Amitav Ghosh: The Nutmeg’s Curse… Review by Pradeep Trikha

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The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for A Planet in Crisis. Amitav Ghosh. Penguin Random House India, 2021. 339pp.

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mitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for A Planet in Crisis (2021) is a tale of the Banda islands in Indonesia. It is about contemporary geopolitics regarding the environmental crisis.  besides its topicality, it is also a book that deals with poignant redemption of migrant experience during the Covid pandemic and makes readers privy to the lives of people who suffered in the hands of market forces on the one hand and on the other it also deals with the medieval history during which the European traders became conquerors of the indigenous Bandanese communities. Their bloody fate forewarns us of a threat to our present-day climate crisis. Ghosh invites readers to get familiar with the 17^th-century Banda islands the location of the islands is:

… one of the fault lines where the Earth shows itself to be the most palpably alive: the islands and their volcano, are among the offspring of the Ring of Fire that runs from Chile in the east to the run to the rim of the Indian Ocean in the west. A still active volcano, Gunung Api (“Fire Mountain”) towers above the Banda its peak perpetually wreathed in plumes of swirling cloud and upswelling steam. (7)

The narrative tracks historical facts regarding trading networks that stretched all the way across the Indian ocean. The common denominator in the nodes and routes of these networks was the nutmeg that fetched great fortune for the traders in Europe, as it was believed that the spice had the potential to cure the plague and other epidemics, that were sweeping Eurasia during those times. It is in the past only that space and time echo each other; in order to reiterate his point of view, Ghosh quotes Timo Kaartinen’s Songs of Travel and Stories of Place: Poetics of Absence in an Eastern Indonesian Society:

we weep and weep
when, on what day
“get on your way”
we, pearls of wisdom
the fruits of nutmeg have died
she sends a letter so we may speak
pearls of wisdom
fruits of nutmegs have died
there is no faith here
there is no blessing inside this island. (36)

Ghosh hereby suggests the uniqueness of the island and its human-centric values, whereas to the European colonialists it was just a resource for generating profits. It was with the advent of modernity that the ‘ideology of conquest’ allowed the hegemonic ‘agencies’ to flourish, which turned even ‘nutmeg’ into a ‘primitive superstition’. Torture, rape, and death of men, women and children of the Banda islands led to the environmental transformations that accompanied it and altered the face of the Earth due to ‘climatic’ disruptions. Later in the book, Ghosh expresses his astonishment:

The violence contained in these ideas is almost beyond comprehension. Is it really possible, we can only wonder in disbelief, that the most prominent lyric poet [Tennyson] of the Victorian age envisioned the extinction of apes and tigers as a positive step toward Man’s evolution into a species that would be a “crowning race”? (81)

In In Memorium Tennyson had remarked. ‘Move upward, working out the beast/ And let the ape and tiger die’; Darwin expressed no such idea, he was far more compassionate about the co-existence of man with animals. In “The Falling Sky” is a piece that ferrets out, “…a direct response to the acceleration of the planetary crisis within the very theatre that holds the Earth’s fate in the balance- the Amazon basin” (205-206). The narration is sprinkled with historical shreds of evidence, that suggest possibilities of regeneration. Whatever happened in Brazil during the Covid pandemic is nothing but, ‘…a replication of centuries-old patterns in the settler-colonial history of America’ (214). The mortality rate during mid-2020 in Brazil was 5.7 per cent, but for Indigenous people, it was 9.7 per cent. Ghosh forewarns the readers that rapid deforestation in the Amazonian region is at the ‘catastrophic tipping point’. The rainforest sustains its own climate and has an in-built ecosystem. The destruction of it would be cataclysmic for our planet. The Nutmeg’s Curse is non-fiction but the author is a narrator par excellence so skill at irony keeps the curiosity of the reader aflame. In “Utopias” he refers to Francis Bacon’s “New Atlantis” in which Bacon vociferously advocates for the liquidation of ‘unnatural’ people. And while referring to the golden age of the Netherlands, Ghosh ironically points out that it was the same period when the Dutch were indulging in the genocide of the Bandanese:

The irony of these utopian imaginings is that they date back to a time when Europeans were actively engaged in constructing new societies, in lands where the native population had been eliminated. (217)

He further adds:

“So explosive are the tensions and uncertainties of this era that it becomes imperative to ask: Is a “politics of vitality” at all possible or desirable at the advanced stage of planetary crisis?” (222)

 

Nutmeg’s Curse weaves together the most laudable threads of Ghosh’s fictional and non-fictional writings to date. The narrative brings together intertextuality and anthropological study, the interplay of which arouses the reader’s interest. Sunil Amrith, author and historian notes that it brings to life, ‘…alternative visions of human flourishing in consonance with the rest of nature’. He even points out that vested interests create impediments to sustainable development. Naomi Oreskes, an eminent environmental activist and writer says that the book is a ‘tour de force’ the writer, ‘…defiantly moves the conversation into the realm of history, politics and culture, insisting that we will never resolve our planetary crisis until we acknowledge that the “great acceleration” of the past fifty years is part of a larger historical pattern of omnicide’.

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Related essays on On Eco-criticism by Suhasini Vincent in The Beacon

Pradeep Trikha, is Professor in the Department of English, Mohanlal Sukhadia University, Udaipur, Rajasthan, India