The origin of climate change began with a spice in your kitchen cupboard. Amitav Ghosh, the writer of wonderful, gentle, sweeping epics with the power to transport readers across centuries, has chosen to use an everyday ingredient, an essential in your garam masala—an addition to every dish—nutmeg—to link climate change to colonialism.
The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables For a Planet in Crisis comes with a generous sprinkle of Ghosh’s ability to conjure up events in the past and connect them with the present. The race for spices—Ghosh writes about nutmeg, a spice believed to have the power to cure plague victims—in Europe planted the flag of colonialism. Built on violence, colonialism erased people’s language, ancient ways of living, changed history, and also changed the way the earth is viewed. “Indeed, ‘subdue’ was a key word in these conquests, recurring again and again in reference to not just human beings, but also the terrain,’’ writes Ghosh. From this processes of subduing and muting, the land—to make it profitable—was born the idea of ‘nature’ as an inert entity, a concept that would in time become the basic tenet of what might be called ‘official modernity’.”
The link is so obvious—it is remarkable that it does not really come up before Ghosh’s book. “Absolutely,’’ he says. “How is it that we don’t see it,’’ he says. “These things are quite simple. It is not complicated. I think that is what education does, so much of education that goes into actually shutting our eyes to the realities that surround us.” It is just past 9am in New York, much earlier than Ghosh usually begins his day. “You have to do what you have to do,” he says. The book was written in nine months—during the pandemic (this is a rare occasion where Ghosh blends the personal with the political, offering a view of bereavement in his own family). Dedicated to his mother, his father and mother-in-law, the book traces the trajectory of ecological devastation that the world has embarked on—the running thread is of Ghosh in New York and loss.
“It was such a difficult time,” he says. “The bereavement, the news from India every other day of friends dying or friends falling ill. It comes with anxiety. Of course, I was in New York, which was the epicentre of the epicentre. It was a sort of strange and terrible time. But it was a time that allowed me to completely focus on this.” His days, however, begin as they have for his entire writerly life—at a desk. “It is a lifetime of discipline really. I get up in the morning and go to my desk and write. That saw me through this very difficult period,” he says. Ghosh writes about his mother’s passing—not being there, but being on the phone—the fugue-like existence in New York, the constant, his inability to leave his home to see his father-in-law as he descended into a downward spiral mirroring the devastation in the book with reality. As the world descended into madness outside—Ghosh escaped into the rabbit holes of the past to find a modicum of control over his surroundings. “I was very fortunate in that I was writing non-fiction,’’ he says. “Other writer friends, especially those who write fiction, had a very difficult time. One writer friend explained it by saying that it was only in the pandemic that she realised how much energy she absorbed from other people in her work. Since I was doing non-fiction, I was absorbing that energy from books, from research that had a lot to do with it.”
But even before his non-fictional treatise on climate change came out this October, Ghosh had dealt with it fictionally in Jungle Nama, which was a retelling of the folk story of Bon Bibi in Sundarbans. For his first complete verse book, Ghosh has partnered with Salman Toor, a Pakistani artist in New York. The audio book has just been released, and Ali Sethi, with his velvet voice, sings in it. “When I finished The Great Derangement, I came to the conclusion that what I really came to was that we, as writers, have to find new stories to tell and find new ways to tell them,’’ he says. “Jungle Nama was absolutely that particular experiment.” Sethi—who was his student in Harvard—is now helping him to turn it into a performance.
The Nutmeg’s Curse, unlike Jungle Nama, deals with the question head on—philosophically, historically, economically and ecologically. The book is a sort of yoga for the mind—as Ghosh makes sense of the world bringing the systematic war waged against native Americans, to the dependency to the world energy consumption that takes the equivalent energy of over 2,800 barrels of oil per second, and, of course, the scientists who shape the discourse on climate change. It comes at a time when there is a meeting for carbon emissions and the world is struggling to keep up with the sheer dizzying pace of the impact of climate change.
The story—of foretold doom—begins in a way that only Ghosh can do: with an incident of a lantern in April 21, 1621 in Banda Islands—a blue and green archipelago in Indonesia that is so small that on most maps it is just a “sprinkling of dots”. The falling of the lantern in the dark of a moonless night in the Indies spooked Martijn Snock, a Dutch official, who had commandeered the mosque on the island as his quarters. Snock and his men started firing in the dark at random. What was unleashed later was unspeakable violence. Japanese ronins were involved, offering a glimpse of how guns for hire, or in this case swords are not a modern invention. The firing kicks off a chain of events that lead to the point where climate change is real. “We don’t see that all this goes back to violence against human beings, colonial violence, which was unleashed almost at an unimaginable scale,’’ he says. “It is really what is at the bottom of it.’’
Urgent, important, The Nutmeg’s Curse is also essential reading for any hope of the future. There is hope, Ghosh believes: it lies in people’s resistance and in story-telling. It is the only way out.
The Nutmeg’s Curse
By Amitav Ghosh
Published by
Penguin Random House
pages 352 Price Rs599