‘The planetary crisis is a kind of bio-political war’

The dominant are still dominating the writing of history, says celebrated writer Amitav Ghosh

Celebrated writer says the “planetary crisis” is akin to the “bio-political wars of the past” and holds that “things are really not good” in the world today. Speaking of his new book The Nutmeg’s Curse, Mr. Ghosh said that violence directed at people, ultimately, becomes violence directed at the environment. Edited excerpts from an exclusive interview with of The Hindu.

Well, things are not good. I try to be optimistic, and not be a predictor of doom and disaster. On the whole, even this book is in some ways more optimistic than not, but things are really not good. Just today I heard the President of Palau, one of the Pacific islands’ nations, at COP 26 saying, ‘you might as well bomb us’, and I think that was a very, very sound statement, because, in fact this planetary crisis is a kind of war. But as I argue in my book, it is precisely a kind of bio-political war, akin to the bio-political wars of the past.

When you speak of the extraction of nutmeg from the Banda islands, and the Jallianwala Bagh-type massacre that followed, if I might call it that, committed by Dutch colonialists, you appear to be pointing to the continuity of resource extraction and consumption by dominant nations. That seems to be a process, which seems to be very much on.