Wild Fictions: Essays
By Amitav Ghosh
HarperCollins, 496 pages, Rs 799.00

Amitav Ghosh, one of a handful of Indian authors with a global readership, is not only a great storyteller, he is an excellent essayist. His essay collections are as eagerly awaited as his fictions.

With the collection ‘Imam and the Indian’ (2002), Ghosh offered us an eclectic and unique mix of travel writing (‘An Egyptian in Baghdad’), political commentary (‘The Ghosts of Mrs Gandhi’), literary criticism (‘Petrofiction’), book review (‘Empire and Soul’), profile (‘Agha Shahid Ali in Brooklyn’), memoir (the title piece) and the good old-fashioned literary essay. No other writer could turn a piece of ‘academic’ writing with literary flair of a suspense novel (or was it the other way round à la Umberto Eco?) as he did in ‘The Slave of M.S. H.6’.

The latest collection, ‘Wild Fictions’, continued the same tradition of fine prose pieces in a variety of sub-categories, with one addition – climate change and environment, the theme of his several recent novels and two non-fiction works (‘The Great Derangement’ and ‘The Nutmeg’s Curse’). Written for journals and magazines over several years, the essays do have a common thread running through them, as the author says in the Introduction, “of bearing witness to a rupture in time, of chronicling the passing of an era that began 300 years ago, in the eighteenth century.”

‘Wild Fictions’ brings together Ghosh’s writings over the last twenty-five years: literature and language; climate change and the environment; human lives ... The 26 essays are presented under these thematic sections: Climate Change and Environment, Witnesses, Travel and Discovery, Narratives, Conversations and Presentations.

From the significance of the commodification of the clove to the diversity of the mangrove forests in Bengal and the radical fluidity of multilingualism, ‘Wild Fictions’ is a powerful refutation of imperial violence, a fascinating exploration of the fictions we weave to absorb history, and a reminder of the importance of sensitivity and empathy.

With the combination of moral passion, intellectual curiosity and literary elegance that defines his writing, Ghosh makes us understand the world in new, and urgent, ways. Together, the pieces in Wild Fictions chart a course that allows us to heal our relationships and restore the delicate balance with the volatile landscapes to which we all belong.

The title piece (which can be read here in full: https://www.amitavghosh.com/docs/Wild%20Fictions.pdf) bring together nearly all of the sub-genres and concerns mentioned above in one piece. First published in ‘Outlook’ in 2008, it begins with the author wondering, “If there is anything distinctive about human beings, as a species, it consists, I believe, in our ability to experience the world through stories.” As an example, he chooses ‘The Indian Hut’ (1791), a story by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, “a novelist, naturalist and philosopher who was both a friend and disciple of Jean-Jacques Rousseau”. It apparently made a deep impression on Mahatma Gandhi too.

Ghosh wrote the essay when he was working on the first volume (‘The Sea of Poppies’) of his famed Ibis Trilogy. The essay marks the point from when climate concerns became explicit and Ghosh’s writings. It also has the seeds of ‘Gun Island’.

Ghosh writes,

“The relationship between human beings and their surroundings constitutes as vast a spectrum of experience as the human mind is capable of conceiving - it ranges from a fisherman’s knowledge of a river’s rapids, to Saint Francis of Assissi’s meditations; from a child’s wonder at the sight of a butterfly to public outrage at an oil-spill. The very vastness of this spectrum of experience points us to the reason why the human relationship with nature is so profoundly formed by fictional imaginings of it, no matter whether it be the stories of a writer like Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, a legend such as that of Bon Bibi or a novel like Herman Melville’s incomparable Moby Dick.”

In a manifesto-like tone, he states his belief that “only fiction can provide a canvas broad enough to address this relationship in all its dimensions; only in fiction can a reconciliation be affected between Bon Bibi and Saint-Pierre’s recluse, between the quest of a scientist determined to prevent the disappearance of a species and the needs of a fisherman who must hunt in order to live”.

Any effective climate action, then, must begin with literature. In India, Ghosh names Sivarama Karanth, Gopinath Mohanty and Mahasweta Devi as those who have shown the way.

An especially notable piece here is the author’s long conversation, a series of email exchanges, with renowned historian Dipesh Chakrabarty on the latter’s now-classic ‘Provincializing Europe’ (2000).