Of Dreams and Desires in the Anthropocene | Akshata S. Pai

Amitav Ghosh. The Living Mountain: A Fable for our Times. Fourth Estate, 2022.

Amitav Ghosh’s latest work The Living Mountain: A Fable for our Times continues his preoccupation with climate change which has previously produced works of non-fiction such as The Great Derangement (2016) and The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021), the novel Gun Island (2019), as well as a work in verse, Jungle Nama (2021). In all these works, Ghosh has been concerned with the question of how to narrate climate change as well as its enmeshment in colonial history. Published in May 2022, The Living Mountain continues Ghosh’s search for a suitable form to narrate climate change, using here the form of the fable. Merely 35 pages long, it is different from Ghosh’s usual fare that has long been characterised by descriptive weight, complex characters, and well-researched attention to the particularities of history. In choosing the fable, Ghosh heads in the opposite direction. The prose as well as the narrative are stripped to their bare bones, and in its broadly sketched action, he attempts to condense colonial history and its dark aftermath which are inseparably entwined with the history of climate change.

Like in The Great Derangement and Gun Island, stories remain at the heart of The Living Mountain. It begins with a framing narrative in which two members of a book club choose the term “Anthropocene” as their theme for the year’s reading. One of the readers, Maansi, a New York-based sales manager, originally from Nepal, begins to read a cli-fi novel, and is so strongly affected by it that it triggers a disturbing dream. What follows is the narration of this dream whose tentacles tentatively reach out to the real world: Maansi suspects that the dream is not really a dream but perhaps a memory of a story told by her grandmother. It is notable that the trigger for this dream is not a news article or a scientific report, but a work of fiction. Even in the dream itself, stories remain of crucial importance as a repository of knowledge and as agents of desire and value.

Maansi dreams that she belongs to a people who live in the shadow of the Mahaparbat, an immense mountain in the Himalayas. They consider the Mahaparbat a living mountain, one that protects and nurtures its people.They revere this sacred mountain through stories, songs, and dances, always performed from a respectful distance. However, their relationship with it does not remain this way for long, as the “Anthropoi” invade the valley in order to access and control the mountain, whose “gifts” now become resources to be dug up and used (16). By naming these colonising forces the “Anthropoi” Ghosh pointedly breaks from the universalist discourses of the Anthropocene while also pointing to the exclusive nature of European humanism: the Anthropoi make themselves out to be a different species of being from the valley people.

Ghosh summarises the process of colonisation in his fable: from the ‘innocent’ gathering and organisation of knowledge to colonial myth-making and violent conquest. The fable notes not only the violence of colonialism but also the ways in which colonialism transformed the colonised people’s sense of what was possible, what desirable, and what futile. Ghosh deftly portrays this shift in an entire cultural worldview. The fable moves beyond the time of colonisation to track its continuities in the postcolonial world. In a haunting and feverish sequence, the text narrates how the desires birthed in colonial regimes turn into monstrous compulsions in postcolonial times. Devangana Dash’s inked sketches, in their economy of lines, perfectly accompany and illustrate this dire tale.

Despite its simplicity, at the end, the fable defies any attempt to draw simple morals from it. A lone surviving custodian of indigenous knowledge chastises the Anthropoi, and by extension, the readers: “Have you understood nothing […]?”, she asks (31).

The story of The Living Mountain was originally written for a trans-disciplinary anthology titled Altered Earth: Getting the Anthropocene Right edited by Julia Adeney Thomas and published in March, 2022. This original context helps to put the story in perspective. As a leading postcolonial author, Ghosh succinctly retells the Anthropocene narrative from a postcolonial lens using the form of the fable. As Harold John Blackham has said of the fable, Ghosh’s story runs its “metaphorical traffic on narrative rails” (xii). In its heavy symbolism, the story packs vast times and spaces within its narrow confines and alongside multidisciplinary takes on the Anthropocene, advances a strongly postcolonial and narrative perspective. As a standalone publication, however, the story’s shortness becomes more starkly perceptible.

At his best, Ghosh has been able to evoke the boisterous, complex, diverse worlds of colonial and postcolonial times in all their material and sensory details as well as their moral ambiguities. In fact, in many of his novels, he has told stories of the ways in which colonisation was ecological as well as political, whether in his descriptions of the systematic felling of ancient forests for timber or in the flooding of fields with opium or rubber. In some ways then, the fable summarises not only colonial history but also Ghosh’s own body of work while missing out on some of its best and most enjoyable parts. However, as one tracks the trajectory of Ghosh’s work, one senses in this short fable the urgency that now drives his oeuvre. This is no time for leisurely storytelling or immersive worlds, Ghosh seems to be saying. His fable is shaped by the powerful tides of climate change.

Works Cited

Blackham, Harold John. The Fable as Literature. Athlone Press, 1985.

Ghosh, Amitav. The Living Mountain: A Fable for Our Times. Fourth Estate, 2022.

—. “The Ascent of the Anthropoi: A Story”. Altered Earth: Getting the Anthropocene Right. Edited by Julia Adeney Thomas. Cambridge UP, 2022.

—. The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. Penguin, 2021.

—. Jungle Nama: A Story of the Sunderban. Fourth Estate, 2021.

—. Gun Island: A Novel. Penguin, 2019.

—. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Penguin, 2016.

Header image: Cover of The Living Mountain © HarperCollins India

Akshata S. Pai is a PhD student at the Department of English at the University of Hyderabad. For her PhD project, she is working on contemporary environmental fiction.