COMMUNITY
Returning to the Sundarbans
Amitav Ghosh
“The most central aspect of what we call literary modernity is that it's centered around humans: Western humans. It's not just that it excludes other kinds of beings, it also excludes most of the species we now call humanity. This doesn't change with post-1945 Western avant-gardism. If anything, that experimentalism resulted into the absolute withdrawal of the human into abstractions.”
Amitav Ghosh speaks to Kartika Budhwar about the Sundarbans & climate change and its relationship with literature, literary modernity, and the Western avant-garde.
During COVID lockdowns, nobody seems to have considered the fate of migrant workers who were stranded in cities. Many were so desperate they started walking home. And right then, Cyclone Amphan started in the Bay of Bengal. All these catastrophes intersect disastrously.
RECOMMENDED: The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (Penguin Allen Lane, 2021) by Amitav Ghosh.
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:
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Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV.
Interview
Sundarbans
Commonwealth Literature
Climate Change and Literature
Cyclone Amphan
Evictions
Migrant Workers
Energy Crisis
Geography
Mythology
Working-Class Stories
Humanitarian Crisis
Language
Epistemology
Gopinath Mohanty
Failure of the Avant-Garde
Debjani Bhattacharyya
Modernism
Bay of Bengal
Climate Change
Climate Anxiety
Histories of Migrations
Avant-Garde Origins
AMITAV GHOSH is the author of The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, Gun Island and The Ibis Trilogy, consisting of Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and Flood of Fire. The Great Derangement; Climate Change and the Unthinkable, a work of non-fiction, appeared in 2016. The Circle of Reason was awarded France’s Prix Médicis in 1990, and The Shadow Lines won two prestigious Indian prizes the same year, the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Ananda Puraskar. The Calcutta Chromosome won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and The Glass Palace won the International e-Book Award at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The Hungry Tide was awarded the Crossword Book Prize. His novel, Sea of Poppies was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. He holds two Lifetime Achievement awards and four honorary doctorates. In 2018 he was awarded the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary honor. He was the first English-language writer to receive the award. In 2019 Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the most important global thinkers of the preceding decade. His latest book is The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis.
