Once upon a mahaparbat: Neha Sinha reviews Amitav Ghosh’s ‘The Living Mountain’

Amitav Ghosh’s cautionary tale, mixing magic and reality, asks us to rethink our relationship with nature as the clock ticks down

As I write this, we are in the middle of an unprecedented war which is predicted to increase the demand for dirty fossil fuels. Yet the United Nations Climate Change Conference, held last October-November, made promises to arrest carbon emissions. Within this global scenario, there is a multiplicity inherent in the choices India will have to make at this moment — at the tail of a pandemic, gripped by biological and climate calamities, yet wanting to grow larger, faster, and bigger. In many ways then, Amitav Ghosh’s slim fable,  The Living Mountain, seems to fit right into India’s chequered 2022 growth story.

At just 35 pages, this is a no-nonsense tale. It is also cautionary:  a  fable  for our times, as the strap says. You go into an Amitav Ghosh book expecting poetic turns of phrase, and morally ambiguous characters braided into meticulous plots.  The Living Mountain eschews these expectations. You have paragraphs that resemble stanzas, and direct prose that is so stripped-down it appears the author wants you to peer only at the bones of the metaphor he is offering you. Look and learn, decolonise, this is our society’s story, he seems to say.

Amitav’s engagement with the ecological destiny of our world is now a few books old. In  The Great Derangement (2016) is a non-fiction book on our collective indifference to climate change and environmental legacies. In the novel  Gun Island (2019), nature is implacable, and a spiritual understanding of it is embraced. How then does  The Living Mountain position itself? To me it suggests that while there may not be one way of looking at Nature, there indeed is a way we should  not look at Nature. We shouldn’t expect it to be a domestic familiar, destined to lie in chains of mining and megalomania.

In  The Nutmeg’s Curse, Amitav uses wonder for the ordinary, bringing together a tiny seed and a great planet. On the nutmeg he says: “taking a nutmeg out of its fruit is like unearthing a tiny planet... like a planet, a nutmeg too can never be seen in its entirety at one time... when one [hemisphere] is in the light the other must be in darkness.” And in this book too, there is a wondrous seed.

The eponymous Living Mountain is the seemingly-magical Mahaparbat, a mountain that feeds a tree which produces valuable honey, flowers — and fragrant nuts. This forms the bedrock of an indigenous economy. Here, life is hard but bound by a quotidian respect for the sacred mountain that offers gifts, not inexhaustible resources. This keeping of sustainable quotas is interrupted by the coming of the greedy yet racy Anthropoi — miltarised men of machines with no time for oral traditions. Reminiscent somewhat of Ursula Le Guin’s novella  The Word for World is Forest, the story follows events after the arrival of technologically superior Anthropoi (and the Anthropocene, the Age of Man).

We don’t really have characters here. Rather, we have ideologies or pressure groups. This builds into both the simplicity and complexity of the story, and the use of a format, which is deceptively fantasy-like. The mountain at the centre is valuable and unknowable, and an atlas for our own desires or resistance of desires. For me, as an environmentalist, the story mirrors domestic policy directions — for instance, India’s Biodiversity Act, 2002, is proposed to be changed so that the pharmaceutical industry gets greater access to medicinal plants or parts. And the medicinal can be magical, if sustainably used. The book also mirrors global movements on the Rights of Nature which say Nature should exist as an altruistic entity. All of it can’t be for our taking — an idea that underpins both sustainable-use concepts and Amitav’s world-building. It appears simplistic, but like a good fairy tale, has a firmness at its heart that needs to be looked right in the eye.

The Living Mountain should not be dismissed as pandemic fiction, borne of a temporary despair at the bleakness of a capitalist world. Instead, it should be seen as the beginning of the real, normative question — what do we do, now that we know that the Anthropocene is here, espoused and glibly defended by us?