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Seeing Differently: Amitav Ghosh on his new book Ghost Eye

In conversation with writer Keshava Guha, Ghosh traced how food, past lives and ecology shaped his new novel

4 min readUpdated: Jan 20, 2026 01:52 PM IST

Udayan Mitra, Executive Publisher, Harper Collins, Mandeep Surie, General Manager, The Indian Hotels Company Limited (IHCL), Amitav Ghosh and Keshava Suri at the book launch.

The Ambassador Hotel near Delhi’s Khan Market, once a bustling landmark, felt like an apt setting for the launch of Amitav Ghosh’s new novel Ghost Eye, on January 6.

The venue carried its own memories for the author, who opened the evening by recalling how deeply the space was woven into his Delhi years. “You have no idea how many associations I have with this place,” Ghosh said, describing weekends spent there in the past. Its restoration, he added, felt like “seeing it restored to a new glory,” a phrase that also echoed the book’s preoccupation with return and remembrance.

Published by Harper Collins, Ghost Eye is Ghosh’s first novel that has been published in several years. In a conversation with writer Keshava Guha, he was candid about how unusually and swiftly the story came into being. “It just came to me and I just wrote it. It just wrote itself, really,” he said. Invoking Stephen King, Ghosh described the sensation of ideas arriving “from some other agency from outside,” an apt framing for a novel that treats reincarnation not as metaphor but as lived disturbance.

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When memories haunt

Amitav Ghosh and Keshava Guha at the event.

The story opens in 1969 Kolkata, when a three-year-old girl from a strictly vegetarian family suddenly demands fish, triggering shock and confusion. Ghosh explained how the moment is drawn from his reading on documented cases of reincarnation, many of which were in India. What fascinated him was how often such memories are anchored in appetite.

“There are innumerable cases of… children with past life memories who are absolutely haunted by the desire to eat from their past lives,” he said. “Food is the essential way in which we as humans relate to the earth, relate to other beings and relate to each other,” he added.

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Food, in fact, became a recurring motif in the conversation. Ghosh admitted cheerfully, “Food is frankly a very large part of my life,” speaking of cooking, markets and the knowledge embedded in them. Markets, he added, reveal a lot about ecology as much as the economy. While he professed his love for science, he also expressed his wariness over its dominance as the sole language of nature, arguing that ordinary fishermen and fisherwomen often know far more about their environments than experts with credentials.

Ghosh and Kolkata

The emotional undercurrent of the novel is also shaped by Ghosh’s relationship to Kolkata – a city he has returned to time and again in his reflections. Writing the book, he said, led him to relive his childhood there. Kolkata, for him, runs “in the opposite direction from the rest of the world,” and taught him “to be sceptical about the claims of modernity.” That scepticism feeds into Ghost Eye’s larger anxieties about ecological collapse, extractivism and the limits of contemporary thinking.

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When asked about climate fiction, he expressed discomfort with reducing complex crises to a single frame. “Science is a way of knowing the world and like all ways of knowing the world, it has its limitations,” he said. Literature, he argued, must work to open imaginative possibilities rather than reproducing scientific constraints.

As the author put it more simply while gesturing towards the book’s title and its way of looking: it is about learning, once again, to see differently.