Great Nicobar Mega Port or Char Dham Highway are Ideological Assertions, Says Amitav Ghosh
Eminent writer Amitav Ghosh in an email interview to Nandini Keshari speaks about climate fiction, implications of Trump’s climate actions, development in ecologically sensitive areas and India’s net-zero-emission targets. Edited excerpts
Nearly a decade ago, you posed an important question: ‘Where is the fiction about climate change?’ How do you view the current state of climate fiction?
What I was arguing for in The Great Derangement is that writers should engage with the changing realities of the world. I was not calling for a new sub-genre called ‘climate fiction’. The problem with climate fiction is the phrase itself—because it foregrounds ‘climate’ over all other vectors of the planetary crisis.
Right now, biodiversity loss and geopolitical tensions may, in fact, be even greater threats than climate change. Moreover, to link fiction directly to climate change is to tie it to certain domains of scientific and sociological research. What is implied by this link is that fiction should be a mode of narrativising certain kinds of academic research.
The problem with this is that those fields of research are themselves often limited by certain assumptions, which means that those limitations will also circumscribe the fiction.
Take for example, the idea that a certain ‘wet-bulb temperature’ will automatically lead to predictable kinds of human behaviour. This is a very typical behaviorist assumption, and it is laughably inaccurate in relation to real-world events.
Moreover, the very notion of wet-bulb temperatures is based on skewed data. Mike Hulme [professor of human geography, Cambridge University] has argued forcefully that we should be very careful about ‘climate reductionism’ that is reducing complex phenomena to climate change alone. Climate fiction runs the risk of doing exactly that.
With Donald Trump taking a position of global influence, how do you think this could shift the geopolitical landscape around climate change?
The Trump administration’s rollback of environmental regulations, withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and unabashed support for fossil fuels signal a return to the worst excesses of carbon capitalism. The implications are dire: weakened international cooperation, emboldened petrostates and a potential domino effect where other nations—including India—may justify slower climate action.
The Trump administration’s unabashed support for fossil fuels signals a return to the worst excesses of carbon capitalism
In your works, you’ve linked climate change with the legacies of colonialism and capitalism. Could you elaborate on how these interconnected forces manifest in contemporary India?
The climate crisis is not a sudden phenomenon—it is the culmination of patterns of exploitation and extractivism that go back over centuries. Colonialism turned forests into timber, rivers into irrigation channels and entire ecosystems into plantations. Postcolonial India inherited this extractive mindset, replacing the British Raj with corporate and state-led plunder.
Today, we see this in deforestation for mining, privatisation of water and megacities built on wetlands. The Adivasi and Dalit communities, displaced by dams and coal mines, are the first victims. Meanwhile, the elites are insulated from the consequences. This is not just environmental degradation—it is a continuation of colonial violence, where the powerful sacrifice the vulnerable in the name of ‘development.’
The Sundarbans plays a prominent role in The Hungry Tide. What drew you to this fragile ecosystem, and how does it highlight the complexities of climate change?
The Sundarbans fascinates me because it is a place of constant negotiation—between land and water, humans and tigers, survival and extinction. This is not a static landscape but a volatile, living entity that resists domination. The Sundarbans exposes the hubris of human control—no embankment can hold back the tides forever. When cyclones like Aila or Amphan strike, they reveal the fragility of our systems. The Sundarbans teaches us that adaptation is not just about technology but about humility, about learning to live with uncertainty.
In your books like The Living Mountain and The Nutmeg’s Curse, you highlight the consequences of large-scale development in fragile regions. In light of current projects such as the development in the Great Nicobar Islands and the Char Dham highway, how do you see the long-term implications of such interventions?
Projects like the Great Nicobar mega port or the Char Dham highway in the Himalayas are not just creating the conditions for ecological disasters —they are ideological assertions. They reflect the same colonial mindset that treats nature as inert matter to be reshaped for profit.
The Great Nicobar plan, for instance, disregards the rights of indigenous Shompen people and threatens a Unesco biosphere reserve. These projects assume that ‘progress’ must mean concrete, steel and deforestation. The long-term implications are clear: more erosion, more disasters, more displacement. We must ask: Who benefits from this ‘development’? And who pays the price?
You are one of the most prominent literary voices engaged with climate change. Could you explain your research process?
My approach is deeply interdisciplinary. For The Nutmeg’s Curse, I traced the history of colonial botany and indigenous resistance.
But the most crucial research comes from listening—to scientists, yes, but also to farmers, fishermen and other voices on the ground. They understand ecological change in ways that data alone cannot capture.
India has set renewable-energy goals for 2030 and a net-zero target for 2070, which have pushed several industries to begin reducing their carbon footprints. Can they make a meaningful difference in mitigating the risks of climate change?
Renewable energy is necessary, but 2070 net-zero is too late. And if ‘green growth’ simply means more extraction—lithium mines, solar farms on tribal land—then we’re simply repeating old mistakes.
A sustainable India would: decentralise energy—community solar, not mega dams; restore agroecology—support small farmers not corporate agribusiness and prioritise public transit, not car-centric cities.
We can learn from Kerala’s participatory governance, Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness or Latin America’s Buen Vivir. The alternative—business-as-usual ‘development’—is a death sentence for much of humanity.