
KOCHI: In a world where the climate suffers worse plights every day, discourse around the issue is still struggling to catch up with the magnitude of the crisis. In the titular essay of Amitav Ghosh’s latest book, Wild Fictions (HarperCollins India; Rs 799), climate, nature, and our interrelationships come under scrutiny in the context of power.
The essay ‘Wild Fictions’, by nature a non-fiction account, treads a nimble line between fact and fable; Ghosh’s identity as a stalwart in Indian fiction cannot help but with incredible effect, beat as this text’s heart. If non-fiction is the primary mode of writing, it still rolls from a pen whose mother tongue is fiction.
Storytelling acts as a stepping stone for this account, where Ghosh draws in different stories from varied contexts, all of whose threads seem to knit together at a point that heaves with ecological concern.
Ghosh’s lens sees the end goal of climate conservation as rooted in the human species being factored in as an inherent part of nature, not existing outside of it. To his credit, it is a lens that is grounded in issues of caste (and by extension, race), evident in his retelling of the aforementioned stories, including ‘The Indian Hut’.
Because he asserts fiction as the most able salve towards reintegrating humanity within nature, it is important to be aware of ideologies being essentially stories too, with the best stories making the most potent ideologies. Ghosh, a recent winner of the Crossword Lifetime Achievement Award, sheds light, “Fascist ideologies, with their emphasis on purity, hierarchy, and exclusion, are particularly insidious.
They thrive on fear, on the demonisation of the ‘other’, be it a different race, religion, or even a perceived threat to the natural order. To counter these narratives, we need stories that celebrate difference, that weave together the human and the non-human, that acknowledge the interconnectedness of all beings.”
There is a familiar undercurrent visible in Ghosh’s retold stories that involve the Western gaze as the narrative searchlight. In these stories, or even real incidents described in the essay, the binary Western mind easily dismisses indigenous stories as fables and fiction that are in necessary opposition to science. Ghosh himself stresses,
“The notion that indigenous knowledge is somehow ‘primitive’ or ‘irrational’ stems from a long history of colonial arrogance, a desire to assert Western dominance over other ways of knowing. Instead of dismissing these other ways of knowing, we need to find ways to integrate them with modern science. We need to create spaces for dialogue and exchange, where indigenous knowledge systems can be valued and respected.”
Amongst the many ideologies pervasive to natural ecosystems, masquerading as norms, there is one that Ghosh brings up that is of special perversion: the ‘untouched forest’. That the idea of an ‘untouched forest’ has unmistakably casteist roots is clear enough; it also reveals the racist rhetoric that allows Western naturalists to impose an exclusivity between humanity and nature.
Echoing the sentiments already evident in the essay, Ghosh states, “The concept of the ‘untouched forest’ is a deeply problematic one, rooted in long histories of dispossession. It reflects a desire to separate humans from nature, to create an allegedly pristine wilderness devoid of human presence.
This idea is a fantasy – human populations have been deeply involved in the creation of many apparently ‘untouched’ and ‘pristine’ forests.”