Amitav Ghosh had his first brush with climate change during a stroll near Delhi University’s North Campus over three decades ago. A freak tornado tore through the streets of the national capital in March 1978 taking nearly 30 lives and injuring hundreds, a calamity he claims to have escaped by the skin of his teeth.
Now nearly 38 years after the experience he terms as surreal, Ghosh examines the failures of literature, history and politics in addressing the most pressing challenge of our times in his second non-fiction ‘The Great Derangement- Climate Change and the Unthinkable.’
The author is not exactly treading new waters here – it is an issue which has always been an “obsession” with him, one which he dealt with obliquely in his sixth novel “The Hungry Tide”.
Although the fiction addressed topics like erosion in the Sundarbans, it also opened his eyes to some of the issues that arise when one tries to write about climate change within the bounds of a work of fiction.
“You are forced to tackle things that don’t normally figure in a novel. Things like geology, continental drift etc. So I had to grapple with this – Why I want to write about the things I really want to write within fiction. I questioned the boundaries of the novel…,” he told PTI in an interview.
Although there was “some tension” switching tracks from historical fiction to non-fiction, the ideas simply “poured out of him” while writing his latest, as he says he had been “obsessively reading about it for years”.
Recalling the fateful March evening, Ghosh wonders whether it was that extreme weather phenomenon that perhaps got him thinking about climate change.
“I heard a noise and I looked over my shoulder, and I saw this strange cloud. And suddenly this sort of long finger seemed to come out of the cloud straight down towards me. I had the presence of mind that I ran, and took shelter. Suddenly I looked up and I saw things hurtling past me. Like tea stalls, and cars and scooters. It lasted for about a moment. It seemed completely surreal,” he describes.
From Agencies, Feature image courtesy townhallseattle.org
