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Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

Amitav Ghosh wants to fight climate change with faith, not reason

In Amitav Ghosh’s 'Ghost-Eye', rationality is debated and then edged out. And instead of questioning faith, it privileges it.

New Delhi: In one timeline of Amitav Ghosh’s Ghost-Eye, climate activists and locals are trying to save an island in the Sundarbans from a capitalist coal corporation. Tipu, whom we first met in Ghosh’s 2019 novel Gun Island, steps in with a plan. Explaining ecological fragility, biodiversity, or sea-level rise won’t mobilise people, he says. But faith will. Manasa Devi—the Hindu goddess of snakes—will draw crowds, and devotion will become a form of resistance.

In many ways, Ghosh does the same with the third instalment in his unofficial Sundarbans trilogy, after The Hungry Tide (2004) and Gun Island. He serves an age-old folklore of reincarnation, divine intervention, and memory across lifetimes as bait, drawing the reader into a story that is ostensibly about climate change.

What I assumed was a clever narrative strategy in the book gradually hardened into something else: a proposition that when institutions fail, politics stalls, and rationality runs out of answers, only the divine can step in.

This supernatural is not a touch-and-go theme of the novel; it sits at the centre of Ghost-Eye.

A long-time critic of Hindutva politics and the uses of faith in public life, Amitav Ghosh has consistently argued for reason, history and structural critique through his works and in public life over the years. Yet, faced with the scale of climate catastrophe, his confidence seems to falter.

No counterweight to........

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