I see the climate crisis in terms of karma and dharma: Amitav Ghosh

LONDON, Nov 24: Renowned author Amitav Ghosh will receive the prestigious Erasmus Prize at a grand ceremony at the Royal Palace in Amsterdam on Tuesday for his contributions to the theme of “imagining the unthinkable” around the climate change crisis .

As the first recipient of the award in South Asia, the Kolkata-born author said he felt “extremely privileged” to have been chosen for an award that has had a diverse range of recipients over the decades – from artists like of Charlie Chaplin and Ingmar Bergman to the latest Trevor Noah.

The Praemium Erasmianum Foundation, behind the annual award, selected Ghosh as the 2024 Laureate for his ability to make an uncertain future visible through compelling stories about the past.

“I’m not a great believer in this whole dualism between optimism and pessimism, or optimism and despair. I think, as someone from an Indian background, I tend to think of these things in terms of karma and dharma,” Ghosh told PTI in an interview ahead of the awards ceremony in the Netherlands next week. .

“I think whether things are going to be bad or not, it’s our dharma to try and do the best we can. It’s our duty to do the best we can, to try and prevent the terrible disruptions that almost we will definitely see in the future,” he said.

The author of ‘The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable’ tears down the current process to address the issue through the Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), commonly known as COP, has “been broken for too long.”

“What we’re seeing now is that even the pretense of trying to create some kind of mitigation, or of trying to deal with this as a collective problem, has been effectively abandoned,” he said.

“The common-sense idea that things are going to be so bad that some change will be made eventually, I don’t think we can count on that… To effectively implement some measures requires political action, and it is it is now quite clear that actual environmental degradation does not directly lead to political action,” he noted.

As a writer of historical fiction and non-fiction, Ghosh sees these problems as “rooted in history, in the long history of colonialism, inequality and global disparities”. When countries in the Global South, such as India, are faced with the need to reduce their carbon footprint, he acknowledges an inevitable backlash against the wealthy West.

“You hear people in these countries saying that they (the West) got rich by oppressing us when we were weak, so now we are. So, in the Global South, this whole issue is really seen as an issue of inequality and the differences of the world, and in a way, that’s why the problem is so difficult,” he said.

But having spent a lot of time in non-fiction for his last few titles, Ghosh is “going back to my roots as a fiction writer” as he envisions his next novel set in contemporary times with elements of history

“I don’t want to say much about it because I’m superstitious about talking about unfinished projects,” he said.

His latest work, ‘Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories’, has been shortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding 2024. Throughout his illustrious career, the 68-year-old author of famous works like ‘ Sea of ​​​​Poppies’ and ‘The Calcutta Chromosome’ have won a series of literary prizes including the Jnanpith Award in India. Next week, he will add the Erasmus Prize to a growing list of awards for promoting a “new humanism in which not only all men are equal, but humanity also abandons the distinction between man and nature “.

The Erasmus Prize is awarded annually to a person or institution who has made an outstanding contribution to the humanities, social sciences or arts, in Europe and beyond. The award consists of a cash prize of EURO 150,000 and decorations of a harmonica folded ribbon with titanium plates at both ends. (PTI)