Amitav Ghosh reimagines memory, ecology and the limits of reason in Ghost-Eye

Ami machh-bhat khabo (I want to eat fish and rice), demands Varsha Gupta. If the three-year-old’s craving shocks her vegetarian parents, Varsha’s declaration of a long acquaintance with a very different world plunges the Kolkata Marwari family into turmoil. Relatives and domestic help struggle to make sense of the child recounting, in a rustic Bangla dialect, a past life in which she caught fish by a river in Lusibari village in the Sundarbans and cooked the younger, smaller rui, dousing it with a generous amount of chilli. But Ghosh desists from plotting Varsha’s experiences as a supernatural one. Instead, the child’s unlikely demand becomes the writer’s ruse to take the reader along as he seeks answers to an abiding query: Would the world have been something else if it had done justice to experiences out of bounds for rational epistemes?

Ghosh is, perhaps, also pushing the boundaries of a thought that underlies several of his earlier works — memory can be reconstructed and myriad versions of the past archived to become sources of a more capacious history. In Shadow Lines, for instance, memory is a vehicle for framing a universe that’s at odds with politically drawn boundaries. The Hungry Tide questions the neglect of experiential narratives. The Ibis Trilogy tries to recover suppressed histories. A self-aware expert is the key to such a restoration project. Piyali Roy, the marine scientist in The Hungry Tide, as well as her namesake in Gun Island are not authoritative figures — their vulnerabilities are the starting point of recognising the ecological knowledge that exists outside formal disciplines.

In Ghost-Eye too, the psychiatrist Shoma Bose — drawn to Varsha’s case as a clinician trying to understand what goes around as “reincarnation” — embodies the tension between science, her own atheist inclinations and the universe that defies rationality. But Bose goes further than the central characters of The Hungry Tide and Gun Island in questioning if an empirical system can do justice to lived experiences. In Ghost-Eye, empathetic documentation doesn’t ipso facto open pathways to people’s interconnectedness.

Is Ghosh then doubting the layered universality, posited in his earlier works as a counter to Eurocentric universality and casting a critical eye at the idea of the universal itself? Even as readers begin to ask these questions, Ghost-Eye alerts them to another consistent theme in Ghosh’s works: history is about intertwined lives across the world, not just local or national stories. His latest novel expands this quest to encapsulate the ecological longue duree. Food, especially fish, is not just about an individual’s dietary preference; it’s about continuities and discontinuities in the Sundarbans. Ghost-Eye is a nudge to the empiricist to lend a more attentive ear to memory — not piece together fragments from the past but hear out voices like Varsha, perhaps, for their own sake. For, what is memory if the archive is its ultimate fate?

Does seeking the insight of Sundarbans’s oracle to understand the current ecological crisis go against this quest? The tension drives Ghost-Eye yet remains unresolved.

Ghosh is among the prominent moral voices of our times, who maintain that climate change exposes the limits of modern ways of understanding the world. For him, the recovery of suppressed histories is a moral task to mitigate the hypocrisy of a world in which people least responsible for climate change — those in Sundarbans, for example — are also its worst sufferers. The intellectual arc of Dr Bose’s nephew, Dinu, typifies this ethical imperative. A detached theorist as a youngster — readers might recognise him as the sheet anchor of other works of Ghosh — he is prodded by his mashima into studying Sundarbans’s folklore when “nothing else has worked” in his quest for an academic career in the US. “You could treat the texts as sources for all kinds of historical data — on diet, trade, climatic patterns and a lot else,” she tells him.

However, these stories have, as the psychiatrist-turned-folklore archivist, adds, “existed in the soil of Eastern India for hundreds of years. They are presences that literally arise out of the land and inscribe their stories upon the world”. The myths had “chosen” Dinu. But can a materialist do justice to them? Or would that require the appearance, decades later, of a “ghost eye”, one that discerns many aspects of reality; the eyes of Tipu, another recurring figure in Ghosh’s novels, an activist rooted in the Sundarbans? But Tipu is today embroiled in his own battles against environmental depredations. Is Ghosh going against one of the fundamental caveats of historians — the past and the present speak to each other but history doesn’t always provide direct answers to today’s challenges?

How does the rationalist, now a middle-aged antiquarian in Brooklyn, finally reconcile to the stories of Mansa Devi, Behula, Chand Sadagar? What becomes of Varsha? Ghost-Eye resists easy answers and eschews a neat closure. It is, instead, a tribute to the timeless art of storytelling by one of its finest modern-day exponents. It carries his message: in our fraught times, stories are critical to living richer lives.