 Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and now lives between Calcutta and Brooklyn you will find out the relevance of this later. And the author of 10 novels he laid down the challenge facing storytellers in his 2016 polemic The Great Derangement Climate Change and the Unthinkable and went on to answer his own clarion call with 2019 gun island. In the two years since he has turned to parable and nonfiction, his most recent publication is Jungle Nama and an adaptation of a legend from the Sunderban. With artwork by Salmantur is new book that not makes curse parables for a planet in crisis, which is out imminently is a work of nonfiction which sets our current crisis in its historical context. Welcome, Amitav. Hello, thank you so much for having me. I want to get straight down to the Great Derangement. Just give us the what you what you said in that 2016 pamphlet really which was so important in this debate. So, you know, I feel a little bit sort of a discombobulated when I hear that it's sort of call to arms or, you know, or a polemic or anything because they're actually it's really more a kind of introspection. I was trying to sort of ask myself, why is it that I in my own practice have been have found it so hard to write about climate events and the climate crisis. And what is it about the form of the novel as such that really resists, you know, something like the climate crisis. You know, I point to various aspects, you know, of the form that make it very difficult to deal with, you know, matters like extremely improbable events. And as we know now, all these events that are sort of coming at us so fast and furious. But they're all extremely improbable. I mean, the scientists keep saying that, you know, there's a one in a thousand year chance of such a flood or, you know, such a hurricane or such a drought and so on. And yet they're happening all around us all the time. I would say in the great derangement that I have come to recognize that the challenges that climate change poses for the contemporary writer, although specific in some respects also are also products of something broader and older that they derive ultimately from the grid of literary forms and conventions that came to shape the narrative imagination in precisely that period when the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere was rewriting the destiny of the earth. That is a ringing, a ringing paragraph. Well, yes, because I think it's actually really since the, you might say the 1970s onwards, but most of all from the 1990s onwards, that really fiction has come to have a sort of exclusive focus on, you know, on people's emotions, their thoughts, their states of mind, their identities and so on. Because, you know, even in the 60s, Steinbeck was writing a book like The Grapes of Roth, you know, which was in many ways really a book about climate. I mean, the first chapter of The Grapes of Roth is very much about climate issues. And I think in many ways, you know, the book really deals, it's very contemporary. I mean, it deals with migration, it deals with this kind of people being displaced by this, this terrible change in climate. Two of the themes you mentioned is the ability of the novel to deal with the non-human, and also the ability of the novel to deal with the uncanny with coincidence, which seems the events which seem beyond our imagination. Can you just explain those two things? You know, the novel has a long tradition of dealing with the uncanny, you know, and the uncanny is very much the realm that we are in. I mean, so many of these events nowadays are profoundly uncanny, you know. They suddenly arrive in the middle of, you know, I was just, the day before yesterday in Houston, Texas, about to deliver a lecture on climate events and the uncanny and what should happen. But the hurricane exploded over us at just that time. I mean, these things are just constantly occurring. I mean, you know, there's a section in Don Island about a wildfire approaching a museum in Los Angeles. And that did happen. The Getty Museum had a wildfire coming right at it. But I wrote that part six months before it happened. You know, so I mean, one just constantly encounters these sort of weird and improbable events. And of course, our fiction has historically been able to deal with many uncanny events of this kind. You know, there's, I don't know if you, if you remember the work of Alganon Blackwood, a Canadian British writer who wrote wonderful stories of the uncanny and so on. But, you know, the problem is that, you know, that tradition of writing is really regarded as marginal as a genre as a kind of, you know, fantasy or horror or something. And we see now that it's not at all fantastical. It's not at all unlikely. It's just happening all around us all the time. In a way what you're talking about is a problem for the literary novelist because you make the point in the great derangement that science fiction writers and fantasy writers and in medians other than the novel have been dealing with this and with also with the non-human for for decades, you know, we could talk about Terry Pratchett's Discworld. We could talk about the universe. Yes. Yes, that's absolutely true. You know, it is, I mean the problem really is not so much about what writers do but rather the literary ecosystem as a whole. You know, I mean the writer who writes about those things I mean like Alganon Blackwood if you like or Richard Adams and writing Watership Down and so on. They're regarded as, you know, fantastical books. They're regarded as something completely extraneous to serious literature. But you know, that's one of the strange things. If I think back on the books that were considered a serious literature, you know, 50, 60 years ago, you know, who are the very serious writers? I mean, Angus Wilson, maybe Iris Murdoch and so on. And, you know, nobody reads Angus Wilson today. I think I can say that with a fair degree of certainty. They just don't. Whereas the writers from that period who are really remembered and read all the time now are writers like Arthur C. Clarke. You know, there's a huge sort of Alganon Blackwood revival, for example, there's an HP Lovecraft revival. Ursula Le Guin, I mean you know her work. She was throughout a life sort of categorized and marginalized as a science fiction writer. But you know when she died a couple of years ago, there was just this huge outpouring of love for her, you know, and a sort of incredible excitement of discovery. Yeah, Butler is another person who comes to mind. So in terms of the what has changed in those in the establishment writers that you're talking about you, you have sort of noticed a change in 2018 just before gun island. What was it this change? That's an interesting. That's an interesting question. I think 2018 really was a pivotal year, you know, I think that was when these climate events became impossible to ignore. As indeed they are today I mean nobody, nobody really sort of tries to pretend that these weird things aren't happening. If that had a part to do with it, then there was a Greta Thunberg and many other young youth groups sort of springing up. And also in the literary world there was a real change I think Richard Powers's over story was published that year. And it, you know, far from being marginalized it was celebrated by the literary community was, you know, up for the booker and so on, quite rightly it's a completely wonderful book. The story of it's reinventing the novel from the point of view of the tree. That's right. Absolutely. Absolutely. So there you are I mean I think there was a real change and you know now I can't even tell you I mean I keep, I get like two or three manuscripts a day. I've been through my public website. And, you know, they often begin by saying, you know, we read your book The Great Derangement and it made us want to do this, you know, this kind of writing. And so now you have to read, you have to read our manuscript. And of course, I would love to read all those manuscripts but it's not possible, you know, I couldn't possibly keep up. Since the gun island, which was now published two years ago, you have turned to fable or parable, I suppose I said parable but I think it's more fable in jungle now which is is retelling a traditional story of a sort of ecological fable really from the 19th century. And then, and now your next book is a history of colonialism and the very one of your points is that it's this this change is all tied up with our colonial history and our history of exploitation of people and resources. Yes, absolutely. I mean, a jungle now are followed really in a way from the Great Derangement because in the Great Derangement I make the argument that we have to look for other forms. You know, perhaps new collaborative forms and for me it was incredibly exciting to work with a Salman to whose, whose work is just absolutely fabulous. And, you know, an audio and a performed version is going to be out very very soon. And I hope you get to hear it is, I think it's just fantastic. This is performed by Ali Sethi, who's a very gifted young singer. And this is a fable which gives, which which puts the natural world in charge and has its its protagonists at a sort of tigers and explain a little bit about it. Yes, well, it's an adaptation of a legend from the Sundarban, which is the world's largest mangrove forest. And it's really a legend about how human beings are create a balance between their needs and the needs of other beings, you know, of all kinds of tigers and crocodiles and all sorts of other beings. I think it's a wonderful story simply because it speaks of, you know, finding a balance. And, you know, so it was a very exciting story to work with. Now, you know, I've got this book, The Nutmegs Curse coming out. By the way, have you received a copy yet? I haven't. I look forward to it, but I haven't yet. Well, that's terrible. I must get Jacasta to send your copy immediately. Yes. So, you know, I think in so many ways when we talk about the climate crisis, when we talk about, you know, the so-called Anthropocene and so on, we tend to see it as a problem oriented towards the future. Whereas to me, it seems perfectly evident that it's in fact a problem of history. It's completely rooted in history and especially in colonial history, in the expropriation of resources and the expropriation and indeed extermination of, you know, many groups of people by European colonists going back to the 17th century. I think in so many ways we are really reliving the 17th century, which was also a time of enormous climatic disruption. So I want to just finish by asking you to read from Gunn Island, a particular passage which brings together two of the themes. One of the themes is about how we blame the little guys in the boat, trying to get away from the places of maximum devastation. And the other is about this uncanny, these uncanny events that we are all seeing in our everyday life, as told in a fictional form. Please, please, would you read those two passages? Of course, it would be a great pleasure. I saw now why the angry young men on the boats around us were so afraid of that derelict refugee boat. That tiny vessel represented the upending of a centuries old project that had been essential to the shaping of Europe. Over the early days of chattel slavery, the European imperial powers had launched upon the greatest and most cruel experiment in planetary remaking that history has ever known. In the service of commerce, they had transported people between continents on an almost unimaginable scale, ultimately changing the demographic profile of the entire planet. Even as they were repopulating other continents, they have always tried to preserve the whiteness of their own metropolitan territories in Europe. This entire project had now been upended. The systems and technologies that had made those massive demographic interventions possible, ranging from armaments to the control of information had now achieved escape velocity. They were no longer under anyone's control. That was why those angry young men were so afraid of that little blue fishing boat. Through the prism of this vessel, they could glimpse the unraveling of a centuries old project that had conferred vast privilege on them in relation to the rest of their world. In their hearts they knew that their privileges could no longer be assured by the people and institutions they had once trusted to provide for them. They changed too much too fast. The systems that were in control now did not obey any human master. They followed their own imperatives, inscrutable as demons. Suddenly Lubna came rushing over her face flushed, her eyes shining in exhilaration. What's that over there, she said. I spun around to see a darkening smudge spreading across the southern horizon. It's a cloud, I said. No, that can't be it, said Chinta. There's something different about the way it's moving. It seems to be coming towards us. The smudge was growing quickly, spilling over the horizon like a stain, expanding rapidly in our direction. I could only gape uncomprehendingly. What on earth could it be? Then suddenly Pia was beside me, snatching her field classes out with my hands. She focused them on the horizon. Birds, she said. They're birds, hundreds of thousands of them, no millions. They must be migrating northwards. They're going to pass right over us. Suddenly two had appeared beside us now. Gazing at the sky, he said, it's just as it says in the story, the creatures of the sky and sea rising up. An awestruck silence descended on us as the dark mass came arrowing through the sky. It was as if some limb of the earth had risen into the heavens and were reaching out to touch us. It seemed to stand still, even the air. I felt that I had somehow ceased to breathe. Time itself is an ecstasy, said Chinta softly. I had never thought I would witness this joy with my own eyes pouring over the horizon. And then there they were, millions of birds circling above us, while below in the waters around the blue boat, schools of dolphins somersaulted, and whales slapped their tails on the waves. Un stormo, said Chinta, gazing upwards, using the Italian word for a flock of birds in flight. And it seemed to me that this was indeed the right word, the only word for the phenomenon that we were witnessing. A storm of living beings, butas. So Amtav, it's a pleasure, as always, to talk to you. You've become one of my benchmarks in a whole area of thinking that I have to say has opened up since we met. I mean, it was post the great derangement we met at Hay-on-Wye. Yes, that's right. I look forward to the next novel. I hope you're not going to forsake it entirely for nonfiction and fable. No, no, not at all. I love writing novels and, you know, thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me on. Thank you. Thank you. Goodbye.