The Praemium Erasmianum Foundation has awarded the Erasmus Prize 2024 to the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh. He receives the prize for his passionate contribution to the theme ‘imagining the unthinkable’, in which an unprecedented global crisis – climate change – takes shape through the written word. Ghosh has delved deeply into the question of how to do justice to this existential threat that defies our imagination. His work offers a remedy by making an uncertain future palpable through compelling stories about the past. He also wields his pen to show that the climate crisis is a cultural crisis that results from a dearth of the imagination.
Born in Kolkata in 1956, Ghosh studied social anthropology at Oxford and divides his time between India and the United States. He has produced a vast body of work, made up of both historical novels and journalistic essays that carry the reader across continents and oceans. Each work is grounded in thorough archival research and succeeds in transcending boundaries and time periods with literary eloquence. Ghosh makes major themes such as migration, diaspora, and cultural identity tangible without ever losing sight of the human dimension.
Nature has been an important character in his work ever since he conducted research into the tidal landscape of the Sundarbans for his book The Hungry Tide and witnessed how climate change and rising sea levels were ravaging the area. Drawing from the rich history of the Indian subcontinent, Ghosh describes how, in that part of the world where he was born, the effects of natural catastrophes have been inextricably linked with human destiny for a very long time. In his compelling Ibis trilogy, set against the backdrop of poppy cultivation and opium wars, he shows how colonialism has left equally deep scars in the landscape.
In his non-fiction book The Nutmeg’s Curse he traces the current planetary crisis back to a disastrous vision that reduces the earth to raw material, soulless and mechanical. In his essay The Great Derangement he challenges readers to view climate change through the geopolitical context of war and trade. Through understanding and imagination he creates space for hope, a prerequisite for change. Thus, Ghosh propagates a new humanism in which not only all people are equal, but humanity also abandons the distinction between man and nature.
Ghosh has won various prizes, among them the 2018 Jnanpith Award, the highest literary prize in India. In 2019 he received an honorary doctorate from Maastricht University and was ranked by Foreign Policy magazine as one of the most important global thinkers of our time.
The following is
Ghosh’s acceptance speech, delivered on November 26, 2024, produced in full
from the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation’s website. It takes only a glance at a
newspaper nowadays to see that much of what we once took for granted is either
being cast aside or turned on its head. Indeed, with floods sweeping away
entire cities, and the prospect of a nuclear war closer than it has ever been,
I couldn’t bring myself to think about what I was going to say today until a
couple of weeks ago; such are the uncertainties of our times that I wondered
whether it would even be possible to hold this ceremony as scheduled.
On the day that I
finally began to write these words, I happened to be at the far eastern end of
Indonesia, in the Banda archipelago, which is the ancestral home of the tree
that produces both nutmeg and mace. These spices were once immensely valuable,
and they made those islands so rich and prosperous that they became a coveted
prize for European colonialists and were ultimately conquered by the Dutch East
India Company or VOC. In the year 1621, on the orders of the then governor
general of the East Indies, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, almost the entire population
of the islands was eliminated in the course of a few weeks, although a few
hundred managed to escape to neighboring islands where they kept their culture
and language alive till the present day. This was one of the foundational genocides
of the early modern era, and it enabled the VOC to establish a monopoly on
nutmeg and mace, which in turn, contributed greatly to the prosperity of the
Netherlands in the period known as the Dutch Golden age.
This atrocity never
features in the art and literature of that period, and it would probably have
been largely erased from history had it not been for the work of an almost
forgotten Dutchman who happened to be the head archivist of the colonial
administration in Batavia, J.A. van der Chijs. In 1886 van der Chijs published a meticulously
detailed account of the Banda genocide, titled The Establishment of Dutch Rule
Over The Banda Islands: it was van der Chijs’s research that made it possible
for me to write my own account of the Banda massacre in my book The Nutmeg’s
Curse.
Van der Chijs should by
rights be accorded a prominent place within the distinguished lineage of Dutch
critics of empire that goes back to Eduard Douwes Dekker or Multatuli. This
tradition that has been kept alive until the present day by scholars like Jan
Breman, Dirk Kolff and Marjolein van Pagee. The fact that I am here today, to
accept this great honor here in the Netherlands, is itself a testament to this
tradition’s continuing relevance and vitality.
The legacies of writers
like Multatuli and van der Chijs serve to remind us of the extreme violence
through which Western hegemony over the entire
planet was established several centuries ago. It is important to note
that violence was not incidental to the geopolitical ascendancy of Western
empires; it was central to it. As the American political theorist Samuel
Huntington once noted: “The West won the world not by the superiority of its
ideas or values or religion… but rather by its superiority in applying
organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never
do.”
Paradoxically, it was
in the aftermath of decolonization that Western geopolitical dominance reached
its apogee, with the United States becoming the world’s sole hyperpower at the
end of the Cold War. This rise to absolute dominance happened so suddenly, and
in such a fashion, that American political elites came to be convinced that the
US had achieved absolute and permanent geopolitical supremacy, and that its
paramountcy would never again be challenged. This, combined with the booming
successes of Silicon Valley, created a hubris that surpassed anything that had
existed even in the glory days of European imperialism in the 19th century.
Western politicians and pundits decided that they had a duty to impose their
will wherever they wanted, for whatever reason. And what was the result? Sadly,
it was a swath of destruction that stretched from Afghanistan and Pakistan to
Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and Palestine.
NATO’s bombing of Libya
is a particularly egregious example of the short-sightedness of Western actions
in this period. Libya was host to hundreds of thousands of Asian and African
migrants: after the government collapsed, and the country descended into civil
war, these workers had no recourse but to flee across the Mediterranean, as
stateless migrants and refugees.This resulted in a crisis that continues to
roil politics in the West to the present day, with the issue of migration
causing an upsurge in support for demagogues and right-wing movements. Driving
the ascendancy of these neo-fascist movements is a myth of victimhood, in which
affluent countries are seen as the aggrieved parties, resisting invasions by
black and brown foreigners. Yet the fact is that the preconditions for these
mass migrations were created by none other than the West itself, with the
multiple invasions and regime change operations that it launched across the
world while it was reveling in the delirium of the unipolar moment.
Did none of the West’s
leaders, with all the collective wisdom of their armies of pundits and think
tanks, see this coming? The triumphalism of their pronouncements at that time
suggest that they truly believed that their actions would never have any
consequences. But, as the recent US elections show, all of that is now
unraveling because of a tremendous backlash from their own constituencies,
which are no longer willing or able to pay the price of hegemony.
This is indeed one of
the principal reasons for the extreme uncertainties of our era, because it has
now become evident that the centuries-long period of Western dominance is
lurching towards its end. Whatever might be our opinions on the rights and wrongs
of the current conflicts in Israel, Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen and Ukraine, it is now
self-evident that it is no longer possible for the West to dictate solutions
through force of arms, as it once did: it has lost its erstwhile ‘superiority
in applying organized violence.’ This loss has been accompanied also by an
accelerating erosion of the West’s financial and industrial dominance: the fact
that the recently founded BRICS grouping
of nations now has a significantly larger share of global GDP than the G7 nations
is a clear indication of this. Nor is it a coincidence that this relative
military and financial decline has been accompanied by political crises of such
gravity that the West’s structures of governance are now in danger of swerving
disastrously off course.
We are, in other words,
in a moment of multiple intersecting crises and transitions – of geopolitics,
financial structures, and, perhaps most importantly, of environmental and
ecological regimes that are slowly but surely pushing the planet towards catastrophe.
No wonder then that one of the most often repeated quotations of our time is
Antonio Gramsci’s famous aphorism: “The old world is dying, and the new world
struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
That is where we find
ourselves today, living through a time of monstrous anomalies, when
exterminatory violence, like that which depopulated the Banda Islands, can play
out on live television; a time when it is possible to speak of the deaths of
certain people, but not of others; a time when entire cities can be swept away
by flash floods while the world carries on as usual; a time when environmental
activists receive longer jail sentences than corporate criminals; when UN forums for climate change negotiations turn
into markets for selling oil and gas.
Even Antonio Gramsci
could not have imagined the full extent of the abnormality of our era, because
he lived in a simpler time when the most dangerous monsters were purely
political creatures, like fascists. What is distinctive about our time is that
its monsters consist not only of political extremists of all kinds, but also of
weather events that could not have been conceived of in Gramsci’s lifetime:
supercharged storms, megadroughts, catastrophic rain-bombs and the like. Back
then these monsters, had they appeared, would have been considered ‘natural’
phenomena or acts of God. But knowing what we now know about the role of
anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions in intensifying climate disasters, it is
no longer possible to cling to the fiction of a strict division between the
natural and the political: it is clear now that wildfires, rain-bombs and the
like are also deeply political creatures in that they are the by-products of
historical processes that have hugely benefited a small minority of human
beings at the expense of the great majority of the world’s population.
These inequalities are
at the core of the monstrous dramas that are unfolding in front of us today:
what we are witnessing is nothing other than an epochal struggle between those
who are intent on preserving their historical advantages, and those who are not
only determined to resist but now also have the means to do so. And since those historical advantages, as
well as the means to resist, are greatly dependent on the use of fossil fuels,
the result is a spiraling double helix that will continue to generate more and
more monstrously anomalous events, through processes that are neither
exclusively political nor environmental, but both at once.To come to this
realization has taken me a very long time and I am fortunate in having had the
support, on this journey, of my children Lila and Nayan, and above all, of
Deborah, my partner of 35 years, who has at this point been by my side for the
better part of my life. I have also been extraordinarily fortunate in having
had the support of many friends and members of my family, some of whom have
taken the trouble to travel long distances to be here today: I thank them all
from the bottom of my heart, particularly my sister and my niece, and my
in-laws from the Baker and Harper
families. There are many others I would like to thank but I am afraid that I
would run out of time because I have been informed, by none other than the
director of the Erasmus Prize Foundation, that the number of family and friends
attending this ceremony is more than she has ever seen in her ten years in that
position. Well, that is what happens when you give a prize to someone from the
world’s most populous country.
However, it would be remiss of me if I failed to thank
Shanti Van Dam, the director, and Britt Kroon, the program administrator, of
the Erasmus Prize Foundation who have spared no effort to make the arrangements
for this ceremony. And finally, I would like to thank the members and jury of
the foundation for bestowing an undreamt-of honor on me, and for making it
possible for me to be here today, in the Royal Palace in Amsterdam, to receive
the prize from his Majesty, King Willem-Alexander in the presence of the Royal
Family of the Netherlands.
Amitav Ghosh is a
celebrated writer. He won the 54th Jnanpith award, India’s highest literary
honour, in 2018.
