Amitav Ghosh opens The Nutmeg’s Curse with soldiers from the Dutch East India Company unleashing their savagery on the people of the Banda Islands in the 17th century. White man’s burden Colonialists’ claim to the “savage”, “wild” and “vacant” land laid the seeds of climate change, believes Ghosh. While thumbing one’s nose at scientism might be valid, when the planet …
Amitav Ghosh is an anthropologist by training but is best known as a fiction writer, and he chooses anthropological subjects around which he constructs fiction – for instance, the people, ecology and legends of the Ganges delta in The Hungry Tide. More interesting however is the fact that philosopher and polemicist Sir Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor of England, explained in …
There’s a haunting line in Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables For A Planet In Crisis that stayed with me long after I had finished reading the book: “.The climactic changes of our era are nothing other than the Earth’s response to four centuries of terraforming.” Terraforming isn’t a word you would normally associate with Earth. In Ghosh’s urgent and …
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