Climate is one of many factors that play a part in people’s large-scale movements: Amitav Ghosh Premium

“The pieces in this collection are about a wide variety of subjects, yet there is one thread that runs through most of them: of bearing witness to a rupture of time, of chronicling the passing of an era that began 300 years ago, in the eighteenth century,” he writes in the book’s introduction, adding that this was the period that saw the birth of modernity and industrial civilisation, in which, under the leadership of the British empire, the West tightened its grip over most of the world, culminating ultimately in the emergence of the U.S. as the planet’s sole superpower.

Amitav Ghosh thinks of the West as an empire of chaos. “Look at the mess the West had made,” says the award-winning writer, who was recently in Bengaluru to release his latest book, Wild Fictions, a collection of 26 essays centred around many of the themes he has explored in both his fiction and non-fiction over nearly four decades. Some of these include the long shadow of colonisation, the planetary crisis, displacement and migration, a mapping of south-south connections, neo-imperialism, the limitations of science, and so much more.

“The pieces in this collection are about a wide variety of subjects, yet there is one thread that runs through most of them: of bearing witness to a rupture of time, of chronicling the passing of an era that began 300 years ago, in the eighteenth century,” he writes in the book’s introduction, adding that this was the period that saw the birth of modernity and industrial civilisation, in which, under the leadership of the British empire, the West tightened its grip over most of the world, culminating ultimately in the emergence of the U.S. as the planet’s sole superpower.

“Starting with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the ‘unipolar moment’ peaked at the turn of the millennium and then ran into a series of profound shocks that began in 2001,” writes Ghosh, who was awarded the Erasmus Prize 2024 “for his passionate contribution to the theme ‘imagining the unthinkable’, in which an unprecedented global crisis — climate change — takes shape through the written word.”