Peppered with uncanny episodes and coincidences involving non-human forces, Amitav Ghosh’s Ghost-Eye blurs the line between real and unreal, reimagining memory through reincarnation while foregrounding climate anxiety. The novel opens in 1960s Calcutta, where three-year-old Varsha Gupta, born into a rigidly vegetarian Marwari family, shocks her household by demanding fish and rice. Psychiatrist Shoma Bose diagnoses her as a “case of the reincarnation type”. Varsha, it emerges, had lived as a fisherwoman in the Sunderbans. The narrative unfolds through Dinu, Shoma’s nephew, a Brooklyn-based bookseller, who is contacted during the pandemic by Tipu, an NGO worker trying to stop a coal power plant in the fragile delta. Tipu believes Varsha’s past holds the key to averting ecological disaster.
The title refers to Tipu’s heterochromia and to those who can see the “unseen”. Varsha is one such “ghost-eye”, capable of prophecy and spirit communication. Ghosh suggests that portals open between worlds when catastrophe looms, and in this novel, supernatural intervention appears as the only hope for the Sunderbans.
By privileging metaphysics over material realities, Ghost-Eye ultimately shifts from climate crisis toward the supernatural.
Interview |Writing About Collapse is an Important Literary Tradition: Amitav Ghosh
In Ghost-Eye, the themes of the supernatural—reincarnation, synchronicities, spirits—dominate. Are you trying to explore the link between climate justice and the supernatural?
Personally, I don’t give any credence to words like ‘supernatural’, or, for that matter, ‘natural’. These categories were invented during the Catholic Inquisition, and they were intended to create a binary between things of this world and otherworldly matters. I do not subscribe to this binary at all. How do we draw the line between worldly and unworldly phenomena? Into which category do we put quantum phenomena? The great physicist Niels Bohr once said that behind everything real there is something unreal. In practice, it is impossible to draw a strict line between the two. As for reincarnation, there are literally thousands of documented cases of children who are born with past-life memories, not just in India but around the world. Should these memories be classified as ‘natural’ or ‘supernatural’? Or do they present a profound challenge to that binary? I think these questions need to be contended with.
Among all your books, Ghost-Eye seems to have the most intimate relationship with food, especially fish.
Food is perhaps the most intimate and regular exchange between the human body and the environment. It is biochemistry, but it is also culture, memory, and love. Food can create an entire cosmology—a way of knowing the weather, the seasons, the health of the water—all of that is encoded in the knowledge of how to catch a particular fish, how to clean it, and how to cook it with the right spices. That knowledge is granular, local, and passed down through generations. It binds humans to their ecology not as abstract “environmentalists,” but as creatures who derive their sustenance and joy from a specific, living world. When that world is destroyed, it isn’t just an ecosystem service that is lost; it is a library of wisdom, a lexicon of taste, a whole way of being.
The story leads us into Varsha’s past life as a fisherwoman, possibly from a different caste. Do you think caste shapes how people interact with ecosystems?
There can be no doubt that in India, the caste system creates a hierarchy based on proximity to and distance from the environment, with the latter being elevated above the former. Those who work most closely with the elements, fisherfolk, farmers, or those who handle “waste”—in other words, the people who were described by Madhav Gadgil as ‘ecosystem people’—are usually placed at the bottom of the social order. But in fact, ‘ecosystem people’ possess a profound, embodied knowledge of the natural world. Varsha’s past life as a fisherwoman and cook places her in an intimate relationship with the river that a landlord or a bureaucrat would never have. There is a profound irony in this because the planetary crisis will probably overturn this entire hierarchy.
How has the climate emergency reshaped your relationship with literature?
The books I have written over the last many years, both fiction and non-fiction, have made me lose interest in the kind of literary fiction that is centered on the private domestic dramas of a few privileged humans in a stable world. That world is gone. We are now in a world that is on a trajectory that is heading towards the breakdown of many of the systems that sustain our societies. But it’s important to recognise that writing about collapse is itself an important literary tradition.
One might expect climate crisis to occupy a central place in ‘serious’ fiction. Why do you think climate change remains marginal?
There is a deep-seated, almost theological belief in the autonomy of the human. The “serious” novel, as it evolved in the 19th century, is predicated on the idea of human protagonists acting against the stable, neutral backdrop of an orderly ‘Nature’. The intersecting crises of the present day have demolished that scenario. They have made the non-human world an active, unpredictable participant in the story. This is profoundly unsettling to the traditional form. Yet, a few writers have been able to rise to the challenge using the techniques of traditional realist fiction. The climate crisis is not just changing our world; it is demanding that we change our stories.