Amitav Ghosh’s new novel, which echoes the spirit of The Hungry Tide and Wild Fiction: Essays, is steeped in magic realism, reincarnation, Calcutta’s evolution and the power of stories to challenge technicism
An unmissable sense of affinity with, and continuity from, Amitav Ghosh’s earlier works — most notably The Hungry Tide and Wild Fiction: Essays — pervades his new novel, Ghost-Eye (Fourth Estate), through its thematic overlaps and emotional anxieties. Not unexpectedly, the Sundarbans — with its threatened landscapes, precarious resources, imperilled small traditions, and its position at the receiving end of all manner of ‘predators’ — constitutes the backdrop of both The Hungry Tide and Ghost-Eye. Wild Fiction: Essays, against hackneyed techno-managerial prescriptions, underlines the centrality of cultural resources, stories, fables, parables, and poetry in fighting climate change, and this continues to find powerful echoes in Ghost-Eye.
Expansive in scope — slow but steady in the way the storyline develops, intriguing in the manner in which disparate forces and characters are thrown together, and ending on a note that doesn’t let hope slip away — the novel is full of insights. Its theatres of action move effortlessly between Bengal of the late sixties and Brooklyn of today. As expected, while the impending climatic disaster is very much present, Ghosh also touches upon events and developments that have shaped the transformation of Calcutta into Kolkata. Covering a span of almost 50 years — from the Naxal upsurge to the pandemic — the narrative carries vignettes and moments that enrich the book.
Equally, if not more importantly, Ghost-Eye is informed by magic realism to a remarkable extent — a mode that Amitav Ghosh has previously experimented with in The Shadow Lines and The Calcutta Chromosome. The book is strewn with stories of birth, death, rebirth, shared destinies, and a flickering sense of optimism amid overwhelming odds.
Being ghost-eyed
In the strict medical sense, a “ghost eye” refers to a type of double vision where a faint, shadowy image overlaps the main one. In many cultural traditions, people with ghost eyes are believed to possess an uncanny ability to understand the workings of the spiritual world. Ghosh’s Ghost-Eye suggests eloquently that those with normal eyes — those who claim rationality, who assume that reason alone can solve everything — may, in fact, miss the plot. The cult of technicism — the belief that technology will inevitably offer solutions to the very problems technology created — is unsustainable. Even those who swear by lofty hobby-horses such as climate action, and who appear at the forefront of conferences of parties, are often deeply compromised.
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Given the state of things, the planet cannot be redeemed through the normal and the conventionally acceptable. This compels Ghosh to summon the power of myths, anecdotes, stories, and those who tell and listen to them; those who remember how things once were; those who prioritise not mind over matter, but spirit over mind. A guild of the ghost-eyed — uninterested in conventional ideas of progress and development, intent instead on respecting the symmetry and solitude of nature. Ghosh conveys an insistent plea: the planet has endured enough specious solutions — scientific on the surface, technological in execution, panaceatic in promise — but they have only worsened the crisis in the long run.
Cases of reincarnation and redemption
Reincarnation is a recurring motif throughout the book. In its scheme, reincarnation signifies the rebirth of something that has died. It functions both as a protest against a linear way of viewing the world and as a plea to return, reflect, and understand how things came to such a sorry predicament. When Varsha Gupta — a three-year-old, born to Abhay and Dipika Gupta in a staunch vegetarian Marwari family in Calcutta — expresses a precocious desire to be served fish, their familiar world of predictability and certainty is thrown into disarray.
New uncertainties introduce new forebodings. Varsha claims to remember another life, when she was Isha, born to Jhorna and Binu Mondal; they lived by a river embankment in a thatched house, and she was skilled at catching and cooking fish. Dr Shoma Bose, a psychiatrist, diagnoses it as “a case of the reincarnation type”. Half a century later, Dinu — her nephew and the story’s chronicler — finds himself drawn into the search for Varsha. In the process, he discovers facts about himself of which he had been oblivious of — another form of reincarnation.
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The story moves from Calcutta to the Sundarbans. There, a group of environmentalists chance upon Varsha’s medical history. Dinu — first reluctantly, then with growing conviction — becomes involved in their unconventional plans to save the Sundarbans. The region has witnessed tumultuous change, and the book offers a vivid account of how people living at the margins find themselves pushed to breaking point, as the promised cargo of development threatens to destroy much in its wake, including the abode of Manasa Devi, the snake-goddess. Varsha, in her earlier incarnation, is about to be raped after her parents are killed by Chhoto Sardar when a snake bites her, ending her life — the snake, therefore, is not an enemy.
Reincarnation, then, is also about the possibility of renewal when those “fantastical techno-utopian dreams”, bandied about by experts spectacularly, fail. Ghosh does not give up. “With everything else having failed,” he writes, “the time had come to try to rekindle that sense of awe and wonder on which human faith in the sacred is founded.”
A telling account of Calcutta’s evolution
In Wild Fiction: Essays, Ghosh underscores the agency and instrumentality of fiction to overcome seemingly intractable problems. As Salman Rushdie reminds us in Joseph Anton, stories are evidently untrue, yet by being untrue they can make one feel and know truths that literal truth cannot articulate. At an apparent level, stories demand a degree of gullibility and credulity. They may seem specious, disconnected, and unable to pass the muster of rationality. At a deeper and more fundamental level, however, they speak of possibilities that reason cannot summon and science cannot rationalise.
Stories rooted in living, though threatened, traditions — encapsulating popular beliefs, expressing collective aspirations and anxieties, offering frames of reference and reinforcing moral codes; stories of Manasa Devi, Bonbibi, snakes, birth, death, reincarnation, shared fate — stories that, despite their nativity, relate to universal consciousness — abound in this novel, and Ghosh deploys them thoughtfully to develop and communicate its ideas.
Although it is not a book on Calcutta per se, it offers a telling account of the city’s evolution over a period of time. The Calcutta of 1969, when the upsurge of Naxalism caught the fancy of a young, bright, passionate generation but ultimately doomed. When “we were always prepared for uncertainties, knowing that everything around us could be plunged into darkness at any moment.” The Marwaris of Calcutta — commercially successful yet facing workers’ militancy, culturally uprooted yet clinging to inherited traditions with obstinacy; the city of bewildering indigenous fish varieties even as exotic species were introduced; the Calcutta of sprawling havelis giving way to high-rises; the Calcutta of jhalmuri vendors who “would make a great show of mixing puffed rice, mustard oil and chillies in tins that they wielded like shamans’ rattles.