Amitav Ghosh: A Mind At Work

The thing I’ve always noticed about Amitav Ghosh is the ringing adolescence of his voice. It’s the buoyant timbre of an illustrious alum who made it in the world and has returned, troubadour-like, to tell you about the dreams he dreamed and how they all came to reality. To introduce you to Brecht and Guevara and Morrison and Rilke. In the present moment, this returning college senior figure is telling me about the story of his love affair with House of Ming, the 1978-established fine dining restaurant in Taj Mahal Hotel in New Delhi.

“Oh my god, I love this place,” he exclaims. “When I was at university, we used to save up our pocket money to come here. It was such a treat because it was the best Chinese restaurant in the city. And it’s undergone such a change.” 

The time he’s looking back on must be just a few years before his first novel, The Circle of Reason (1986), was published. A book that would go on to win the Prix Médicis Étranger, a French honour for ‘writers whose fame doesn’t yet match their talent’. 

As he first clawed his way towards fame during his time in the capital, Ghosh recalls life in barsaatis and cooking for himself. Chhang in North Delhi. Preparing the soil—in his own metaphor—that would yield the rest of his life’s work. “The Delhi University, when I was both a student and teaching here, could hold its own with any university anywhere in the world. Oxford—which I went to later and was very beautiful and a lot of fun—wasn’t more exciting than Delhi University, intellectually speaking.” 

Ghosh’s been writing since the ’80s, but clearly, his drive for telling a gorgeous, surreal story cannot dull. In his latest, Ghost-Eye, a precocious three-year-old is visited by vivid memories of her past life. As she stops eating vegetarian food and demanding fish, her conservative family consults a local Bengali psychologist. Vision after vision and dream after dream follows as the tale spins into a familiar, cyclical Ghosh parable.

Ask him about where this sort of a scientific-explanation-defying fever dream of a novel arrived, and he goes back to The Calcutta Chromosome (1996), where this theme of reincarnation and the paranormal first appeared in his work. 

“This interface between high science and folk knowledge really interests me. It started from actually reading the diaries of Ronald Ross, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine, and it’s very clear from Ross’ field notes and diaries that the major connections in this research were made by his assistants.” 

Counterintuitively, Ghosh has been markedly doubtful of science. His books, most recently the allegory The Living Mountain (2022), imparts a life force to a mountain worshipped by a community, and later exploited for gains as disaster soon follows. 

“Science makes an exclusive claim to knowledge nowadays, and so much of science comes from folk knowledge,” he says. “The people who know their environment best are the people who live in it. And really, trying to impose exterior knowledge on them often has incredibly destructive results.” 

In between his appreciation of the kung pao—he tells me he makes excellent kung pao—I ask if, much like food, there was a book that made him go, oh I should have written that. He nods in the affirmative, slipping in an “of course” before a sip of the exquisite jasmine tea and a quick reminder of the futility of the question. Of course game recognises game. Of course, Amitav Ghosh has felt the way Marquez felt about Rulfo, and Hemingway, shockingly, Fitzgerald. 

Of late, he has been particularly vocal about his admiration for Barbara Kingsolver. He even posted on his Instagram a cover of the American novelist’s 2023 Pulitzer winner Demon Copperhead, a Dickensian story of a boy on the margins of social life in the American mountains of Appalachia. “She writes very much in realist mode and her work is incredibly powerful. Very relevant to the crises of our times.” 

What everyone’s rushing to ask him these days is the book he’s written that will not be read for the next 89 years, as part of the Future Library Project. A writer who once told me about how the end of the world is very much an imaginable reality, Ghosh has continued to dream. 

“I haven’t written it yet,” he shares. “There’s a manuscript and I have to produce it, and all my efforts so far have proved unavailing. But it will come to be—yeah, I’ve been thinking about it a lot. It’s a much greater challenge than it appears—who knows what the world will be like in 80 years… if by 2050, global mean temperatures really do touch two degrees, the scale of disruption is unimaginable. We can see every indicator and instead of slowing down, we’re just heading for the cliff, faster and faster.” 

And what of the COPs that take place every year in order to apparently locate solutions for the ballooning environment crisis? “I’ve always been sceptical of them, to tell you the truth,” he says, matter-of-factly. “Now, it’s just straightforwardly a farce, you can tell. The lobbyists outnumber the activists by a huge margin. It’s basically been taken over by energy interests and billionaires. One caveat, though—one good thing that comes out of the COP process is that young activists and activist networks manage to establish contact with each other.”

In such despondent times, just like everyone else, Mr Ghosh wrings solace from the most remarkable mundanities, like the new reality of being a grandfather. And then, he recognises the most dreaded moments in time as its undeniable, inescapable truths. “Even though I am second to none in my despondency about the world, I think the human instinct is to always take refuge with your family, your friends, your community. That’s one of the positives that’s come out of the COVID experience, as well as the environmental crisis,” he says. 

We may keep returning to the safe place that is the knowledge that many worlds have ended before us. “For many people, most of all for Indigenous peoples in the Americas, in Australia, in the Pacific. And people learn to live with it. They learn to pick up the pieces.” 

But at the same time, his faith in the leadership of Zohran Kwame Mamdani—his batchmate Mira Nair’s son, whom he has known since he was a little boy, and the current mayor of New York City, is quite unrelenting. 

“Incredible charisma. He’s like a genius,” Ghosh says, with barely contained admiration. “If Zohran succeeds even in a tenth of what he’s set out to do, it’ll really spell the end of this whole era of neoliberalism that has done so much damage to the world. And have you heard of this really interesting guy called Saikat Chakraborty? He came from a very ordinary migrant family but he’s very intelligent and brilliant. He worked in Silicon Valley where he made a fortune, and with that fortune, he supported this entire movement—the Democratic Socialists of America, Zohran and AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez]. So, what I’m trying to say is that none of this happened by accident. It’s not just the work of a single person. It’s many people working together. And that’s a great sign.” 

He is no contrarian, but Ghosh’s is an unfettered instinct for nuance. Predictably, he refuses to see the looming AI takeover of creative work as a real threat.

In fact, he has continued to use it, also at the encouragement of his nephew, former CEO of Grammarly Rahul Roy-Chowdhury (who told him “it’s just a tool, like any other”). When his publisher Harper Collins India created an AI video for the promotion of Ghost-Eye which he really liked, Ghosh recalls receiving a whole barrage of outraged messages. 

“Someone said, ‘Oh, my favourite writer is using AI—I can’t believe it,” he remarks. “I think a lot of these people were teachers or academics who are constantly railing at their students not to use AI. But it is a losing battle—if you’re using autocorrect, you’re already using AI.” 

I’m about to tell my favourite writer it was I whose comment he recalls reading on that post. But he’s enjoying the shredded lamb that just got gently ladled on to his plate. And Ghosh is as generous with his praise for good food as he is with the sensory detail he sketches elaborate fish preparations in Ghost-Eye.

He’s been the family cook all his life, having seen his own father lead the family tradition of men rustling up tremendous meat dishes on Sundays. Big cauldrons, neighbours pouring in for helpings, that sort of a thing. In a sort of ungendered, cooking-as-sport way, he also remembers meals by his mother, the supremely talented cook she was. 

Which is why he rues the desperate dearth of good food writing, beyond what often settles into that familiar terrain of lifestyle features and restaurant reviews. “Writers live in very abstract worlds. So, food isn’t something real to them often. I don’t think many writers even know how to cook, so they’re just not open to that part of life as it were, which is a sad thing I think,” he says. 

For someone who’s earned cred and canon through his initial work—from In An Antique Land, The Glass Palace and The Shadow Lines in the late ’80s and ’90s—Ghosh has gone on to write a lot of books in the last decade or so. Flood of Fire, The Great Derangement, Gun Island, The Nutmeg’s Curse, Smoke and Ashes, The Living Mountain, Jungle Nama, Wild Fictions and now, Ghost-Eye. He’s had a whole shapeshifting, during this time, in fact, metamorphosing from a novelist writing about displaced realities, fragmented homelands, and the idea of travel and history/memory to someone devoted to the climate movement. He has collaborated with the musician and former journalist Ali Sethi on the novel Jungle Nama. Among the recent pictures on his Instagram—he is an avid user—is a snapshot with the actor Pulkit Samrat (!). 

Seriously—how does he do it? 

“I wish I knew! I don’t do anything else. I don’t teach. All I am’s a writer.” 

Nodding, Ghosh brings the napkin up to his face. He sees it. “It’s true that over the last 10 years, my pace has really picked up. After the publication of Flood of Fire, I just found a new gear. It really beats me—I cannot explain it. My children also say, ‘Baba, you’ve written another book?’” 

His prolificacy is quite mind-boggling but he describes it simply as a lifetime of discipline.

He recalls a particularly bizarre moment.

“There was one point in my life when I found that I had to write my doctoral thesis in a month because I was running out of funding. Like, 80,000 words in 30 days. And I just locked myself into my room and just wrote, you know, literally like 16 hours.” 

“The ability to work hard in life comes second to none,” Ghosh stresses. It’s a way of talking about hard work that doesn’t sound like a millennial platitude or a toxic pro-hustle diktat but a stoic mantra for our times. It’s a life skill, especially for writers. 

“So much of writing is just like riyaz,” he states. Even when you don't have any ideas—even when you don't have any inspiration, you prepare, prepare, prepare. And then suddenly one day, these windows open. I've literally had days like that when just out of nowhere, I just sit there and I see these windows opening and I think, right, that's the next two years.” 

This is what he calls cultivating the soil. “I’ve heard people say that having children is a distraction from writing. But in my life, it’s been exactly the opposite. Your children give you ideas, they give you strength, they give you the motivation and energy that you can’t find.” 

It’s a propulsion. 

“Yes, that’s right. It’s like a propulsion.” 

Rainer Maria Rilke, the Austrian poet, went thirteen years without writing a poem. “And then, suddenly, in two weeks, he writes the Duino Elegies, his masterpiece.” Ghosh reminds me that in those 14 years, he was always headed in that direction. “Of course, he prepared, he worked. It was never a blank.” 

And then, of course, it’s as Rilke wrote in the poem ‘I am, O Anxious One’. If you are the dreamer, I am what you dream/But when you want to wake, I am your wish/ and I grow strong with all magnificence/and turn myself into a star’s vast silence/above the strange and distant city, Time.