Book: WILD FICTIONS: ESSAYS
Author: Amitav Ghosh
Published by: Fourth Estate
Price: Rs 799
Amitav Ghosh is one of the few Indian writers who straddles the worlds of fiction and non-fiction with a conviction that they need to inform and complement each other. These two worlds are often connected by a passage of time where the present appears as a refiguration of the past and the past is held accountable to the present’s concerns and anxieties. This constant movement among different times (and multiple geographies) infuses Ghosh’s narratives with remarkable patience and empathy, traits that are becoming rare in contemporary articulations of the political prose. At a time of cheeky indifference and aggressive denial, Ghosh refuses to give up on this tired, depleted, exploited planet and its inhabitants. Not yet.
Wild Fictions, his new collection of essays, mirrors Ghosh’s commitment. The essays are of several kinds and have been written over a period of almost twenty-five years with a freshly-written Introduction and an Afterword. Apart from these, there are six sections starting with the one on “Climate Change and Environment”. It is followed by short pieces on books that he has found interesting, travel narratives, exchanges with other scholars and writers, lectures and ruminations.
In Ghosh’s words, the essays have a running thread “of bearing witness to a rupture in time, of chronicling the passing of an era that began 300 years ago…” This was the time that saw in gradual succession both the industrialisation of the Western world and the colonisation of the rest, decolonisation, the globalisation of American political and cultural hegemony, the fall of the Soviet Union, the emergence of unipolarity and, now, the crumbling of the American dream.
In all this, we have suddenly found ourselves mired in a situation where drawing a line between the natural and the political seems impossible and probably ill-advised. The processes facilitating the unhindered accumulation of capital, exploitation of labour, concentration of power in the hands of few, widening of the income gap and the intensification of inequality have led to the destruction of life forms, catastrophes, pandemics and an apprehension of an almost hopeless future. The fanciful boasting of species pride has now turned into a call for help. The crisis that we are living is a consequence of the hubris that some of the world leaders still seem to entertain.
The essays present the bleakness of the situation from different perspectives and with varied implications. Often, the historical narratives draw upon ethnographical snippets (Ghosh, lest we forget, is trained in both) and the literary slips into cautionary tales. Multiple examples can be given but my favourite is the essay that has given the book its title. In it, Ghosh introduces us to a series of ‘wild’ narratives of different genres — a short story by a French naturalist where a Western pundit is taught a lesson by a Dalit hut dweller, an article by a British natural historian where a school of whales was released by the locals to the dismay of the scientist, the legend of Bon Bibi who cut to size both the tiger king, Dokkhin Rai, and a greedy human called Dhona, who wanted to profit out of the forest. These diverse narratives converge on one point: “The relationship between people and their surroundings constitutes as vast a spectrum of experience as the human mind is capable of conceiving…” No policy on resource management, sustainable living and climate change can be truly beneficial if it fails to take into account this simple fact.
If it all sounds too romantic and unfeasible, that is because we are quick to draw a binary between reason and love, prudence and compassion, thinking and living. When Jagadish Chandra Bose argued that plants possessed a form of sentience, he was rebuked by his Western colleagues. “Today Bose stands vindicated,” Ghosh tells us in the Afterword, “and [the] subject of plant sentience is now a burgeoning field of study.” A sustainable life is not wild fiction. But we need to be open to all the possibilities of cohabitation and cooperation. As Bose once said in Ghosh’s beautiful translation, “Where there is love many possibilities can be seen, many things can be heard.”
Are we ready to love, ready to listen?