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Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
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Speaker 2: Writing. Living in this world, you know, very strange things happen in this world, very very strange, inexplicable things. And that's what the beauty and miraculousness of this world consists in.
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Speaker 1: Amitav Ghosh, novelist and interpreter of worlds real and imagined. Do you have to work hard to separate yourself from the real world when you're writing a novel like this one?
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Speaker 2: Yes, I really have to create a kind of little bubble of tranquility in order to be able to write, and that's becoming harder and harder. Before we were writing about the planetary crisis, but now we are in a circumstance where we have to write from within the crisis.
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Speaker 1: From Bloomberg Weekend, this is the Michelle Hussein Show. I'm Michelle Hussein. Many years ago, I read a book called The Glass Palace. It's a sweeping family story set across Burma, India and Malaya from the nineteenth century, and it really drew me into those places and those times. The writer was Amitav Ghosh. It wasn't his first novel, but it was I think his breakthrough one. And since then he has developed a global following, often for fiction that is deeply researched. You know somehow as you read that he's been immersed in learning enough to set a context to prepare a canvas for his characters. Sometimes he's used that knowledge for both novels and nonfiction. There's a trilogy of his, for example, that set around the colonial era opium trade, and that also inspired a nonfiction book about the history of that business. Similarly, he's written novels set in the fragile eco system of coastal Bangladesh and eastern India, and that too has led to essays on climate threats. So he's always moved between these spaces, but his latest book, Ghost Eye, takes that to a different level because there is something otherworldly about it. You'll hear him explain in his own words in a moment. But we met in New York, where he's lived for a long time. He was born in India, but he's made his home in the United States, and the fact that the plot of Ghost Eye goes back and forth between those two countries didn't surprise me. What did was him revealing just how personal this latest book is. So here's the conversation I had with Amitav Ghosh, Well, it's lovely to meet you, having spent so many years reading many of your books, and here we are. There's a part early on in made me wonder how autobiographical this book is, because your protagonist in ghost Idin who says, my memories of the city of my childhood had ebbed until they came flooding back half a century later on the other side of the planet in Brooklyn during the plague year of twenty twenty. The reason those lockdown days reminded me of Calcutta was that during the pandemic too, there was a sense of darkness closing in, or rather an artificial brightness leaking out of the world. So did your memories come back to you while you were locked down?
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Speaker 2: Yes, very much. Actually writing this book helped me reconcile various things that I'd never thought about before. You know, I was in Calcutta in January twenty twenty, and my mother was very sick. And my mother was a very ordinary homemaker, but she was also someone who had very strange sorts of perceptions of things. Odd things would happen around her, and one day, when she was in hospital literally in front of my eyes as she had a near death experience, you know, and watching that, watching her describe what she was seeing on the other side, it really unlocked something for me.
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Speaker 1: What did she actually say? What did she articulate?
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Speaker 2: You know? The first thing she did was that she literally said goodbye to me and my wife. My wife was there too, and she said goodbye in the same way and in the same tone that she used to say goodbye to me when I was going off to boarding school. And then her head sort of snapped back and she began to toss her head from side to side, and she was telling me in Bengali what she was seeing. There was a light, there were people coming towards her, very welcoming figures, and she was not at all afraid. These are all classic near death experience, people calling you, that's right. And then suddenly, you know, a doctor came in and gave her this injection, and you know, so she sort of came out of it. But you know, the first thing she said when she came out of it is why did you bring me back? I wanted to go. It was my time.
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Speaker 1: You've put that in the book. There's a scene exactly like that in the book. So it obviously stayed with you, Yeah, very much. I mean it does sound like an extraordinary thing to have experienced.
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Speaker 2: It was, yes, and as I said, suddenly unlocked things, you know, in my brain, and I suddenly began to realize that, you know, writing living in this world, you know that very strange things happen in this world, very very strange, inexplicable things, and that's what the beauty and miraculousness of this world consists in.
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Speaker 1: And then a strong theme in Ghost I is this idea of reincarnation and a child who's born with memories of a past life. Where did that thought come from? And how long has that been percolating in your mind?
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Speaker 2: I've been thinking of it for a long time. In fact, I touched on it in an earlier book called The Calcutta Chromosome. I don't like to use the word reincarnation because there's a kind of metaphysic involved in reincarnation, you know, because you're implying that there's a whole sort of cycle of karma and so on. Maybe that exists. I just don't know about that. I'm agnostic. But what I do know is that a very large number of children are born with past life memories. Since this book came out, I've been contacted by, you know, literally dozens and dozens of people, very unlikely people. There are a lot of these inexplicable things, like, you know, children being born with the knowledge of another language.
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Speaker 1: And you believe that you don't. It's not a it's not people's perception, it's not artifice, it's not children putting it on. There's no doubt in your mind that that phenomenon is real.
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Speaker 2: No doubt whatsoever. Because you know, the people who've told me about these experiences and memories and so on, they're friends, and I trust them. And what incentive do they have to lie to me? I mean, and when there are so many of them saying.
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Speaker 1: That, Yeah, I don't mean lying. I just mean that sometimes our perception does sometimes lead us to believe certain things or see certain things that someone else might not. I think the reason I'm particularly interested in your views on this is that I've always been struck by how in your novels, how deeply researched they are. The worlds that you create in fiction, sometimes you've mirrored them in nonfiction, so you've shown the real events that your characters would derived from. And that's why I'm wondering if you're doing something a little different in this book. You're asking us to suspend our belief and step into a different world with you.
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Speaker 2: Yes, very much. So. You know why this interests me, why this phenomenon interests me, is that I think one of the things that's gone really wrong with the world is that, you know, because of the mechanistic ways in which the most powerful people in the world think about the Earth, you know that it's just a machine, that it's inert, that everything in it can be known by science or by engineers or whatever. The world has lost all its wonder and it's mystery. And that's why Elon Musk wants to leave our poor, you know, exhausted world and go to Mars or whatever. But our Earth is infinitely mysterious, and I feel that we know almost nothing about it. You know, science is great, but you can't use a hammer for every job.
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Speaker 1: The plot of Ghost I moves between Kolcuta in nineteen sixty nine It's the city of your birth, and New York in twenty twenty. Nineteen sixty nine in the United States is the year of the Vietnam War protests in the UK, it's more about the troubles in Northern Ireland. Probably What did nineteen sixty nine mean to you? As a thirteen year old in Kolcuta.
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Speaker 2: In nineteen sixty nine, I was mainly in boarding school in Northern India, following the news very closely, So not Vietnam and so on, but also you know, it was a time when really we in India had a huge kind of exposure to American culture through music. Most of all, I think it was the spectacle of what young people were doing in America. You know, I often think it's very common for American politicians to say that people come here for our freedoms and our liberties, and but in fact, really what I think the world found so attractive in that particular period was the counterculture. You know, it wasn't the mainstream culture at all. It was actually the counterculture that really made America into a kind of global leader of youth culture.
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Speaker 1: If you like, This reminds me of something I've heard you say about Calcutta in that period that while there was unrest and it was a politically tense time, there was also a flowering of culture. The writers, the filmmakers, the arts of many kinds.
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Speaker 2: Absolutely. I mean that's the really remarkable thing. I mean, if you look at the filmmakers who were working in Calcutta in the sixties and seventies, I mean, it's an astonishing number of the great Indian filmmakers of the past, most of all sat Three, whose work I found incredibly exciting.
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Speaker 1: Take me back to the real story behind the unrest in Calcutta. That's part of the book. What was the political climate that surrounded you and how do you think it impacted the writer that you became very much.
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Speaker 2: Calcutta, I should explain, was then kind of a hotbed of Marxist activity. There were Maoists, there were Stalinists. I mean, there were so many varieties of Marxist activists, and they were very powerful presents. They were there as a political presence but also as an intellectual presence. I never subscribed to those ideologies really at all, but still it was there. You had to contend with it. And what made it very interesting in a way is that, you know, Calcutta and New York are like the opposite ends of the telescope. I mean, Calcutta is the antithesis of the modern world, at least it was in that period, you know, and New York is the heart of the modern world. So in a sense, it's such a huge gap to bridge. My New Calcutta is very different now.
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Speaker 1: I mean, it's really New York is the home of capitalism in so many ways. So I guess that's the contrast that's between the two, because I've heard you say that there was something about growing up in such contentious times that put you in the mindset of thinking against the grain, that that is the roots of your work.
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Speaker 2: That is absolutely the case. Yes, I think that was the main thing about growing up there at that time, that you really learned to be very critical, very skeptical of everything. You know, I really learned to think against the grain, and that stayed with me forever.
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Speaker 1: You are a writer who's so connected to everyday events and to present day politics. I can see it from your x feed. I can see that you're reposting multiple times a day. How much does it bleed into your fiction? Do you have to work hard to separate yourself off from the real world when you're actually writing a novel like this one.
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Speaker 2: Yes, I really have to create a kind of little bubble of tranquility in order to be able to write, and that's becoming harder and harder. It's becoming impossible now. I would say, you know, before we were writing about the planetary crisis. You know that's I mean, it's a political crisis, it's a geopolitical crisis, environmental, so many things. But now we are in a circumstance where we have to write from within the crisis, and that completely changes your perspective. I mean, you have to write from the point of view of the reality of her time, and it's a time of absolute distrus.
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Speaker 1: And you don't just mean climate, do you. I think you mean the state of the world, the war with Iran. All of these things are exercising you at this moment in time very much.
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Speaker 2: So. You know, I wrote a book called The Nutmekes Curse, and there I said that, you know that the mistake that Western experts make when they think about the climate crisis is that they think of it as a technological and scientific crisis, whereas in fact, it's a geopolitical crisis. You know, it's a crisis that's tied to the fossil fuel economy, which in itself is the underpinnings and has been for two hundred years of the Anglo American Empire.
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Speaker 1: You know, are you saying there's a link between that and Iran?
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Speaker 2: Very much?
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Speaker 1: So?
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Speaker 2: Absolutely, it's completely straightforward. I mean, the reason why Anglo America has to try and retain control most of all of the Straits of Homus is exactly this, to control the flow of fossil fuels.
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Speaker 1: But other parts of the world, not East India, the country of your birth, is highly dependent on that. I mean, how closely are you following how badly India has been affected economically in this period.
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Speaker 2: I spoke to my sister in Calcutta a couple of hours ago, and she was, people are desperate to find natural gas because you know, most of the cooking that's done in India has done with canisters of natural gas. And the situation is really very very bad, and it's getting worse and worse. And the situation in India is actually very serious because the government, unlike China, didn't stockpile enough quantities of fuels. So India is very very vulnerable.
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Speaker 1: And has not been diplomatically active in this period. It would seem.
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Speaker 2: What can you say you know, India in some way over the last few years, most of all, has completely lost its way diplomatically within the region, and it's very hard to see how it can get back contract. I mean, you know, just a few days before this conflict started in Iran, the Indian Prime Minister was in Israel literally hugging Natanyahu and so on. Despite the fact that these stands are not at all popular overwhelmingly in India by.
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Speaker 1: Any means, can you say that for sure that they're not a popular Is it more amongst your group of people?
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Speaker 2: Yes, you know, I'm from a part of the Indian public which is opposed to these policy stands. Look, I mean, even if it's a question of it being popular or not, just prudence requires you to conduct yourself with a certain kind of caution in relations to the big supplies of oil.
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Speaker 1: So how would you describe your relationship with both these countries that are part of your life, with India and the United States? Because this is where you live today, I presume it's where you feel much more at home today. But does some of that feel different in the midst of a moment like this, Well, you know, you have.
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Speaker 2: To remember that one doesn't live in a large country like the United States and India, as if you were geographically spread across the entirety. I mean, I'm from Bengal. In Bengal, our views are often very very different from that of other especially of northern India. So you know, I'm influenced by that. And here I live in New York. I live in Brooklyn, and I have for my mayor a boy I've known since he was a.
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Speaker 1: Kid, Zoran mam Danni. So you know his parents, you know, Mir and Ire.
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Speaker 2: Yes, Mira is one of my oldest friends. We went to college together in New Delhi.
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Speaker 1: And so did you ever think that the child you knew might go into politics? Was there a moment where you thought that that's where his future might Like.
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Speaker 2: You know, in our circles, it's so rare for anyone to go into politics, you know, I mean straightforwardly into retail politics. So we start say to Mira, Mira, what is he doing? And you know I would say, well, he's doing it, But really, never would I have guessed that he'd turne out to be literally a kind of political phenomenon, I mean, a genius in a way.
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Speaker 1: What was the moment that you realized that he could, you know, he could go all the way in this mayoral race. Was it before he won the Democratic primary?
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Speaker 2: Oh? Yes, I would say June or July last year. It was particlear. I mean, he just hit such a chord with the young people.
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Speaker 1: You know, do you find yourself worrying that what happens if he can't deliver? Because he has inspired so much political enthusiasm. You know, he has fervent supporters that can just quite easily dissipate if people get disappointed. You know.
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Speaker 2: The thing that's been really surprising for me. I mean, of course we knew that Zoran was charismatic. He spoke, well, he's you know, he's got that killer smile and so on. What really surprised me, though, is how competent he is.
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Speaker 1: So is that the thing that gives you hope that you're living in New York, a city whose mayor you not only know, but you know you have a great fondness for. And is that essentially your retreat amidst a broader political establishment that worries you?
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Speaker 2: Yes, But I think what that tells us is that there is a huge body of people in the United States, especially young people who are now just longing for change.
00:18:49
Speaker 1: So can we go back into history, Amov? Because I mentioned this earlier in the conversation, and the fact that so often you've drawn on great moments in history, and you know, and obviously history is full of difficult moments. And I'm thinking about your charting of the opium trade through your novels as as we're in this process where it feels like power is shifting, that there's a new world order developing. You've thought about India and China a lot for your writing. How do you think that relationship develops, Like, will India end up moving closer to China than the United States because the United States is a difficult place to be close to, difficult for its allies these days.
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Speaker 2: Absolutely, you know, the problem for India goes beyond any one political party or any one political figure. What we are really seeing is an era of maritime power slowly declining and continental power slowly rising to the top as it were, you know, I mean China and Russia, Iran, they're the three continental powers. Now, you know, within this, where does India fit. India's problem is that it's not a continental power entirely, and it's not entirely a maritime power, yet it is in a significant sense dependent on maritime relations. So where does India go? I mean, it's so in geography put sit in this double bind, you know, where it has to maintain sort of very close relations with the maritime powers and at the same time it has to try and maneuver within the new emergent order of continental power. It's a huge challenge for anybody to navigate that, and certainly I think the current dispensation is not proving to be at all good at it.
00:20:42
Speaker 1: The current political leadership in any land. It's insing to hear you call Iran a continental power and not India one.
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Speaker 2: Well, India doesn't really reach very deep into the into the Asian land mass, you know, it's cut off by the Himalay really, you know, the northern India is in some sense very attached to the continent. But if you look at India, it's this huge peninsula that's just you know, jutting out into the sea. So that maritime aspect of it really has to be balanced against whatever continental ambitions India might have. And this puts India in a terrible position because it's perfectly clear now that China is a world leader in so many different technologies, you know, and Pakistan, which is in some way, you know, maneuvered very well within this system.
00:21:33
Speaker 1: It's having a diplomatic moment for sure, oh absolutely, but in this climate, God knows how long that lasts, who knows.
00:21:39
Speaker 2: But at least they've been able to take advantage of Chinese technology, whereas India really has you know, blocked Chinese technology in India. So I mean, just like the United States, I mean, you know, just cutting off your foot despite your face, you know, because I mean look at those amazing Chinese cars that every now and actually even over here in the US, I feel sometimes like that I'm going back to the India of my childhood, where we drove around in these old old cars, you know, twenty thirty year old cars, and we envied you know, the West at that time for having all these fancy things. And now really here, because of tariffs, et cetera, we are entering that same cycle.
00:22:25
Speaker 1: And yet this is the country that you've chosen, that you've made your home of which you've become a citizen. All of that. You've done it for a reason, because it's Freedom's represented something that was precious and important to you.
00:22:38
Speaker 2: Yes, absolutely, absolutely. And also it's culture, you know, And there's no gain saying that, you know, I mean the culture of intellectual excellence that it also has. It may be sidelined very often, but within my world I get to meet many first rate thinkers from across the world. I get to meet many first rate artists, you know, writers, et cetera. So that part of it, which has always existed and still exists and will continue to exist, is what holds me here, not to speak of my family and my friends.
00:23:13
Speaker 1: I know that you've contributed a manuscript to, or you're in the process of contributing manuscript to, a really extraordinary project which began in twenty fourteen. It's called the Future Library, and books are being put away, not to be opened and read until the year twenty one fourteen, which is an extraordinary idea. What made you want to be part of it? And how hard was it to imagine what people would want to read in the year twenty one to fourteen.
00:23:46
Speaker 2: Well, you know, I think it's perfectly evident today that one of the factors that are really responsible for creating our planetary crisis is very short term misthinking. We tend to think in like two year election cycles, four year election cycles, you know, that kind of thing. And this in facts also the literary and artistic worlds, you know, there's a sort of pressure to keep up with the trend of the moment and so on. And when I heard about this project, it struck me that it was absolutely thinking of time in a completely different way. So, you know how in Native American cultures and many other cultures as well, there's this concept of thinking seven generations ahead. Anything you do you have to consider the seventh generation, and this project struck me as being very much along those lines of thinking of time in a radically different way, you know, and having to produce a text for that has really been salutary for me, you know, to try and think of, you know, what can I have to say to a readership that's not yet born.
00:24:52
Speaker 1: Is it a full book?
00:24:54
Speaker 2: There's no particular specification.
00:24:56
Speaker 1: But what did you do? Like how many pages? And is it fiction or is it nonfiction?
00:25:01
Speaker 2: I don't think I'm allowed to tell you about.
00:25:04
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, how did it even start to think what your contribution should be?
00:25:12
Speaker 2: Well, of course, the first thing that you're tempted to do is to try and imagine the future world, you know, and I made many false starts. I tried that, and then I decided that that's actually a fool's Errand you know, I mean, if I think about how much the world has changed within my own lifetime, and that's obviously accelerating, it's impossible for any of us to have a sense of what the world will be like in twenty one fourteen. And in fact, you run the risk of making an ass of yourself because you know people will open that thing and say, oh, he was so completely wrong, you.
00:25:47
Speaker 1: Know, So you discounted that.
00:25:49
Speaker 2: I discounted that, and I.
00:25:50
Speaker 1: Thought instead that you needed to think of something timeless.
00:25:55
Speaker 2: I needed to think of drawing on my own resources, you know, of saying what I need to say. Really, rather than trying to imagine a world far ahead.
00:26:07
Speaker 1: It is really hard to think about what will the you know, what will the planet look like, what will borders look like? You know, there might be nations that have even gone by then. So you're in the process of handing over that that manuscript.
00:26:23
Speaker 2: Yes, it'd be at the end of June. Yes, so I'll go to Oslo for.
00:26:27
Speaker 1: That and your own writing. Because you said how difficult it is to separate yourself out and to carve that kind of time for your writing away from the news. How do you actually do it? What have you learned?
00:26:40
Speaker 2: Well, you know, one thing that helps is that writing is all I've ever done, and I've done it all my life. You know, along the way, I've developed certain sort of disciplines with just seeing me through the day and help me write a little bit. I'm saying a little bit, but especially over the last five or six years, I've written an awful lot, you know, even as the world is kind of falling apart around us.
00:27:05
Speaker 1: Is it a daily word count? Because when Selimon Rishti came on the show, he said he was happy if he does two hundred words a day, which I was slightly surprised by because but that's that's where he is. Do you think in that way?
00:27:19
Speaker 2: No, But I think two hundred words is a is good. I mean, if they're good words, that's good going.
00:27:26
Speaker 1: So do you read back the next day or read back what you've written the day before?
00:27:32
Speaker 2: Well, you know, I write in a very complicated way. First I write by hand, then I start typing, and when I start typing. That's when I start reading back the next day.
00:27:41
Speaker 1: But your book start in long hand.
00:27:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, yes, a long hand with a fountain pen. If I try to sort of compose directly onto a computer, I find that it just it just freezes me, you know, whereas if I'm writing by hand, I feel much more free, so I can just follow my thoughts.
00:28:02
Speaker 1: So you must have a library full of the notebooks, the originals.
00:28:06
Speaker 2: Yes, I do. I have a lot of notebooks.
00:28:08
Speaker 1: And how much do you find that the ultimate book has changed from the original notebook, the handwritten one.
00:28:15
Speaker 2: It changes a lot, actually, I mean with earlier books, I mean they were unrecognizable, but with this one it wasn't. You know. I had a very strange experience writing this book. It it was literally like it came from outside myself, you know, and the book just seemed to write itself. I mean, I wrote it. It usually takes me years to write a novel, but with this one, it was really something kind of uncanny. You know. The only writer who talks about that experience in relation to writing is Stephen King, you know, who often says that his books seemed to come from somewhere outside himself.
00:28:56
Speaker 1: So do you know yet which place, which dimension, even your next book might take you in.
00:29:06
Speaker 2: You know. Yeah, let's face it, all our everyday politics has they've proved utterly ineffectual in confronting the planetary crisis that we're in. The only political movement that has actually had real effects in this world is the rights of nature movement, I would say, you know, and movements like the No Dakota Pipeline movement. You know, right here in America. We've had many similar movements amongst Adivasi groups in India. And all these movements which have been so effective are founded on notions of the sacredness of the land. And what they've actually been able to do is to mobilize governments into according personhood to rivers and mountains and glaciers, you know. And this is I had a real effect in the world. Now, imagine what it is for a court in New Zealand, a high court, the Supreme Court of New Zealand to actually say this river is a person and can be the ancestor of a group of people. You know. It's not just that you're giving rights to rights to a river. You're making an ontological shift in the way that you see the world, because these ideas are all based upon the sacredness of the land, if you like. And where does sacredness come from. It comes from the miraculous.
00:30:33
Speaker 1: I mean that obviously, that's been part of Native American culture and modo Catholic culture. But it's so far away from our present moment and the political moment in the United States and in some other parts of the world.
00:30:45
Speaker 2: Yes. Absolutely, Again, this is because of the deep attachments to the fossil field economy, you know. And these attachments go way past any anything to do with means and ends. I mean, there's a genuine emotion attachment to fossil fuels. I mean, when you hear people roaring down the street on those very noisy motorcycles, they're not doing it just to get from one place to another, you know, an electric motorcycle that won't do it for them. They like that noise.
00:31:16
Speaker 1: So I'm it'sough to close having written about past lives in this book. I mean, if I asked you to imagine what you would like to come back as, or the life you might like to have after this, what would you choose?
00:31:32
Speaker 2: That's absolutely impossible. I don't know. Maybe I'd like to be a bird Or.
00:31:38
Speaker 1: Is there a place in history that you've written about all research that you know of which your knowledge has been so deep that you have been able to really imagine living in that time or been drawn towards.
00:31:49
Speaker 2: Yes, I mean, certainly, I've researched the nineteenth century in India in very great detail. But I also researched the twelfth century in you know, especially along the West coast, where there were communities of Muslims, Jews, Hindus are living together.
00:32:07
Speaker 1: Pre colonial times, pre colonial times.
00:32:09
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was a very beautiful time. I think I would choose that.
00:32:14
Speaker 1: I mean, thank you very much, congratulations on Ghost I thank you, forward to the next book.
00:32:19
Speaker 2: Thank you, Michelle, and thank you so much for having me. It's been a great pleasure.
00:32:26
Speaker 1: And that's where we left our conversation. In the text version, which we'll find at Bloomberg dot com forward slash, Michelle, you'll find my notes adding background to the places we talked about, the political context and how cases of the reincarnation type are documented at the University of Virginia and so to the team. The producers are Jessica Beck and Chris Martlu. The video producer is Andy Haywood. Social media is by Alex Morgan, Production assistance by Jennifer Seeley, audio mixing by Richard Ward. Our music is by Bart Walshaw and the executive producer is Louisa Lewis at Bloomberg Weekend. The director of Audio and Special Projects is Brendan Francis Newnham, and our executive editor is Catherine Bell. Special thanks this week go to Keshav Pandya. If you want to get in touch with us, the email is Michelle Show at Bloomberg dot net. We not only read every email, we always write back until next time. Goodbye,
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
00:00:09
Speaker 2: Writing. Living in this world, you know, very strange things happen in this world, very very strange, inexplicable things. And that's what the beauty and miraculousness of this world consists in.
00:00:22
Speaker 1: Amitav Ghosh, novelist and interpreter of worlds real and imagined. Do you have to work hard to separate yourself from the real world when you're writing a novel like this one?
00:00:35
Speaker 2: Yes, I really have to create a kind of little bubble of tranquility in order to be able to write, and that's becoming harder and harder. Before we were writing about the planetary crisis, but now we are in a circumstance where we have to write from within the crisis.
00:00:51
Speaker 1: From Bloomberg Weekend, this is the Michelle Hussein Show. I'm Michelle Hussein. Many years ago, I read a book called The Glass Palace. It's a sweeping family story set across Burma, India and Malaya from the nineteenth century, and it really drew me into those places and those times. The writer was Amitav Ghosh. It wasn't his first novel, but it was I think his breakthrough one. And since then he has developed a global following, often for fiction that is deeply researched. You know somehow as you read that he's been immersed in learning enough to set a context to prepare a canvas for his characters. Sometimes he's used that knowledge for both novels and nonfiction. There's a trilogy of his, for example, that set around the colonial era opium trade, and that also inspired a nonfiction book about the history of that business. Similarly, he's written novels set in the fragile eco system of coastal Bangladesh and eastern India, and that too has led to essays on climate threats. So he's always moved between these spaces, but his latest book, Ghost Eye, takes that to a different level because there is something otherworldly about it. You'll hear him explain in his own words in a moment. But we met in New York, where he's lived for a long time. He was born in India, but he's made his home in the United States, and the fact that the plot of Ghost Eye goes back and forth between those two countries didn't surprise me. What did was him revealing just how personal this latest book is. So here's the conversation I had with Amitav Ghosh, Well, it's lovely to meet you, having spent so many years reading many of your books, and here we are. There's a part early on in made me wonder how autobiographical this book is, because your protagonist in ghost Idin who says, my memories of the city of my childhood had ebbed until they came flooding back half a century later on the other side of the planet in Brooklyn during the plague year of twenty twenty. The reason those lockdown days reminded me of Calcutta was that during the pandemic too, there was a sense of darkness closing in, or rather an artificial brightness leaking out of the world. So did your memories come back to you while you were locked down?
00:03:31
Speaker 2: Yes, very much. Actually writing this book helped me reconcile various things that I'd never thought about before. You know, I was in Calcutta in January twenty twenty, and my mother was very sick. And my mother was a very ordinary homemaker, but she was also someone who had very strange sorts of perceptions of things. Odd things would happen around her, and one day, when she was in hospital literally in front of my eyes as she had a near death experience, you know, and watching that, watching her describe what she was seeing on the other side, it really unlocked something for me.
00:04:13
Speaker 1: What did she actually say? What did she articulate?
00:04:16
Speaker 2: You know? The first thing she did was that she literally said goodbye to me and my wife. My wife was there too, and she said goodbye in the same way and in the same tone that she used to say goodbye to me when I was going off to boarding school. And then her head sort of snapped back and she began to toss her head from side to side, and she was telling me in Bengali what she was seeing. There was a light, there were people coming towards her, very welcoming figures, and she was not at all afraid. These are all classic near death experience, people calling you, that's right. And then suddenly, you know, a doctor came in and gave her this injection, and you know, so she sort of came out of it. But you know, the first thing she said when she came out of it is why did you bring me back? I wanted to go. It was my time.
00:05:07
Speaker 1: You've put that in the book. There's a scene exactly like that in the book. So it obviously stayed with you, Yeah, very much. I mean it does sound like an extraordinary thing to have experienced.
00:05:17
Speaker 2: It was, yes, and as I said, suddenly unlocked things, you know, in my brain, and I suddenly began to realize that, you know, writing living in this world, you know that very strange things happen in this world, very very strange, inexplicable things, and that's what the beauty and miraculousness of this world consists in.
00:05:41
Speaker 1: And then a strong theme in Ghost I is this idea of reincarnation and a child who's born with memories of a past life. Where did that thought come from? And how long has that been percolating in your mind?
00:05:54
Speaker 2: I've been thinking of it for a long time. In fact, I touched on it in an earlier book called The Calcutta Chromosome. I don't like to use the word reincarnation because there's a kind of metaphysic involved in reincarnation, you know, because you're implying that there's a whole sort of cycle of karma and so on. Maybe that exists. I just don't know about that. I'm agnostic. But what I do know is that a very large number of children are born with past life memories. Since this book came out, I've been contacted by, you know, literally dozens and dozens of people, very unlikely people. There are a lot of these inexplicable things, like, you know, children being born with the knowledge of another language.
00:06:36
Speaker 1: And you believe that you don't. It's not a it's not people's perception, it's not artifice, it's not children putting it on. There's no doubt in your mind that that phenomenon is real.
00:06:48
Speaker 2: No doubt whatsoever. Because you know, the people who've told me about these experiences and memories and so on, they're friends, and I trust them. And what incentive do they have to lie to me? I mean, and when there are so many of them saying.
00:07:04
Speaker 1: That, Yeah, I don't mean lying. I just mean that sometimes our perception does sometimes lead us to believe certain things or see certain things that someone else might not. I think the reason I'm particularly interested in your views on this is that I've always been struck by how in your novels, how deeply researched they are. The worlds that you create in fiction, sometimes you've mirrored them in nonfiction, so you've shown the real events that your characters would derived from. And that's why I'm wondering if you're doing something a little different in this book. You're asking us to suspend our belief and step into a different world with you.
00:07:39
Speaker 2: Yes, very much. So. You know why this interests me, why this phenomenon interests me, is that I think one of the things that's gone really wrong with the world is that, you know, because of the mechanistic ways in which the most powerful people in the world think about the Earth, you know that it's just a machine, that it's inert, that everything in it can be known by science or by engineers or whatever. The world has lost all its wonder and it's mystery. And that's why Elon Musk wants to leave our poor, you know, exhausted world and go to Mars or whatever. But our Earth is infinitely mysterious, and I feel that we know almost nothing about it. You know, science is great, but you can't use a hammer for every job.
00:08:32
Speaker 1: The plot of Ghost I moves between Kolcuta in nineteen sixty nine It's the city of your birth, and New York in twenty twenty. Nineteen sixty nine in the United States is the year of the Vietnam War protests in the UK, it's more about the troubles in Northern Ireland. Probably What did nineteen sixty nine mean to you? As a thirteen year old in Kolcuta.
00:08:56
Speaker 2: In nineteen sixty nine, I was mainly in boarding school in Northern India, following the news very closely, So not Vietnam and so on, but also you know, it was a time when really we in India had a huge kind of exposure to American culture through music. Most of all, I think it was the spectacle of what young people were doing in America. You know, I often think it's very common for American politicians to say that people come here for our freedoms and our liberties, and but in fact, really what I think the world found so attractive in that particular period was the counterculture. You know, it wasn't the mainstream culture at all. It was actually the counterculture that really made America into a kind of global leader of youth culture.
00:09:48
Speaker 1: If you like, This reminds me of something I've heard you say about Calcutta in that period that while there was unrest and it was a politically tense time, there was also a flowering of culture. The writers, the filmmakers, the arts of many kinds.
00:10:04
Speaker 2: Absolutely. I mean that's the really remarkable thing. I mean, if you look at the filmmakers who were working in Calcutta in the sixties and seventies, I mean, it's an astonishing number of the great Indian filmmakers of the past, most of all sat Three, whose work I found incredibly exciting.
00:10:20
Speaker 1: Take me back to the real story behind the unrest in Calcutta. That's part of the book. What was the political climate that surrounded you and how do you think it impacted the writer that you became very much.
00:10:34
Speaker 2: Calcutta, I should explain, was then kind of a hotbed of Marxist activity. There were Maoists, there were Stalinists. I mean, there were so many varieties of Marxist activists, and they were very powerful presents. They were there as a political presence but also as an intellectual presence. I never subscribed to those ideologies really at all, but still it was there. You had to contend with it. And what made it very interesting in a way is that, you know, Calcutta and New York are like the opposite ends of the telescope. I mean, Calcutta is the antithesis of the modern world, at least it was in that period, you know, and New York is the heart of the modern world. So in a sense, it's such a huge gap to bridge. My New Calcutta is very different now.
00:11:22
Speaker 1: I mean, it's really New York is the home of capitalism in so many ways. So I guess that's the contrast that's between the two, because I've heard you say that there was something about growing up in such contentious times that put you in the mindset of thinking against the grain, that that is the roots of your work.
00:11:44
Speaker 2: That is absolutely the case. Yes, I think that was the main thing about growing up there at that time, that you really learned to be very critical, very skeptical of everything. You know, I really learned to think against the grain, and that stayed with me forever.
00:12:00
Speaker 1: You are a writer who's so connected to everyday events and to present day politics. I can see it from your x feed. I can see that you're reposting multiple times a day. How much does it bleed into your fiction? Do you have to work hard to separate yourself off from the real world when you're actually writing a novel like this one.
00:12:23
Speaker 2: Yes, I really have to create a kind of little bubble of tranquility in order to be able to write, and that's becoming harder and harder. It's becoming impossible now. I would say, you know, before we were writing about the planetary crisis. You know that's I mean, it's a political crisis, it's a geopolitical crisis, environmental, so many things. But now we are in a circumstance where we have to write from within the crisis, and that completely changes your perspective. I mean, you have to write from the point of view of the reality of her time, and it's a time of absolute distrus.
00:13:00
Speaker 1: And you don't just mean climate, do you. I think you mean the state of the world, the war with Iran. All of these things are exercising you at this moment in time very much.
00:13:10
Speaker 2: So. You know, I wrote a book called The Nutmekes Curse, and there I said that, you know that the mistake that Western experts make when they think about the climate crisis is that they think of it as a technological and scientific crisis, whereas in fact, it's a geopolitical crisis. You know, it's a crisis that's tied to the fossil fuel economy, which in itself is the underpinnings and has been for two hundred years of the Anglo American Empire.
00:13:39
Speaker 1: You know, are you saying there's a link between that and Iran?
00:13:42
Speaker 2: Very much?
00:13:43
Speaker 1: So?
00:13:43
Speaker 2: Absolutely, it's completely straightforward. I mean, the reason why Anglo America has to try and retain control most of all of the Straits of Homus is exactly this, to control the flow of fossil fuels.
00:13:58
Speaker 1: But other parts of the world, not East India, the country of your birth, is highly dependent on that. I mean, how closely are you following how badly India has been affected economically in this period.
00:14:10
Speaker 2: I spoke to my sister in Calcutta a couple of hours ago, and she was, people are desperate to find natural gas because you know, most of the cooking that's done in India has done with canisters of natural gas. And the situation is really very very bad, and it's getting worse and worse. And the situation in India is actually very serious because the government, unlike China, didn't stockpile enough quantities of fuels. So India is very very vulnerable.
00:14:37
Speaker 1: And has not been diplomatically active in this period. It would seem.
00:14:43
Speaker 2: What can you say you know, India in some way over the last few years, most of all, has completely lost its way diplomatically within the region, and it's very hard to see how it can get back contract. I mean, you know, just a few days before this conflict started in Iran, the Indian Prime Minister was in Israel literally hugging Natanyahu and so on. Despite the fact that these stands are not at all popular overwhelmingly in India by.
00:15:16
Speaker 1: Any means, can you say that for sure that they're not a popular Is it more amongst your group of people?
00:15:24
Speaker 2: Yes, you know, I'm from a part of the Indian public which is opposed to these policy stands. Look, I mean, even if it's a question of it being popular or not, just prudence requires you to conduct yourself with a certain kind of caution in relations to the big supplies of oil.
00:15:45
Speaker 1: So how would you describe your relationship with both these countries that are part of your life, with India and the United States? Because this is where you live today, I presume it's where you feel much more at home today. But does some of that feel different in the midst of a moment like this, Well, you know, you have.
00:16:04
Speaker 2: To remember that one doesn't live in a large country like the United States and India, as if you were geographically spread across the entirety. I mean, I'm from Bengal. In Bengal, our views are often very very different from that of other especially of northern India. So you know, I'm influenced by that. And here I live in New York. I live in Brooklyn, and I have for my mayor a boy I've known since he was a.
00:16:34
Speaker 1: Kid, Zoran mam Danni. So you know his parents, you know, Mir and Ire.
00:16:39
Speaker 2: Yes, Mira is one of my oldest friends. We went to college together in New Delhi.
00:16:44
Speaker 1: And so did you ever think that the child you knew might go into politics? Was there a moment where you thought that that's where his future might Like.
00:16:53
Speaker 2: You know, in our circles, it's so rare for anyone to go into politics, you know, I mean straightforwardly into retail politics. So we start say to Mira, Mira, what is he doing? And you know I would say, well, he's doing it, But really, never would I have guessed that he'd turne out to be literally a kind of political phenomenon, I mean, a genius in a way.
00:17:15
Speaker 1: What was the moment that you realized that he could, you know, he could go all the way in this mayoral race. Was it before he won the Democratic primary?
00:17:24
Speaker 2: Oh? Yes, I would say June or July last year. It was particlear. I mean, he just hit such a chord with the young people.
00:17:33
Speaker 1: You know, do you find yourself worrying that what happens if he can't deliver? Because he has inspired so much political enthusiasm. You know, he has fervent supporters that can just quite easily dissipate if people get disappointed. You know.
00:17:47
Speaker 2: The thing that's been really surprising for me. I mean, of course we knew that Zoran was charismatic. He spoke, well, he's you know, he's got that killer smile and so on. What really surprised me, though, is how competent he is.
00:18:02
Speaker 1: So is that the thing that gives you hope that you're living in New York, a city whose mayor you not only know, but you know you have a great fondness for. And is that essentially your retreat amidst a broader political establishment that worries you?
00:18:16
Speaker 2: Yes, But I think what that tells us is that there is a huge body of people in the United States, especially young people who are now just longing for change.
00:18:49
Speaker 1: So can we go back into history, Amov? Because I mentioned this earlier in the conversation, and the fact that so often you've drawn on great moments in history, and you know, and obviously history is full of difficult moments. And I'm thinking about your charting of the opium trade through your novels as as we're in this process where it feels like power is shifting, that there's a new world order developing. You've thought about India and China a lot for your writing. How do you think that relationship develops, Like, will India end up moving closer to China than the United States because the United States is a difficult place to be close to, difficult for its allies these days.
00:19:31
Speaker 2: Absolutely, you know, the problem for India goes beyond any one political party or any one political figure. What we are really seeing is an era of maritime power slowly declining and continental power slowly rising to the top as it were, you know, I mean China and Russia, Iran, they're the three continental powers. Now, you know, within this, where does India fit. India's problem is that it's not a continental power entirely, and it's not entirely a maritime power, yet it is in a significant sense dependent on maritime relations. So where does India go? I mean, it's so in geography put sit in this double bind, you know, where it has to maintain sort of very close relations with the maritime powers and at the same time it has to try and maneuver within the new emergent order of continental power. It's a huge challenge for anybody to navigate that, and certainly I think the current dispensation is not proving to be at all good at it.
00:20:42
Speaker 1: The current political leadership in any land. It's insing to hear you call Iran a continental power and not India one.
00:20:49
Speaker 2: Well, India doesn't really reach very deep into the into the Asian land mass, you know, it's cut off by the Himalay really, you know, the northern India is in some sense very attached to the continent. But if you look at India, it's this huge peninsula that's just you know, jutting out into the sea. So that maritime aspect of it really has to be balanced against whatever continental ambitions India might have. And this puts India in a terrible position because it's perfectly clear now that China is a world leader in so many different technologies, you know, and Pakistan, which is in some way, you know, maneuvered very well within this system.
00:21:33
Speaker 1: It's having a diplomatic moment for sure, oh absolutely, but in this climate, God knows how long that lasts, who knows.
00:21:39
Speaker 2: But at least they've been able to take advantage of Chinese technology, whereas India really has you know, blocked Chinese technology in India. So I mean, just like the United States, I mean, you know, just cutting off your foot despite your face, you know, because I mean look at those amazing Chinese cars that every now and actually even over here in the US, I feel sometimes like that I'm going back to the India of my childhood, where we drove around in these old old cars, you know, twenty thirty year old cars, and we envied you know, the West at that time for having all these fancy things. And now really here, because of tariffs, et cetera, we are entering that same cycle.
00:22:25
Speaker 1: And yet this is the country that you've chosen, that you've made your home of which you've become a citizen. All of that. You've done it for a reason, because it's Freedom's represented something that was precious and important to you.
00:22:38
Speaker 2: Yes, absolutely, absolutely. And also it's culture, you know, And there's no gain saying that, you know, I mean the culture of intellectual excellence that it also has. It may be sidelined very often, but within my world I get to meet many first rate thinkers from across the world. I get to meet many first rate artists, you know, writers, et cetera. So that part of it, which has always existed and still exists and will continue to exist, is what holds me here, not to speak of my family and my friends.
00:23:13
Speaker 1: I know that you've contributed a manuscript to, or you're in the process of contributing manuscript to, a really extraordinary project which began in twenty fourteen. It's called the Future Library, and books are being put away, not to be opened and read until the year twenty one fourteen, which is an extraordinary idea. What made you want to be part of it? And how hard was it to imagine what people would want to read in the year twenty one to fourteen.
00:23:46
Speaker 2: Well, you know, I think it's perfectly evident today that one of the factors that are really responsible for creating our planetary crisis is very short term misthinking. We tend to think in like two year election cycles, four year election cycles, you know, that kind of thing. And this in facts also the literary and artistic worlds, you know, there's a sort of pressure to keep up with the trend of the moment and so on. And when I heard about this project, it struck me that it was absolutely thinking of time in a completely different way. So, you know how in Native American cultures and many other cultures as well, there's this concept of thinking seven generations ahead. Anything you do you have to consider the seventh generation, and this project struck me as being very much along those lines of thinking of time in a radically different way, you know, and having to produce a text for that has really been salutary for me, you know, to try and think of, you know, what can I have to say to a readership that's not yet born.
00:24:52
Speaker 1: Is it a full book?
00:24:54
Speaker 2: There's no particular specification.
00:24:56
Speaker 1: But what did you do? Like how many pages? And is it fiction or is it nonfiction?
00:25:01
Speaker 2: I don't think I'm allowed to tell you about.
00:25:04
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, how did it even start to think what your contribution should be?
00:25:12
Speaker 2: Well, of course, the first thing that you're tempted to do is to try and imagine the future world, you know, and I made many false starts. I tried that, and then I decided that that's actually a fool's Errand you know, I mean, if I think about how much the world has changed within my own lifetime, and that's obviously accelerating, it's impossible for any of us to have a sense of what the world will be like in twenty one fourteen. And in fact, you run the risk of making an ass of yourself because you know people will open that thing and say, oh, he was so completely wrong, you.
00:25:47
Speaker 1: Know, So you discounted that.
00:25:49
Speaker 2: I discounted that, and I.
00:25:50
Speaker 1: Thought instead that you needed to think of something timeless.
00:25:55
Speaker 2: I needed to think of drawing on my own resources, you know, of saying what I need to say. Really, rather than trying to imagine a world far ahead.
00:26:07
Speaker 1: It is really hard to think about what will the you know, what will the planet look like, what will borders look like? You know, there might be nations that have even gone by then. So you're in the process of handing over that that manuscript.
00:26:23
Speaker 2: Yes, it'd be at the end of June. Yes, so I'll go to Oslo for.
00:26:27
Speaker 1: That and your own writing. Because you said how difficult it is to separate yourself out and to carve that kind of time for your writing away from the news. How do you actually do it? What have you learned?
00:26:40
Speaker 2: Well, you know, one thing that helps is that writing is all I've ever done, and I've done it all my life. You know, along the way, I've developed certain sort of disciplines with just seeing me through the day and help me write a little bit. I'm saying a little bit, but especially over the last five or six years, I've written an awful lot, you know, even as the world is kind of falling apart around us.
00:27:05
Speaker 1: Is it a daily word count? Because when Selimon Rishti came on the show, he said he was happy if he does two hundred words a day, which I was slightly surprised by because but that's that's where he is. Do you think in that way?
00:27:19
Speaker 2: No, But I think two hundred words is a is good. I mean, if they're good words, that's good going.
00:27:26
Speaker 1: So do you read back the next day or read back what you've written the day before?
00:27:32
Speaker 2: Well, you know, I write in a very complicated way. First I write by hand, then I start typing, and when I start typing. That's when I start reading back the next day.
00:27:41
Speaker 1: But your book start in long hand.
00:27:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, yes, a long hand with a fountain pen. If I try to sort of compose directly onto a computer, I find that it just it just freezes me, you know, whereas if I'm writing by hand, I feel much more free, so I can just follow my thoughts.
00:28:02
Speaker 1: So you must have a library full of the notebooks, the originals.
00:28:06
Speaker 2: Yes, I do. I have a lot of notebooks.
00:28:08
Speaker 1: And how much do you find that the ultimate book has changed from the original notebook, the handwritten one.
00:28:15
Speaker 2: It changes a lot, actually, I mean with earlier books, I mean they were unrecognizable, but with this one it wasn't. You know. I had a very strange experience writing this book. It it was literally like it came from outside myself, you know, and the book just seemed to write itself. I mean, I wrote it. It usually takes me years to write a novel, but with this one, it was really something kind of uncanny. You know. The only writer who talks about that experience in relation to writing is Stephen King, you know, who often says that his books seemed to come from somewhere outside himself.
00:28:56
Speaker 1: So do you know yet which place, which dimension, even your next book might take you in.
00:29:06
Speaker 2: You know. Yeah, let's face it, all our everyday politics has they've proved utterly ineffectual in confronting the planetary crisis that we're in. The only political movement that has actually had real effects in this world is the rights of nature movement, I would say, you know, and movements like the No Dakota Pipeline movement. You know, right here in America. We've had many similar movements amongst Adivasi groups in India. And all these movements which have been so effective are founded on notions of the sacredness of the land. And what they've actually been able to do is to mobilize governments into according personhood to rivers and mountains and glaciers, you know. And this is I had a real effect in the world. Now, imagine what it is for a court in New Zealand, a high court, the Supreme Court of New Zealand to actually say this river is a person and can be the ancestor of a group of people. You know. It's not just that you're giving rights to rights to a river. You're making an ontological shift in the way that you see the world, because these ideas are all based upon the sacredness of the land, if you like. And where does sacredness come from. It comes from the miraculous.
00:30:33
Speaker 1: I mean that obviously, that's been part of Native American culture and modo Catholic culture. But it's so far away from our present moment and the political moment in the United States and in some other parts of the world.
00:30:45
Speaker 2: Yes. Absolutely, Again, this is because of the deep attachments to the fossil field economy, you know. And these attachments go way past any anything to do with means and ends. I mean, there's a genuine emotion attachment to fossil fuels. I mean, when you hear people roaring down the street on those very noisy motorcycles, they're not doing it just to get from one place to another, you know, an electric motorcycle that won't do it for them. They like that noise.
00:31:16
Speaker 1: So I'm it'sough to close having written about past lives in this book. I mean, if I asked you to imagine what you would like to come back as, or the life you might like to have after this, what would you choose?
00:31:32
Speaker 2: That's absolutely impossible. I don't know. Maybe I'd like to be a bird Or.
00:31:38
Speaker 1: Is there a place in history that you've written about all research that you know of which your knowledge has been so deep that you have been able to really imagine living in that time or been drawn towards.
00:31:49
Speaker 2: Yes, I mean, certainly, I've researched the nineteenth century in India in very great detail. But I also researched the twelfth century in you know, especially along the West coast, where there were communities of Muslims, Jews, Hindus are living together.
00:32:07
Speaker 1: Pre colonial times, pre colonial times.
00:32:09
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was a very beautiful time. I think I would choose that.
00:32:14
Speaker 1: I mean, thank you very much, congratulations on Ghost I thank you, forward to the next book.
00:32:19
Speaker 2: Thank you, Michelle, and thank you so much for having me. It's been a great pleasure.
00:32:26
Speaker 1: And that's where we left our conversation. In the text version, which we'll find at Bloomberg dot com forward slash, Michelle, you'll find my notes adding background to the places we talked about, the political context and how cases of the reincarnation type are documented at the University of Virginia and so to the team. The producers are Jessica Beck and Chris Martlu. The video producer is Andy Haywood. Social media is by Alex Morgan, Production assistance by Jennifer Seeley, audio mixing by Richard Ward. Our music is by Bart Walshaw and the executive producer is Louisa Lewis at Bloomberg Weekend. The director of Audio and Special Projects is Brendan Francis Newnham, and our executive editor is Catherine Bell. Special thanks this week go to Keshav Pandya. If you want to get in touch with us, the email is Michelle Show at Bloomberg dot net. We not only read every email, we always write back until next time. Goodbye,
