Review by Peter Reason
I am a great fan of Amitav Ghosh both for his fiction and his non-fiction. I was introduced to his writing when The Hungry Tide was set as required reading for an MA module on Writing and Place, alerting me both to the quality of his narrative and to the depth of his research and his perspective as an Indian writer on world affairs. For The Hungry Tide is not only about the vulnerable waters of the Bengali coastline, but about the peculiar relationship between European and Indian people and culture. In the Ibis Trilogy which followed, Sea of Poppies alerts us to the forced cultivation of opium poppies (in place of food) by Bengali farmers in the British Raj; River of Smoke to the transportation of labour around the Indian Ocean; and Flood of Fire to the systematic trading of opium to China through the port of Guangzhou (Canton), self-justified by the doctrine of Free Trade, itself justified by a perverted Christianity. I much enjoyed my reading – the novels are very engaging – and I was deeply informed about aspects of the history of Empire we were not taught at school. In Ghosh’s non-fiction, The Nutmeg’s Curse takes a critical view of the history and legacy of European colonialism and the devastation it has wrought on so many cultures and on the more-than-human world. Smoke and Ashes reveals the hidden history of the opium trade into China (the involvement of the United States is particularly shocking). Fiction and non-fiction – and for Ghosh these are inextricably linked – these books are based on extensive and meticulous research (my reviews for Shiny here and here). While I am reviewing Ghosh’s oeuvre, please be sure not to miss his allegorical writing in Jungle Nama and The Living Mountain (Shiny review here).
Wild Fictions is a collection of essays on a wide range of contemporary topics. Ghosh introduces them by pointing to the ‘thread that runs through most of them: of bearing witness to a rupture in time, of chronicling the passing of an era that began 300 years ago, in the eighteenth century’ which includes the birth of modernity and industrial civilization, a period in which ‘under the leadership of the British empire, the West tightened its grip over most of the world…’ Ghosh sees that the world is now entering a ‘time of monsters’, as Antonio Gramsci once put it, when ‘an old era was dying and a new one was struggling to be born’. (Some scholars argue that this is an inaccurate translation of Gramsci’s original Italian, but the English phrase is by now so compelling that such criticism is beside the point!)
The topics covered by these essays are gathered under the headings Climate Change and Environment, Witnesses, Travel and Discovery, Narratives, Conversations, and Presentations. Just to pick out a few examples, there is an essay on migration and displacement in this time of planetary crisis; accounts, drawing on first-hand reports, of the experience of Indian soldiers fighting for the British against the Ottoman Empire in present-day Iraq and Syria; stories from Ghosh’s travels for research, in particular to Egypt and the Spice Islands; Wild Fictions, re-telling of – and drawing lessons from – traditional Indian stories (from which the title of the volume is taken); conversations with other writers and scholars; and a variety of presentations to different audiences.
In the Afterword, Ghosh argues that while we may well be in a ‘time of monsters’, the strange thing is that this interstitial era could also be described as a ‘time of benedictions’: ‘it has suddenly become possible to contemplate, and even embrace, potentialities – that were denied or rejected during the age of high modernity’. Our worldview draws from the early modern era, ‘when a tiny group of elite European men invented a philosophy in which sentience, thought, reason and historical agency were ascribed solely to human beings, that vitalist beliefs came to be contested, denied and suppressed’. We can now begin to recover less anthropocentric (and Euro-centric) worldviews that have been kept alive by Indigenous people for millennia – an argument that is made more fully in The Nutmeg’s Curse.
As with similar collections of essays with such varied content, the reader will be more interested in some topics than others. I was reading Chapter Four, about the folly of a proposed tourist development in the Sundarbans, when the question, ‘Why do I have to know about this?’ passed through my mind. The answer came quickly and was re-enforced as I continued reading. First, these essays are so beautifully written that reading is a pleasure, even when to subject is disturbing or unpleasant (like the visit to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal in the aftermath of the December 2004 tsunami). And second, as with all of Ghosh’s books, we are privileged to contemplate global issues from the perspective of an informed Indian. Did I know about the plight of Indian soldiers fighting the Ottoman on behalf of the British Empire? Did I know that there was routes out of Japanese-invaded Burma that were reserved for Europeans? Did I know the extent of indentured labour transported around the Indian Ocean? Did I know who were the ‘lascars’ who crewed ships around the world? Did I know that so much wealth of the British Empire came from opium that impoverished Indian farmers grew and was forcibly traded to the Chinese? My answer to these and other questions is an embarrassed ‘not very much’ and certainly not in such narrative detail.
The feeling of taking part in a conversation from outside our Western assumptions was for me most salient in Conversations. Ghosh shares email exchanges between himself and celebrated historian Dipesh Chakrabarty discussing the latter’s book Provincializing Europe, which challenges some of the myths as to the origins of modernity. Two deeply informed writers and scholars show us a way of understanding empire, colonialism, the nature of modernity, in ways that challenge the everyday assumptions of even ‘progressive’ Anglo-American readers. To read these men in conversation is enlightening and, again, rather embarrassing.
I would venture to suggest that Amitav Ghosh occupies the role of ‘public intellectual’ and ‘polymath’ in our global culture. He ventures into so many fields, addresses so many contemporary issues, researches so deeply and widely, and writes both fiction and non-fiction, all in a manner that is both accessible and pleasurable. I am not convinced that this collection of essays is the best way into his work – I would argue that The Nutmeg’s Curse is first essential reading; with the Ibis Trilogy a close second for those who prefer fiction. But if you are not yet into Amitav Ghosh’s writing, you don’t know what you are missing.
Peter Reason is currently engaged in a series of experiential co-operative inquiries exploring living cosmos panpsychism: He has been regularly sitting with the River Avon and with invocation and ceremony addressing River as a community of sentient beings: “If I call to the world as sentient being, what response may I receive?” He is writing about this inquiry in at Learning How Land Speaks. He also edits Objects&Lives, short writing and imagery reflecting on household and personal objects that retain value through the memories they hold and their associations with family and cultural history. His online presence is at peterreason.net.
Amitav Ghosh, Wild Fictions (John Murray, 2025). 978-1529349405, 496pp., hardback.
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