The site of Anthropocene and colonial entanglement: reviewing The Nutmeg’s Curse

Abstract

Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021) offers an incisive template of the intersecting history of Anthropocene and colonisation. The parables retold by Ghosh transport us to a sequestered past obscured by a Eurocentric discourse on colonial modernity. However, it is the same history which is now falling apart to reveal the devastating trajectory of the omnicidal enterprise carried out by the earliest colonising forces. The mapping of anthropogenic activities also helps us identify the locus of the philosophy that has bolstered the impetus of these forces. On one hand, the mechanistic view of life propagated by the colonisers had initiated the inception of colonial modernity; on the other hand, its boomeranging effect coupled with the “great acceleration” (133) has reached a tipping point leading to the present-day environmental crisis. Ghosh’s book is a percipient warning for denialists who believe that the earth is an inert entity and that non-humans are brute forces to be subjugated. To counter this climate crisis, Ghosh comes up with some reversal strategies in which storytellers and indigenous communities may play an active role in restoring “Gaia” with all its vitality.

Cognitive (In)justice and Decoloniality in Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse

“…Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (2021) is an insightful deliberation on the layered inequities and asymmetries created by the intersection of colonialism, capitalism and anthropogenic activities. An ideological continuation of Ghosh’s earlier work, The Great Derangement (2016), which foregrounds a cognitive unawareness of and an imaginative failure to fathom the climate crisis, The Nutmeg’s Curse comes out as a ‘percipient warning’ (Biswas, 2022, p. 905) on escalating environmental degradation. Writing at a time when the coronavirus pandemic has hit the world in a deadly way, Ghosh in The Nutmeg’s Curse seeks to probe the vulnerability of humans as rooted in the notions of Western colonialism and modernity.…”