The Unfolding of History and politics in Amitav Ghosh's The Great Derangement

 

                                 

    Amitav Ghosh is a great novelist, essayist and environmental litterateur  who writes in beautiful English language that fires the imagination of the reader . His great trilogy -Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and Flood of Fire stand testimony to his power of writing on epic scale. His work, The Great Derangement  about environment degradation proposes the  need for the  political engagement of  intellectuals and common people in saving the life of one and  all and the Mother earth.

    Asian countries suffer the most due to global crisis and among Asians  it is again  the poorest who bear the brunt. In 1991,Bhola cyclone in Bangladesh is thought to have   killed  3 lakh people  and displaced more than half a million people. In 1991, in the same country 1,38.000 people were killed of whom 90 percent are women in a cyclone.

    A significant rise in sea level could  lead to the disappearance of Lakshdweep islands in India and an estimated 50 million in India and 75 million in Bangladesh and aa tenth of Vietnam population  may suffer displacement. Global warming is leading to desertification of 24 percent land in India, abandonment of one lakh acres annually in Pakistan and China is suffering an annual loss of 65 billion dollars by 2016. The melting of the Himalayan glaciers is leading to flood as in the  Kosi river in Bihar in 2008 and the Indus  floods of 2010. In future the melting of glaciers may lead to water shortage and “the lives and livelihoods of half a billion people in South and Southeast  Asia are at risk.” (121) the modernist experiment by Asian countries has made it clear “that  the patterns of life that modernity engenders can only be practised by a small minority of the world’s population.” (125)

   An interesting thing Ghosh brings out is that modernity has been the result of cross-fertilization between  Europe and Asia. He quotes Ganeri and says that in 17th century Indian intellectuals -Muslims, Jains and Hindu  “produced  work of tremendous vitality.”(128)  

    Amitav Ghosh refers to multiple maternities and criticizes the western claim of singularity  of modernity by a historical account of natural gas in China and oil industry in Burma but the British usurped the control over Burman oil industry in 1885. He also explains India’s role in providing man power and technology for the growth of world steam fleet  and beginning of the carbon economy. The Wadias of Bombay could compete effectively with the shipyards of Europe and America. The British were responsible for curtailing Indian  ship building industry thorough their 1835 law.  It was the brute force of the empire which kept the Asian nations at disadvantage in terms of wealth and power all the while blaming the natives for ‘indolence.’ The earlier industrialization of Asia would have led to the  early onset of the  crisis.  Mahatma Gandhi in India and the religious groups of China such as the Taoist, Confucius and the  Buddhist , and the Burmese Statesman U Thant, The secretary General of the UNO during 1962-71  resisted industrialization and consumerism. All humans who lived in the past or living in the present   have contributed to the problem in different degree. Now the problem is global and Asian countries also  cannot,  under the penalty of extinction, neglect the danger of climate crisis      

     Ghosh says that climate change poses a serious challenge to concept of freedom. The era  Enlightenment   treated  those who had not conquered nature are beyond history or not arrived at. Many Asian countries followed the same notion and mode of development and writers concerned themselves with political engagement at the expense of recognition of ecological crisis.  In their striving not to remain backward they embraced many modernist movements such as surrealism, expressionism , postmodernism , postcolonialism but few listened to the archaic rumblings of the earth. In South Asia, political energies have been focused on issues such as identity, religion, caste, ethnicity, language, gender rights etc. but closed to collective survival. When novel is seen as an ‘individual moral adventure’ as John Updike said, the concept “banishes the collective from the territory of fictional imagination.”(170) Both literature an politics have come to be seen as means of self-discovery. But  Ghosh says what is needed is the ability to imagine a different future. He  says that  though it is possible to ask where one was at the time of  fall of the berlin wall or 9/11 incident ,  can we do so in the same vein , where were you at 400ppm[ parts per million]? Or where were you when the Larsen B iceshelf broke up?”(173)

   He also refers to how demonstrations have had little effect on policy of state craft and national  security.   Oil replaced  coal  has become an invisible dispenser of power to the elite of Britain and America. Internet has become a site of view and counter views , the public sphere deadlocked while the real power is exercised by the ‘deep state’ which means ‘’the interlocking complex of corporations and institutions of governance .” (176) Consequently , the Western countries are ‘post-political spaces’ managed by the deep sate and the lack of political alternatives, disempowerment and the  intrusion of market have led to  spectacular violence.  When the moral-political analysis became dominant, collective action is neglected at the cost of inadequacy of the activists’ life style. Amitav Ghosh points out how mahatma Gandhi , the embodiment of sincerity succeeded in dislodging the British  from India but  failed to steer the country in a different economic path. But this can also be attributed to Gandhi’s demise  in 1948 with  in six months after independence and the different approach of leader such as Nehru and Patel.    Ghosh writes the need to get out of the trap of individual imaginary  and the posterity will blame politicians and artist for the failure to address climate crisis.

    The Anglosphere consisting of the US, the  UK, Australia , Canada, New Zealand deny climate crisis in political domain but acknowledge it in military domain. Environmental activism has come under the scanner of the government of the USA. This shows the fear of the establishment and   undeniable link  between the  system and climate crisis.    Global warming is a domestic as well as global problem. Michael Foucault says that “to ignore this challenge would run counter to the evolutionary path of the modern nation state.” (190)

   The dominant counties who want to preserve the existing world order may resort to militarized aggression,  closed boundaries and  to keep political and   climate refugees out. So, Ghosh sees that the distribution of power lies at the core of climate crisis and there is no language to discuss the redistribution of power. Amitav Ghosh sees capitalism and empire as responsible for climate crisis and the poor suffer the most due to this. So, the developed countries have more responsibility when compare to countries like India in lessening the disaster. He writes that in2014 an average Indian accounted for around 20 percent of the average American’s coal consumption and 34percent of those from the OECD .   

   He compares two documents – one by Pope Francis ‘s encyclical letter Laudato Si’  and the Paris Agreement on climate change and finds the latter as more arcane, vague and talks of limitless human freedom but without realization of intended goals  The former  does  realise that human is spirit, will and part of nature. While nation states view  popular protests against climate crisis from security point of view, religious groupings  who believe in the sacredness can ally with popular movements and can give us a new hope. The new generation born out of  this struggle against climate change will rediscover their kinship with other beings and nature and their vision at once old and new will find expression in art and literature.   It is high time that all humans  including  intellectuals and artists and writers took cudgels on behalf of the mother earth.