In the autumn of 1969, an unusual crisis unsettled the Gupta family in an affluent neighbourhood of south Calcutta. Their three-year-old daughter Varsha, raised in the strict vegetarianism of her Marwari household, began demanding fish. “Ami machh-bhat khabo. Machh dao,” she declared in clear Bengali, startling her mother and the domestic staff. Amitav Ghosh’s novel Ghost-Eye opens with this rupture: a child’s appetite disrupting not just domestic routine but inherited belief.
Varsha refuses food for days until a psychologist, Shoma Bose, intervenes. Bose feeds her fish and begins to interpret the episode as a case of what researchers have termed the “reincarnation type”. In the novel, Bose has been collaborating with Professor Catherine Booth at the University of Virginia. Varsha, she believes, represents a rare instance in which tactile memory, what the narrative describes as the haptic system, carries impressions from a previous life.
As a long-time reader of Ghosh, I approached the novel with hesitation. Reincarnation, in popular speech, such as “in a past life” or “in the next life”, often functions as metaphor or inherited myth. I was curious how Ghosh would integrate such a belief into his continuing preoccupation with ecological crisis. Indeed as the novel progressed Ghosh’s command over storytelling became once again evident from the multiple imageries of magical realism he used to talk about the threat of a grave ecological disaster expected to be caused by a major coal-burning power plant being planned by a powerful crony capitalist on an island in the Sundarban. In Ghosh’s account, the paranormal powers inherited by Varsha through her reincarnation is what eventually leads to the rescue of the Sundarbans.
Ian Stevenson and reincarnation
And yet I was surprised to find out that the idea of reincarnation was not just mythological, or rather lacking in any substantive evidence. Rather, there is an entire body of serious scholarly research going into explaining this extraordinary phenomenon. Among the biggest names who established the research into reincarnation was that of Ian Stevenson, who in Ghosh’s novel, was introduced as Professor Booth’s mentor. Stevenson was a Canadian born American psychologist who was best known for what he called, ‘survival of personality’ after death, or in other words, reincarnation.
Amitav Ghosh’s ‘Ghost-eye’ inhabits the ambiguity between faith and objectivity. (source: amazon.in)
Until his retirement in 2002, Stevenson headed the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia, which he founded in 1967. The division describes its research as examining the relationship between mind and body, including claims of consciousness surviving bodily death. It remains one of the few academic centres dedicated to such questions.
Stevenson’s interest in reincarnation reportedly began in childhood, shaped in part by his mother’s wide-ranging library, which included works on psychical research and religion. In 1961, he travelled to India and Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, documenting cases of children who appeared to recall previous lives. By his account, he gathered details of several dozen cases during that trip alone. He was struck not only by the children’s narratives but by behavioural traits and phobias that, he argued, corresponded to the lives of deceased individuals they claimed to have been.
Over subsequent decades, Stevenson continued to collect and publish case studies from Asia, Africa and North America. Among his best-known works are Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (1966), the multi-volume Cases of the Reincarnation Type (1975–83), and Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects (1997). His methods, reliant on interviews, corroborative testimony and field investigation, won a small but committed following. They also drew sustained criticism from the wider scientific community, which questioned evidentiary standards and the possibility of cultural suggestion.
When Stevenson died in 2007, The New York Times noted that he had been “spurned by most academic scientists,” even as some colleagues regarded him as a careful and courageous investigator of unpopular questions. The divide captures a larger tension: the uneasy boundary between empirical inquiry and metaphysical belief.
Between belief and skepticism
It is not difficult to see why many scientists remain skeptical. Modern intellectual life has long trained us to separate science from spirituality. Science claims objectivity; religion rests on faith. Yet Ghosh’s novel does not ask the reader to resolve that divide. Instead, it inhabits the ambiguity.
I remain unconvinced of reincarnation as a scientific proposition. But Ghost-Eye complicates easy dismissal. In a conversation between Shoma Bose and another central character, Dinu, the limits of human certainty come into view. When Dinu scoffs at the idea of human levitation, Bose replies that the boundaries of one’s own capacities cannot define the limits of all human possibility: ““But just because you and I can’t fly doesn’t mean the same is true for every human being who has ever lived. After all, you and I can’t divide twelve-digit numbers in our heads either, but that doesn’t mean no one can.” The argument is less about flight than about epistemic humility.
In that sense, Ghosh’s novel is not a defense of reincarnation so much as an invitation to question the finality of disbelief and to consider whether the categories through which we sort myth and knowledge are as impermeable as we assume.
Amitav Ghosh's Ghost-Eye is an expansive novel from one of our greatest living storytellers. (Source: amazon) 
Amitav Ghosh’s ‘Ghost-eye’ inhabits the ambiguity between faith and objectivity. (source: amazon.in)
Share
