Writing, living in this world,

you know very strange things happen in this world. Very, very strange,

inexplicable things.

And that's what the beauty and miraculousness of this world consists in.

Amitav Ghosh, novelist and interpreter of the world,

past and present. Do you have to work hard to separate yourself

off from the real world when you're writing a novel like this one?

Yes.

I really have to create a kind of little bubble of tranquillity in order to be

able to write. And that's becoming harder and harder.

Before we were writing about the planetary crisis,

but now we are in a circumstance where we have to write from within the crisis.

From Bloomberg Weekend, this is The Mishal Husain Show.

Many novelists draw on the real world for their fiction,

but for more than 30 years,

Amitav Ghosh has developed a global following for deeply researched

books,

ones whose characters take you into the past or bring urgent

present day issues to life. He did that on colonial history,

how the opium trade linked India, China, Britain, and America.

And he's done it on ecological threat with a series of novels set around

the Sundarban mangrove forest on the Bay of Bengal.

His latest is called 'Ghost-Eye'.

It has a plot that moves between India and the United States,

and that's part of Amitav Ghosh's own life story. Born in Kolkata,

he now lives in New York City,

and this conversation too goes to many places,

real and virtual. It's lovely to meet you,

having spent so many years reading many of your books. And here we are.

Thank you.

There's a part early on in 'Ghost-Eye' made me wonder how autobiographical this

book is because your protagonist in 'Ghost-Eye' Dinu says,

"My memories of the city of my childhood had ebbed until they came flooding back

half a century later on the other side of the planet in Brooklyn during the

plague year of 2020.

The reason those lockdown days remind me of Calcutta was that during the

pandemic too,

there was a sense of darkness closing in or rather an artificial brightness

leaking out of the world." So did your memories come back to you while you were

locked down?

Yes, very much actually.

Writing this book helped me reconcile various things that I had never thought

about before. I was in Kolkata in January,

2020 and my mother was very sick and my mother was

a very ordinary homemaker,

but she was also someone who had very strange sorts of perceptions of things,

odd things would happen around her. And

one day when she was in hospital, literally in front of my eyes,

as she had a near-death experience. And watching that,

watching her describe what she was seeing on the other side,

it really unlocked something for me.

What did she actually say? What did she articulate?

The first thing she did was that she literally said goodbye to me and my

wife. My wife was there too,

and she said goodbye in the same way and in the same tone that she used to say

goodbye to me when I was going off to boarding school.

And then her head sort of snapped back and she began to toss her

head from side to side. And she was telling me in Bengali what she was seeing.

There was a light, there her, very welcoming figures,

and she was not at all afraid.

These are all classic near-death experience ...

People calling you.

That's right. And then suddenly a doctor came in and gave her this injection,

and so she sort of came out of it,

but the first thing she said when she came out of it is,

"Why did you bring me back? I wanted to go. It was my time.".

You've put that in the book.

I have, yes.

There's a scene exactly like that in the book. So it obviously stayed with you.

Oh yeah, very much.

I mean, it does sound like an extraordinary thing to have experienced.

It was, yes. And as I said,

it suddenly unlocked things in my brain and I suddenly began to realize that

writing, living in this world,

very strange things happen in this world. Very, very strange,

inexplicable things.

And that's what the beauty and miraculousness of this world consists in.

And then a strong theme in 'Ghost-Eye' is this idea of reincarnation and

a child who's born with memories of a past life.

Where did that thought come from and how long has that been percolating in your

mind?

I've been thinking of it for a long time. In fact,

I touch on it in an earlier book called the 'Calcutta Chromosome'.

I don't like to use the word reincarnation because there's a kind of metaphysic

involved in reincarnation because you are implying that there's a whole sort of

cycle of karma and so on, and maybe that exists. I just don't know about that.

I'm agnostic.

But what I do know is that a very large number of children are born with past

life memories. Since this book came out,

I've been contacted by literally dozens and dozens of people,

very unlikely people. There are a lot of these inexplicable things like

children being born with a knowledge of another language.

And you believe that. It's not a, it's people's perception,

it's not artifice, it's not children putting it on.

There's no doubt in your mind that that phenomenon is real.

No doubt whatsoever,

because the people who've told me about these experiences and

memories and so on, they're friends, and I trust them,

and what incentive do they have to lie to me? I mean,

when there are so many of them saying that.

Yeah, I don't mean lying.

I just mean that sometimes our perception does sometimes lead us to believe

certain things or see certain things that someone else might not.

I think the reason I'm particularly interested in your views on this is that

I've always been struck by how in your novels, how deeply researched they are.

The worlds that you create in fiction,

sometimes you've mirrored them in nonfiction,

so you've shown the real events that your characters were derived from,

and that's why I'm wondering if you're doing something a little different in

this book.

You're asking us to suspend our belief and step into a different world

with you.

Yes, very much so. Why this interests me,

why this phenomenon interests me is that I think one of the things that's gone

really wrong with the world is that

because of the mechanistic ways in which the most powerful people in the world

think about the earth, that it's just machine, that it's inert,

that everything in it can be known by science or by engineers or

whatever. The world has lost all its wonder and its mystery.

And that's why Elon Musk wants to leave our poor,

exhausted world and go to Mars or whatever,

but our earth is infinitely mysterious,

and I feel that we know almost nothing about it. Science is great,

but you can't use a hammer for every job.

The plot moves between Kolkata in 1969,

it's the city of your birth and New York

in 2020. 1969, is in the west,

in the United States. It's evocative of the Vietnam War protests. In the UK,

it's probably more,

that's when The Troubles in Northern Ireland entered a new era.

What did 1969 mean to you as a 13-year-old

in Kolkata?

In 1969,

I was mainly in boarding school in Northern India following the news very

closely, so North Vietnam and so on.

But also it was a time when really

we in India had a huge kind of exposure to American

culture through music, most of all.

I think it was the spectacle of what young people were doing in America.

I often think it's very common to say that people come

here for our freedoms and our liberties and so on. But in fact,

really what I think the world found so attractive in that particular period

was the counterculture. It wasn't the mainstream culture at all.

It was actually the counterculture that really made America into a kind of

global leader of youth culture, if you like.

This reminds me of something I've heard you say about Kolkata in that period

that while there was unrest and it was a politically tense time,

there was also a flowering of culture, the writers, the filmmakers,

the arts of many kinds.

Absolutely. That's the really remarkable thing. I mean,

if you look at the filmmakers who are working,

working in Kolkata in the sixties and seventies. I mean,

it's an astonishing number of the great Indian filmmakers of the past,

most of all Satyajit Ray, whose work I found incredibly exciting.

Take me back to the real story behind the unrest in

Kolkata, that's part of the book.

What was the political climate that surrounded you and how do you think it

impacted the writer that you became?

Very much, Kolkata, I should explain,

was then kind of a hotbed of Marxist activity. There were Maoists,

there were Stalinists. I mean,

there were so many varieties of Marxist activists and they

were a very powerful presence. They were there as a political presence,

but also as an intellectual presence.

I never subscribed to those ideologies really at all, but still it was there.

You had to contend with it.

And what made it very interesting in a way is that Kolkata,

New York are like the opposite ends of the telescope. I mean,

Kolkata is the antithesis of the modern world,

at least it was in that period.

And New York is the heart of the modern world.

So in a sense it's such a huge gap to bridge,

mind you, Kolkata is very different now.

I mean, really New York is the home of capitalism in so many ways.

So I guess that's the contrast between the two.

Yes.

Because I've heard you say that there was something about growing up in such

contentious times that put you in the mindset of thinking

against the grain, that that is the roots of your work.

That is absolutely the case. Yes.

I think that was the main thing about growing up there at that time,

that you really learned to be very critical, very sceptical of everything.

I really learned to think against the grain and that stayed with me forever.

You are a writer who's so connected to everyday events and to present day

politics. I can see it from your X feed.

I can see that you are reposting multiple times a day.

How much does it bleed into your fiction?

Do you have to work hard to separate yourself off from the real world

when you are actually writing a novel like this one?

Yes.

I really have to create a kind of little bubble of tranquillity in order to be

able to write. And that's becoming harder and harder.

It's becoming impossible now, I would say.

Before we were writing about the planetary crisis. It's a political crisis.

It's a geopolitical crisis, environmental, so many things.

But now we are in a circumstance where we have to write from within the crisis.

And that completely changes your perspective. I mean,

you have to write from the point of view of the reality of our time,

and it's a time of absolute disruption.

And you don't just mean climate do you. I think you mean the state of the world,

the war with Iran.

All of these things are exercising you at this moment in time.

Very much so. I wrote a book called 'The Nutmeg's Curse',

and there I said that the mistake that western experts make when they think

about the climate crisis is that they think of it as a technological and

scientific crisis, whereas in fact, it's a geopolitical crisis.

It's a crisis that's tied to the fossil fuel economy,

which in itself is the underpinnings and has been for 200 years off

the Anglo-American empire.

Are you saying there's a link between that in Iran?

Very much so. Absolutely. It's completely straightforward. I mean,

the reason why Anglo-America has to try and retain control,

most of all of the Strait of Hormuz is exactly this,

to control the flow of fossil fuels.

But other parts of the world, not least India,

the country of your birth is highly dependent on that. I mean,

how closely are you following how badly India has been affected economically in

this period?

I spoke to my sister in Kolkata a couple of hours ago, and she was,

people are desperate to find natural gas because most of the cooking that's done

in India is done with canisters of natural gas,

and the situation is really very, very bad and it's getting worse and worse.

And the situation in India is actually very serious because the government,

unlike China, didn't stockpile enough quantities of fuels.

So India is very, very vulnerable at this particular point.

And has not been diplomatically active in this period it would seem.

What can you say,

India in some way over the last few years,

most of all has completely lost its way diplomatically within the region,

and it's very hard to see how it can get back on track. I mean,

just a few days before this conflict started in Iran,

the Indian prime minister was in Israel,

literally hugging Netanyahu and so on,

despite the fact that these stands are not at all popular overwhelmingly in

India by any means.

Can you say that for sure that they're not popular?

Is it more amongst your group of people?

Yes. I'm from a part of the Indian public,

which is opposed to these policy stands. Look,

I mean, even if it's a question of it being popular or not,

just prudence requires you to conduct yourself with a certain

kind of caution in relation to the big suppliers of oil.

So how would you describe these countries that are

part of your life, with India and the United States ?

Because this is where you live today.

I presume it's where you feel much more at home today,

but does some of that feel different in the midst of a moment like this?

Well,

you have to remember that one doesn't live in a large country like the

United States and India as if you were geographically spread

across the entirety. I mean, I'm from Bengal.

In Bengal, our views are often very, very different from that of other parts,

especially of northern India. So I'm influenced by that.

And here I live in New York, I live in Brooklyn,

and I have for my mayor [Zohran Mamdani], a boy I've known since he was a kid.

You knew his parents. You knew Mira Nair or you know them?

Yes, Mira is one of my oldest friends. We went to college together in New Delhi.

And so did you ever think that the child you knew might go into politics?

Was there a moment where you thought that that's where his future might lie?

In our circles, it's so rare for anyone to go into politics.

I mean straightforwardly used to say to Mira, "Mira,

what is he doing?" I would say, well, he's doing it,

but really never would I have guessed that he turned out to be literally a kind

of political phenomenon. I mean a genius in a way.

What was the moment that you realized that he could go all the way in this

mayoral race? Was it before he won the Democratic primary?

Oh, yes. I would say June or July last year. It was pretty clear. I mean,

he just hit such a chord with young people.

Do you find yourself worrying though, what happens if he can't deliver?

Because he has inspired so much political enthusiasm. He has fervent supporters,

that can just quite easily dissipate if people get disappointed.

The thing that's been really surprising for me,

I mean of course we knew that Zohran was charismatic. He spoke well,

he's got that killer smile and so on.

What's really surprised me though is how competent he is.

So is that the thing that gives you hope, that you are living in New York,

a city whose mayor you not only know,

but you have a great fondness for,

and is that essentially your retreat amidst a broader political establishment

that worries you?

Yes.

But I think what that tells us is that there is a huge body

of people in the United States,

especially young people who are now just longing

for change.

So can we go back into history Amitav,

because I mentioned this earlier in the conversation and the fact that so

often you've drawn on great moments in history and obviously history is full of

difficult moments.

And I'm thinking about your charting of the opium trade through your

novels,

as we're in this process where it feels like power is shifting,

that there's a new world order developing.

You've thought about India and China a lot, for your writing.

How do you think that relationship develops?

Will India end up moving closer to China than the United States?

Because the United States is a difficult place to be close to,

difficult for its allies these days?

Absolutely.

The problem for India goes beyond any one political party or any one political

figure.

What we are really seeing is an era of maritime power

slowly declining and continental power slowly rising to the top as it

were. I mean, China and Russia, Iran, they're the three continental powers now.

Within this, where does India fit?

India's problem is that it's not a continental power entirely,

and it's not entirely a maritime power.

Yet it is in a significant sense dependent

on maritime relations. So where does India go?

I mean its own geography puts it in this double bind.

Where it has to maintain very close relations with the maritime powers,

and at the same time it has to try and manoeuvre within the new

emergent order of continental power.

It's a huge challenge for anybody to navigate that,

and certainly I think the current dispensation is not proving to

be at all good at it.

The current political leadership in India.

In India.

It's interesting to hear you call Iran a continental power and not India one.

Well, India doesn't really reach very deep into the Asian landmass.

It's cut off by the Himalaya, really.

Northern India is in some sense very attached to the continent.

But if you look at India,

it's this huge peninsula that's just jutting out into the sea.

So that maritime aspect of it really has to be balanced against

whatever continental ambitions India might have.

And this puts India in a terrible position because it's perfectly clear now

that China is a world leader in so many different technologies,

and Pakistan, which is in some way manoeuvred very well within this system.

It's having a diplomatic moment for sure.

Oh, absolutely.

But in this climate, God knows how long that lasts.

Who knows.

But at least they've been able to take advantage of Chinese technology,

whereas India really has blocked Chinese technology. So I mean,

just like the United States,

I mean just cutting off your foot to spite your face,

because look at those amazing Chinese cars that are everywhere now.

And actually even over here in the US,

I feel sometimes like that I'm going back to the India of my childhood where we

drove around in these old, old cars, 20, 30-year-old cars,

and we envied the west at that time for having all these fancy things.

And now really here because of tariffs, et cetera,

we are entering that same cycle.

And yet this is the country that you've chosen,

that you've made your home of which you've become a citizen, all of that.

You've done it for a reason,

because its freedoms represented something that was precious and important to

you.

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And also its culture.

And there's no gain saying that.

I mean the culture of intellectual excellence that it also has,

it may be sidelined very often, but within my world,

I get to meet many first rate thinkers from across the world.

I get to meet many first rate artists, writers, et cetera.

So that part of it,

which has always existed and still exists and will continue to exist,

is what holds me here not to speak of my family and my friends.

I know that you've contributed a manuscript to,

or you're in the process of contributing manuscript to a really extraordinary

project, which began in 2014. It's called The Future Library,

and books are being put away not to be opened and read

until the year 2114, which is an extraordinary idea.

What made you want to be part of it,

and how hard was it to imagine what people would want to read in

the year 2114?

Well,

I think it's perfectly evident today that one of the factors that

are really responsible for creating our planetary crisis is very short-termist

thinking. We tend to think in two year election cycles,

four year election cycles, that kind of thing.

And this infects also the literary and artistic world.

There's a sort of pressure to keep up with the trend of the moment and so on.

And when I heard about this project,

it struck me that it was absolutely thinking of time in a completely different

way.

So you know how in Native American cultures and many other cultures as well,

there's this concept of thinking seven generations ahead.

Anything you do, you have to consider the seventh generation.

And this project struck me as being very much along those lines,

of thinking of time in a radically different way.

Having to produce a text for that has really been salutary for me,

to try and think of, you know,

what can I have to say to a readership that's not yet born.

Is it a full book?

There's no particular specification.

But what did you do? How many pages and is it fiction or is it nonfiction?

I don't think I'm allowed to tell you that.

Okay.

Yeah.

How did you even start to think what your contribution

should be?

Well,

of course the first thing that you're tempted to do is to try and imagine the

future world. And I made many false starts. I tried that,

and then I decided that that's actually a fool's errand. I mean,

if I think about how much the world has changed within my own lifetime,

and that's obviously accelerating,

it's impossible for any of us to have a sense of what the world will be like in

2114. And in fact,

you run the risk of making an ass of yourself because people will open that

thing and say, oh, he was so completely wrong.

So you discounted that.

I discounted that, yes.

And thought instead that you needed to think of something timeless.

I needed to think of drawing on my own

resources of saying what I need to say. Really,

rather than trying to imagine a world far ahead.

It is really hard to think about what will the planet look like?

What will borders look like?

There might be nations that have even gone by then.

So you're in the process of handing over that manuscript?

Yes. It'll be at the end of June. Yes. So I'll go to Oslo for that.

And your own writing,

because you said how difficult it is to separate yourself out and to carve that

kind of time for your writing away from the news.

How do you actually do it? What have you learned?

Well,

one thing that helps is that writing is all I've ever done,

and I've done it all my life.

Along the way I've developed certain sort of disciplines which just see me

through the day and help me write a little bit. I'm saying a little bit,

but especially over the last five or six years, I've written an awful lot,

even as the world is kind of falling apart around us.

Is it a daily word count? Because when Salman Rushdie came on the show,

he said he was happy if he does 200 words a day,

which I was slightly surprised by, because,

but that's where he is. Do you think in that way?

No, but I think 200 words is good. I mean, if they're good words.

That's good going.

So do you read back the next day or read back what you've written the day

before?

Well, I write in a very complicated way. First I write by hand,

then I start typing, and when I start typing,

that's when I start reading back the next day.

But your books start in longhand?

Yeah, absolutely. Yes. A longhand with a fountain pen.

If I try to sort of compose directly onto a computer,

I find that it just freezes me.

Whereas if I'm writing by hand, I feel much more free,

so I can just follow my thoughts.

So you must have a library full of the notebooks?

Oh yes.

The originals.

Yes, I do. I have a lot of notebooks.

And how much do you find that the ultimate book has changed from the

original notebook, the handwritten one?

It changes a lot actually. I mean, with earlier books, they were unrecognisable,

but with this one, it wasn't. I had a very strange experience writing this book.

It was literally like, it came from outside myself,

and the book just seemed to write itself. I mean, I wrote it,

it usually it takes me years to write a novel, but with this one it was really,

something kind of uncanny you know.

The only writer who talks about that experience in relation to writing is

Stephen King,

who often says that his books seem to come from somewhere outside himself.

So do you know yet which place,

which dimension even your next book might take you in?

Yeah. Look,

let's face it. All our everyday politics has,

they've proved utterly ineffectual in confronting the planetary crisis that we

are in.

The only political movement that has actually had real effects in this world

is the rights of nature movement, I would say.

And movements like the No Dakota [Access] Pipeline movement,

right here in America.

We've had many similar movements amongst Adivasi groups in India.

All these movements, which have been so effective,

are founded on notions of the sacredness of the land.

What they've actually been able to do is to mobilize

governments into according personhood,

to rivers and mountains and glaciers,

and this has had a real effect in the world.

Now imagine what it is for a court in New Zealand, a high court,

the Supreme Court of New Zealand, to actually say,

this river is a person and can be the ancestor of a

group of people.

It's not just that you're giving rights to a river,

you're making an ontological shift in the way that you see the world,

because these ideas are all based upon the sacredness of the land, if you like.

And where does sacredness come from? It comes from the miraculous.

I mean, obviously that's been part of Native American culture and ...

Part of Catholic culture.

But it's so far away from our present moment and the political moment in the

United States and in some other parts of the world.

Yes, absolutely. Again,

this is because of the deep attachments to the fossil fuel economy,

and these attachments go way past

anything to do with means and ends. I mean,

there's a genuine emotional attachment to fossil fuels. I mean,

when you hear people roaring down the street on those very noisy motorcycles,

they're not doing it just to get from one place to another.

An electric motorcycle won't do it for them. They like that noise.

So Amitav to close,

having written about past lives in this book,

I mean, if I asked you to imagine what you would like to come back as,

or the life you might like to have after this, what would you choose?

That's absolutely impossible. I don't know, maybe I'd like to be a bird.

Or is there a place in history that you've written about or researched that of

which your knowledge has been so deep that you have been able to really imagine

living in that time or been drawn towards?

Yes. I mean, certainly I've researched the 19th century in India

in very great detail, but I also researched the 12th century in India,

especially along the west coast where there were communities of Muslims, Jews,

Hindus, living together.

Pre-colonial times.

Pre-colonial times. Yeah, it was a very beautiful time.

I think I would choose that.

Amitav Ghosh, thank you very much. Congratulations on 'Ghost-Eye.'.

Thank you very much.

I look forward to the next book.

Thank you Mishal, and thank you so much for having me.

It's been a great pleasure.