In Conversation with Amitav Ghosh - Rage against the Anthropocene

Can spirituality work where science and evolution have failed? What share of climate change does our rising need for travel account for? One of India's foremost writers answers

- PRANNAY PATHAK

‘Could we have turned back ourselves?

No–that too was impossible now; for our bodies too had grown used to this drug, and to the thin air that we had risen to, and to all the excitement that accompanied our ascent. There was nothing to be done, but to keep on climbing. And so we did, but with heavy hearts now, for we could not forget that with every step we took we were advancing towards our doom.’

The conundrum faced by the Varvaroi, inhabitants of the pristine valley that a great massif overlooks in Amitav Ghosh’s The Living Mountain, mirrors our age’s own. Having followed the marauding charge of the proto-colonialist Anthropoi up the slopes of this revered mountain, they, before long, come to realise the grave error they have allowed themselves to participate in. This is the same climactic moment of reckoning that stumps Colonel Kurtz (“The Horror, The Horror’’) in Heart of Darkness. This is the same sort of recognition of an existing fear within the psyche, that Ghosh discusses in The Great Derangement.