Fictions is a heartfelt essay collection on how climate crises are shaping human activity
Amitav Ghosh's collection of essays, Wild Fictions, is an invitation to be part of the author's journey as he seeks ways for a more caring and humane world. They traverse Ghosh's arc as a writer who has cast a critical eye on the ways human societies relate to themselves and the environment. He questions certitudes on civilisation, progress and Eurocentric modernity and problematises the links of postcolonial societies with their colonial past. In his recent works, Ghosh has tried to join the dots between the world of the past three hundred years and perhaps the gravest challenge of our times — climate change. The world, as he puts it, quoting the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, is entering a 'time of monsters', when an old era is dying and a new one is struggling to be born. 'But the monsters that Gramsci had in mind were political creatures — fascists. What is distinctive about our time is that its monsters also consist of weather events that would have been considered improbable in Gramsci's time — supercharged storms, megadroughts, catastrophic rain bombs and the like'. Ghosh is aware of the pitfalls of a cause-and-effect narrative. He was trained as an anthropologist, but it's well known that the writer is adept at looking at events through the eyes of a historian, environmentalist and climate scientist. Like his works of fiction, the essays showcase what Ghosh is best at — lending an attentive ear to migrants, sailors, soldiers, tribal communities, friends, neighbours. He isn't a passive interlocutor, but a seeker who scans archives, diaries and correspondences and reaches out to his respondents to draw out the complexities of their experiences. He is alert to the changes brought out by the developments in communication technology and, most importantly, does not shy away from showing that the ecological is political. As with his works of fiction, the reader is struck by the wealth of Ghosh's research. Those acquainted with his fiction will find familiar characters — Deeti from The Sea of Poppies (2008), the seafaring community Lascars from the Ibis trilogy, the legend of Bon Bibi from The Hungry Tide (2004). At times, the writer lets the reader make connections. For instance, in one essay, he observes the tragedy of 9/11 through the eyes of friends — among them. architects of the Twin Towers — as one of them gives up his life trying to evacuate people from the crumbling skyscraper. In another essay at a different part of this collection, he gets a ringside view of the incident from his daughter who sees the buildings coming down from her classroom. The incident evokes memories of research he had conducted 20 years ago in Egypt as a doctoral student in Anthropology. The 'uncanny feeling' deepens when he learns that Mohammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 attack teams, hailed from the same region where he had done field work — 'indeed his ancestral village was closely connected with the places I had worked'. What makes people undertake arduous and expensive journeys across continents? Hope of a better life? Displacement? The force of ideology? Community memory? Ghosh's fiction abounds with such curiosity, and inevitably, the quest occupies a major part of this essay collection as well. Like in his novels, he eschews easy answers to underline that migrants — whether they are from the Indian Subcontinent, Africa, West Asia — could bear scars of the past and also enrich their host cultures with their ideas and enterprise. A delightful essay — some of it, a reprise of a section in The Sea of Poppies — contemplates the etymology of the word 'banyan'. Ghosh scorns marketers who try to brand the garment as 'a sleeveless undershirt', 'singlet' or vest. Instead, he tries to find connections between the eponymous tree, the bania, the traveller, sailor and nawabs, and then locates the changing fortunes of the garment in the country's economic trajectory. Wild Fictions is about migration, ecological crises and conversations of Ghosh with fellow writers and academics. It's also a travel book — about the journeys of communities, commodities and ideas. But if there's one thing that unites the essays, it's Ghosh's criticism of Eurocentric modernity. In an exchange with historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, he draws links with modernity, colonialism and racism. In other essays, he asserts that current crises — whether events such as 9/11, the discomfiture with migrants in some parts of the world, the climate and ecological challenges — have to do with power structures created by modernity. Ghosh isn't against modernity per se, but he does seem to believe that European hegemony has foreclosed alternative imaginations of progress. Ghosh doesn't engage much with the large corpus of scholarly engagement with modernity. But in many ways, the writer is like Manmohan Mitra, the protagonist of Satyajit Ray's trenchant critique of the modern civilisation, Agantuk (1991) – a seeker who amplifies the moral voice of some of his protagonists. He draws attention to myriad forms of inequalities — between humans and nature, between different worldviews, nations and peoples. And, he does so gently, without even a sentence in anger.
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.
