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Amitav Ghosh's passion for climate change continues with 'Gun Island'
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SME Times News Bureau | 24 Jun, 2019
Three years after making a forceful plea against the effects of
environmental degradation, globally acclaimed author Amitav Ghosh
returns to the subject by once again focusing on the Sundarbans, which
he terms critical for the well being of West Bengal and neighbouring
Bangladesh and lamenting that nations around the world are not
responding adequately to the global scourge.
"The Sundarbans are
very important for the ecology of the Delta region of Bengal and the
Delta region of Bengal is very heavily populated, it includes about well
over 200 million people. Here we have to also say that the Sundarbans
extend from West Bengal into Bangladesh and the Sundarbans are
absolutely crucial to the well-being of these two regions," Ghosh, who
received the prestigious Jnanpith Award for 2018 here on Wednesday, and
whose latest work "Gun Island" was released the next day, told IANS in
an interview.
"For one thing they absorb the fury of cyclones so
they are an essential line of defence against the cyclones and the Bay
of Bengal historically has been what you could call a 'storm breeder'.
The single greatest natural disaster of the 20th century was actually
the Bhola cyclone which hit Bangladesh in 1970 and possibly killed
somewhere between 500,000 and a million people and it directly
precipitated the break-up of Pakistan. It was the precursor to the
Bangladesh War of Independence (of 1971).
"So we should not
forget that these kinds of climate events actually have very significant
repercussions at many different levels, including the politics and
civic and social life. So, the Sundarbans are very essential to
preserving and protecting Bengal from the furies of the Bay of Bengal
but the Sundarbans are also important because the mangroves are a very
important breeding ground for fish and fish forms a very large part of
the diet of people in the Bengal Delta and if the Sundarbans were to go
away there would be a dramatic decline in fish catches across Bengal.
Thus in so many different ways the Sundarbans are absolutely vital to
the ecology of the Indian subcontinent," Ghosh explained.
His
sixth novel, "The Hungry Tide" (2004), focused exclusively on the
Sunderbans through issues like humanism and environmentalism, especially
when they come into a conflict of interest. It had won the 2004 Hutch
Crossword Book Award for Fiction, among a string of honours bestowed on
Ghosh, notably the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1990 for "The Shadow Lines".
A recipient of the Padma Shri, Ghosh's "River of Smoke" (2012) was
shortlisted for the Man Booker Asian Prize.
"Gun Island", in
fact, takes off from "The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the
Unthinkable" (2016). What makes it globally relevant is its theme of
migration and the global refugee crisis.
In an
interview to IANS two years ago, Ghosh had contended governments were
only playing lip service to climate change. He said the same in his
acceptance speech on Thursday. Obviously nothing seems to have changed.
"I
think this is absolutely the case. All around the world, you can see,
even with someone who is not a climate denier like a Justin Trudeau. He
accepts the reality of climate change, he accepts the need for action on
climate change but in fact he ends up sanctioning new oil fields, new
oil exploration programmes etc. You know the factor behind this of
course is the fossil fuel industries - they are so vast and they have so
much money that they can push through almost anything. It is very hard
to resist their power," Ghosh maintained.
In a way, "Gun Island"
has come full circle - with a twist - from his first novel, "The Circle
of Reason" (1986) that deals with the personal crisis of a weaver who
is falsely implicated as a terrorist and is a commentary on communalism
in the region.
How would Allu the weaver feel in the India of 2019?
"The
thing about Allu is that in some ways he anticipates the India of 2019
because he is after all someone who crosses the sea as a migrant, who
journeys to the Middle East and starts living in a Gulf country and that
phenomenon, of course, has accelerated across India. Today India is, I
think, the largest remittance receiving economy in the world with some
50-60 billion dollars in revenue for India comes from the Gulf region
and Allu was a harbinger of that trend."
How important is it for authors to include the theme of climate change in their writing?
"I
would say, first of all, it is not that I am telling writers what they
should write about, that's not my business, writers are free to write
about whatever they want. In my book 'The Great Derangement' I was
really questioning myself and saying to myself, for me, writing is a way
of engaging with the world I see around me, the reality I see around
me.
"Why is it that climate change, this extraordinary reality
that exists around us, why is that reality so hard to write about, what
is it in that reality that resists us? And of course I would be asking
this question even if I wrote in some other language. I don't think
language has much to do with it because this region that speaks Hindi is
very badly affected by heat wave so you would imagine that the writers
here would want to confront this reality. Similarly writers in Bengal
are being affected in different ways, writers in Orissa are being
affected in different ways, so for all of us this is an unfolding
reality that we need to confront," Ghosh maintained.
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