The Age of Monsters: Amitav Ghosh’s Wild Fictions Unravels the Intersections of Migration, Climate Crisis, and Colonial Legacy

Amitav Ghosh’s Wild Fictions starts with a deceptively novel-like tone. We meet Bangladeshi migrants in Italy; Ghosh is interviewing them there. The chapter ebbs and flows in characteristic Ghosh style: he writes about people whose personal stories, grief, and disappointments wash over you. He describes Palash, a Bangladeshi migrant who is beaten up by a Kalashnikov-carrying Libyan gang (Libya being a stopover for entry into Italy). As Palash bleeds into the sand, the only thing he is concerned about is saving his cell phone. This, Ghosh explains, is because the cell phone, with applications like WhatsApp and UPI (Unified Payments Interface), is in itself an important tool that enables migrations.

US President Donald Trump once said that migrants were not impoverished because they had cell phones. Ghosh argues instead that cell phones contain aspiration and information that begins the very act of migration: routes, money transfers, along with a willingness to believe in the mythology of a better life in new places. This “global citizenry of desire” is further enmeshed with the climate crisis. Changing weather patterns and other climate pressures, coupled with an unquenchable consumer culture, set up a chain of events that result in migrations.

Ghosh writes: “Climate change and migration are in fact two cognate aspects of the same thing, in that both are effects of the ever-increasing growth and acceleration of processes of production, consumption and circulation. In this sense, the dynamic that is driving the other uprootings that we are now witnessing—of trees, animals, plants, glaciers, and so on—is no different from that which is driving the movements of humans. This is another respect in which human history has once again converged with the history of the earth.”

Also Read | The heat will kill the economy. But it will kill us first

This is a precursor to the rest of the book, a collection of essays that brings together seemingly disconnected topics and attempts to uncover patterns and linkages between them. Ghosh writes on things close to him, such as language, history, migration (his interviews with the migrants in Italy inspired the novel Gun Island), and climate change. At its heart, though, this is a take-down of disaster capitalism (the term was first used by the author Naomi Klein) and imperial, colonial, and capitalist violence. It is an uncovering of what he calls “the age of monsters”, derived from the philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s words. The sections of the book include Climate Change and Environment, Witnesses (on the research he did for his historical novels), Travel and Discovery, Narratives, Conversations, Presentations (this alludes to some of his blog posts).

Ghosh’s tracing of the age of monsters is not likely to go down well with everyone. He derides Project Tiger, calling it a failure; this is at odds with the Indian government’s frenzied exultations over the rise in tiger numbers.

The first way to read the book is to trace Ghosh’s journey as an author. The essays in Wild Fictions—some from the early 2000s, others from a couple of years ago—provide non-fictional breadcrumbs to his journey as a novelist. He writes of the Ternate Island in Indonesia, which once produced cloves. The value of the clove created a battle between colonialists, and ultimately, the Dutch moved in. The new administration decided clove trees should be grown on another island, and all the clove trees in Ternate were removed. Today, the clove is more widely produced globally, but ironically, fresh cultivation in the volcanic Ternate Island is failing. Climate events like wildfires and erratic rainfall have killed off production.

An island that was at the centre of prosperous trade for centuries, which then attracted colonial excess, now cannot grow the tree that put it on the global map in the first place. These provide clues for other works by Ghosh, which look at plants, trees, and spices at the heart of civilisation as it were: The Living Mountain, 2022 (“They knew a lot about how things work, but nothing about what they mean” he writes of colonisers in this fable; the book is imbued with a reverence for nature seen in works like those of Robin Wall Kimmerer), on opium in Smoke and Ashes: A Writer’s Journey Through Opium’s Hidden Histories, 2023, and on nutmeg in The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, 2021 (set on the Banda Islands, also referenced in this book). All these works posit a moral examination of colonial or imperial greed and the exploitation of natural resources. Other portions of Wild Fictions trace some of the research around Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy and respond to criticism of his writing.

The second way to read this book is to approach it like a stamp collection of ideas that have contemporary significance. Ghosh writes about topics that can seem bewilderingly different: how language was used on Lascar ships (with Arab, Asian, and African sailors), the ill-conceived mass tourism plans for the Sundarbans in the 2000s (which find a parallel in more recent tourism plans for Lakshadweep), his own spice mixes and relationship with nature, his research in Egypt, global consumerism, books that have shaped his thoughts, racism, colonialism, and the First World War. This may also be confusing for those wondering about the nature of the essay selection. While sections of the book have explainers, brief context-setting before each chapter would have further benefited the book.

Ghosh’s tracing of the age of monsters is not likely to go down well with everyone. He derides Project Tiger, calling it a failure; this is at odds with the Indian government’s frenzied exultations over the rise in tiger numbers. He examines patterns of consumerism and tech-based progressivism, finding them frequently empty and exploitative: those who enjoy new shiny things and believe that AI will rescue humanity from its drudgeries might find this provocative. But everything Ghosh writes in the book is shot through with an intellectual enquiry into drivers of processes, actions, and events.

His examination has a historian’s eye on what events led to a particular decision; it is also a novelist’s gaze that never loses sight of how characters—real people—get affected by events bigger than them. It is this melding of scholarship and humanism that should be a reason to engage seriously with the book and provides valuable insights into the making of an author. “… if indeed there is in cultures at large as well as in works of literature such a thing as an environmental unconscious, then surely it would consist in an overlapping of the pragmatic and the poetic—a broad acknowledgement of mutual dependence in which rights, mutual obligations and a sense of wonder are seamlessly merged,” he writes.

Also Read | Corporate control over biodiversity? That’s what this new Bill would like to see

He never loses his gaze from the social question, particularly the underdog, even as his writing tackles broader philosophical questions. In a playful chapter on the banyan, the Indian vest or undershirt, he writes that the banyan probably came from Lascar sailors and their preferred vests. Lascar sailors were also the most well-travelled of Indians, he adds. The banyan traveled the world and came “full circle” as it returned to India. This perhaps is the author’s way of recentring subjects that do not enter mainstream wild fictions. He is trying, in a sense, to provide justice for those who became footnotes in history.

Finally, this is a book that gives you a framework to think inter-sectorally, between sociopolitical and environmental (or climate) drivers. It drives home the fact that we spin fictions to understand or narrativise the world, and how important conscionable storytelling can be. The stamps in this collection become an atlas; a map with a key that is likely to reshape how you look at various places and people.

Wild Fictions is not a simple read but a rewarding one. 

Neha Sinha is a conservation biologist and the author of Wild and Wilful: Tales of 15 Iconic Indian Species.