In early 1980, Amitav Ghosh, a 24-year-old student of social anthropology at the University of Oxford, arrived in Egypt on a research trip. He journeyed to a small rural village where his accommodation consisted of a vacated chicken coop on the roof of a mud hut. The village had no electricity although there was a supply of piped water.
At that time, Egypt imported water pumps from India, and the villagers assumed their visitor, who hailed from that country, understood their new equipment. Sadly not – Ghosh describes himself as someone “hard put to tell a spanner from a hammer or a sprocket from a gasket”. Not to disappoint his hosts, however, the young student pronounced positively on the merits of the water pumps. “No machine failed my inspection,” he admits.
Today, Ghosh is a renowned novelist and public intellectual but he is still seeking to make connections between different peoples so as to save a world in “a period of extraordinary instability and fear”.
The story of his student travels is contained in a piece from 2008 reproduced in this collection of 27 articles, lectures and correspondence spanning 2004 to 2022. Wild Fictions is divided into six sections, which focus on issues long championed by Ghosh including geopolitical inequities arising from colonisation, climate change and human migration. Each section is worthy of a single review, in particular, Conservations, which includes a fascinating scholarly email exchange with the Indian historian, Dipesh Chakrabarty.
Notwithstanding the author’s bleak political prognosis, the collection is never polemical, and it brims with ideas and insights. Ghosh also has a fine eye for detail, evident in his travel writings. A 2011 article on travelling in the province of Yunnan in southwestern China is a joy. “The landscape in this part of Yunnan is as crumpled and fractured as the bonnet of a car after a head-on collision. Tectonic plates grinding into each other with titanic force have created jagged mountains and deep valleys, some of which are worlds unto themselves, inhabited by distinct ethnic groups.”
This trip includes a memorable meal in “a little two-table eatery” adjacent to a village market. Local produce provides the basis for the meal, including “Chinese bitter melons cooked with freshly laid eggs and chunks of Yunnan’s storied ham; a frittata-like omelette made with wildflowers; dishes of mushrooms – some came stewed in a light broth; some had barely felt the touch of heat; some were flash-fried with slices of green chilli and garlic.” At the end of the meal, the owner produced home-made orchid wine. “The gods could be forgiven for envying this feast,” Ghosh writes.
Even in these travel articles, Ghosh never loses sight of his wider concerns about geopolitical inequities, and the climate and migration emergencies. There is time for reflection on globalisation during a visit to Ternate, a tiny island in the Far East of Indonesia once known as the Moluccas or Spice Islands, and home to the tree that produces cloves.
Ternate is described as a sleepy place, notable mainly for the ruins of the early Portuguese and Dutch forts that line its shores. The island is by no means an economic backwater but it is grappling with climate change. There is less rain, and the rain that comes is more erratic than previously, and this has led to the spread of blight and disease. The lack of rain has also brought wildfires. As Ghosh observes: “across the island, clove trees are dying; in orchard after orchard they stand in drooping clumps, their branches leafless, their trunks ashen.”
Faced with this serious situation, the author asks about the efforts the people of Ternate are making to reduce their carbon emissions. One local man provides a blunt reply: “Why should we cut back? That would be unjust to us. The West had their turn when we were weak and powerless and they were our rulers. It’s our turn now.”
Here, Ghosh is at his sparkling best, drawing together disparate political and policy themes in arguing that global action on climate change cannot be seen as “explicitly about maintaining a structure of dominance – or, in other words, inequality”.
Ghosh’s worldview stands in sharp contrast to the Trump administration’s narrow and misguided “United States Alone” outlook. Indeed, we might all be better off should more thoughtful political leaders than the current US president read the paragraphs on migration in the introduction to Wild Fictions.
Ghosh argues that support for demagogues and right-wing politicians derives from “a myth of victimhood, in which affluent countries are seen as the aggrieved parties, resisting invasions by black and brown foreigners” but forgetting that the West created the preconditions for these mass migrations with invasions and regime-change operations “while revelling in the delirium of the unipolar moment”.
Kevin Rafter is professor of political communication at DCU and the author of Dillon Rediscovered
