Amitav Ghosh on why the original American model of wildlife conservation doesn't work, Donald Trump & end of Eurocentricity in the world

Amitav Ghosh's new book 'Wild Fictions' released in January 2025.

With Donald Trump's inauguration as the 47th US President looming, I ask Amitav Ghosh what he thinks of Trump's desire to acquire Greenland and exert greater control over the Panama Canal. There are at least two reasons I put the question to the 2018 Jnanpith awardee: Apart from being a US resident since 1988, Amitav Ghosh's new book 'Wild Fictions' makes the case that the era of Eurocentricity and America-as-the-sole-superpower-in-the-world is over. Second, Donald Trump has again - in 2025 - expressed a desire to "buy" Greenland to strengthen American national security. And of Panama Canal, he has said he's concerned about growing Chinese influence over the crucial trade route - even though some experts have expressly said there are no signs that the Chinese have any more sway in the region than the Americans.

Amitav Ghosh's response: "Trump is bringing this up is precisely because the US projection of power is suffering, really, a major shock right now, especially in Ukraine... And also, in an economic sense, in relation to China. All of these are major reversals. You might say they need (a win) - in the American world, there is always a need for a victory - and that victory in the past has always consisted of expansion. So, I think that's the imperative that's driving this."

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We are meeting in the HarperCollins India office in tony CyberHub, Gurugram, a day after Ghosh delivered the 2025 CG Deshmukh Memorial Lecture at the India International Centre (IIC) and launched his latest non-fiction book titled ' Wild Fictions' - a collection of essays, book reviews, conversations and correspondence on a range of subjects from the 9/11 terror attack and climate change to histories - personal and national.

At IIC, Ghosh's comments on artificial intelligence ("For now, I'd be happy if AI could get my name right") and Silicon Valley's fevered preparations for a catastrophic event that could wipe out a large portion of the world's (poorer) population (a "Malthusian correction" that technocrats will survive on their reinforced islands and in bunkers made at huge expense to ride out disasters both natural and manmade) had elicited laughs. Meanwhile, his end-of-era pronouncements had got a more somber reception. Back in the HarperCollins India office, I ask what's changed in the 21st century to precipitate this and whether this turn away from a Eurocentric worldview is also translating into more focus on indigenous forms of knowledge.

Ghosh's response is immediate, visceral even. "The incredible irony," he says, "is that it's in colonizing countries like Australia and America where for 200 years they wiped out the indigenous peoples, they suppressed their forms of knowledge, but right now, it's in those countries that they have started the process of recovering the knowledge system and understanding their knowledge systems. In India, it's gone exactly in the opposite direction. Indigenous peoples now more than before even are being treated like Native Americans used to be treated 100 years before. Their belief systems are derided."

Of course, Ghosh isn't the first to pronounce that Western/First-world influence is on the wane everywhere in the world. Where Amitav Ghosh's writing in 'Wild Fictions' differs is really in where it looks for the challenges to Western ideas of supremacy and how it presents alternative (and increasingly more attractive) narratives.

Consider the long essay that lends its title to the whole book. "Wild Fictions", the essay, tells four different stories. It begins with a fictional story about taking cues from nature and coexisting with it. The story, titled "The Indian Hut", goes something like this: at the height of the British Raj, a European traveller comes to India in search of ancient wisdom on questions like how to seek, know and share truth. Disappointed with the answers he gets from scholars in holy cities, he finds what he's looking for in the home of a "paraya" lower caste forest-dweller who tells him that nature is his temple and his guide, and he's learnt to pay heed to this great teacher through great misfortunes. The story champions this romantic idea of pristine nature that is best preserved away from human interference.

Next, Ghosh tells the story of a naturalist called Edward Blyth, curator of natural history at Calcutta's Asiatic Society in the 1950s. Faced with an unusual situation when a hoard of sea creatures get beached on the banks of the Hooghly, his first instinct is to dissect and identify them. The locals, on the other hand, immediately and doggedly attempt to return as many of these creatures back to sea as they can manage - even risking the Englishman's wrath to free the healthiest creatures he had earmarked for dissection. The narrative here finds more wiggle room, for the coexistence of humans and animals.

The third story is a retelling of local folklore in the Sundarbans, about the balance between nature and human society. It explains how local myth about a "Bon bibi" (forest dame) reinforces the idea of moderation when extracting natural resources, with the locals believing that getting more than you need or before you need it could unleash a demon tiger upon the offender.

Finally, there's a more recent story about a rare breed of sheep - and some excellent views - in Pakistan's Hunza Valley. Before a Western zoologist suggested that the valley be turned into a nature reserve to conserve the Marco Polo sheep, the meadows were open to the locals who grazed their own animals there. Once the Khunjerab National Park came up, the locals were no longer allowed to graze there. They were uprooted and asked to vacate the land their ancestors had lived and worked off. The reserve began to attract ecotourists instead. And little by little, the numbers of the Marco Polo sheep started to dwindle - as poachers and displaced locals sought ways to make ends meet.

Of these, Amitav Ghosh finds the third model most effective - where humans co-exist with their environment, trying to strike a balance. "The whole sort of reserve forest idea was really borrowed from American models, you know, and they tried to recreate what was done in America. That is, you move all the indigenous people out and you create a sort of enclave, which is essentially tourism-oriented. And this this model has been implemented in Africa, and also in India. And actually, if you think about it, what that has really led to is a kind of ethnic cleansing. The local people get shunted out and basically the middle-class urban people replace them as tourists. And I think this is based on a completely wrong idea of what forests are, because we know now that there is no such thing as a pristine nature. It's never existed anywhere.

"Before the European conquest of the Americas, it's thought that up to 10 million people lived in the Amazon. And what we see as the Amazon is actually not a wilderness as such - it's actually more like a garden that the indigenous peoples made possible. So to move the indigenous peoples out is it is a terrible mistake. Nobody knows that ecology better than them. If you go to Ranthambore, for example, Ranthambore is a place that I first visited in 1975 as a college student. And at that time, it had been declared a forest reserve, but it was a place where villagers lived. It had its own kind of life, and tigers existed. They cohabited with human beings and there was not a problem really. If you go there now, you will see that all these villages have been completely cleared out. The people have been moved away. They have lost their livelihood. They have lost their lands. And in principle, they are entitled to some kind of compensation. But as we know, they almost never get anything equal to that. So for them it's a tremendous loss. And what happens is that then they become really, how shall I say, disoriented and antagonized. And since they know the forest, they can often become poachers. So you are really creating the problem. Today, around the world, there is an increasing realization that sustainable, long-term forest policy must be worked out with the participation of indigenous peoples, the participation of forest peoples."

Cover of 'Wild Fictions' by Amitav Ghosh (Photo courtesy HarperCollins)

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'Wild Fictions' is a curious book. Written over 25-plus years, the "chapters" vary widely in terms of length, style, subject.

Take, for example, the write-up titled simply "11 September 2001". In it, Ghosh recalls where he and his family were on the day of the terror attack. Next, he recounts the ordeal of his neighbours in Brooklyn who worked in - and loved - the World Trade Center. The whole write-up is barely five pages long.

Ghosh's chapters on how he got interested in researching how spices like nutmeg and mace made it into spice boxes in kitchens around the world are significantly longer. Despite the differences in tone, approach, length, however, each essay is a window onto what Ghosh was writing, researching, living through at the time - often capturing ideas and events with broad resonance and/or historical significance.

Some of the chapters are deeply personal. Others are based on his reading of other people's experiences, writings, histories. We learn, for example, that when he was 20, Ghosh tried to offer his services as a teacher through the embassies of multiple third-world countries, only to realize that wannabe Indian immigrants were largely unwelcome except as students in the 1980s. His stint at Oxford, studying social anthropology with people who saw themselves as writers more than social scientists turned out to be serendipitous.

You can skip to the essays you want to read first. Each offers a glimpse into the mind of Amitav Ghosh, and on to the world through the lens of a well-read and widely travelled anthropologist-turned-writer of the human condition in a world that seems to him to be a "grim" place getting grimmer by the decade.