by Amitav Ghosh
Fortunately, the chances of a cyclone hitting Mumbai are small in any given year. But there is no doubt whatsoever of the threats that will confront the city because of other climate change impacts: increased precipitation and rising sea levels. If there are substantial increases in rainfall over the next few decades, as climate models predict, then damaging floods will become more frequent. As for sea levels, if they rise by a meter or more by the end of the century, as some climate scientists fear they might, then some parts of south Mumbai will gradually become uninhabitable.
A similar fate awaits two other colonial cities, founded in the same century as Mumbai: Chennai (Madras), which also experienced a traumatic deluge in 2015; and Kolkata, to which I have close familial links.
Unlike Chennai and Mumbai, Kolkata is not situated beside the sea. However, much of its surface area is below sea level, and the city is subject to regular flooding: like everyone who has lived in Kolkata, I have vivid memories of epic floods. But long familiarity with flooding tends to have a lulling effect, which is why it came as a shock to me when I learned, from a World Bank report, that Kolkata is one of the global megacities that is most at risk from climate change; equally shocking was the discovery that my family’s house, where my mother and sister live, is right next to one of the city’s most threatened neighborhoods.
The report forced me to face a question that eventually confronts everybody who takes the trouble to inform themselves about climate change: what can I do to protect my family and loved ones now that I know what lies ahead? My mother is elderly and increasingly frail; there is no telling how she would fare if the house were to be cut off by a flood and medical attention were to become unavailable for any length of time.
After much thought I decided to talk to my mother about moving. I tried to introduce the subject tactfully, but it made little difference: she looked at me as though I had lost my mind. Nor could I blame her: it did seem like lunacy to talk about leaving a beloved family home, with all its memories and associations, simply because of a threat outlined in a World Bank report.
It was a fine day, cool and sunlit; I dropped the subject.
But the experience did make me recognize something that I would otherwise have been loathe to admit: contrary to what I might like to think, my life is not guided by reason; it is ruled, rather, by the inertia of habitual motion. This is indeed the condition of the vast majority of human beings, which is why very few of us will be able to adapt to global warming if it is left to us, as individuals, to make the necessary changes; those who will uproot themselves and make the right preparations are precisely those obsessed monomaniacs who appear to be on the borderline of lunacy.
If whole societies and polities are to adapt then the necessary decisions will need to be made collectively, within political institutions, as happens in wartime or national emergencies. After all, isn’t that what politics, in its most fundamental form, is about? Collective survival and the preservation of the body politic?
Yet, to look around the world today is to recognize that with some notable exceptions, like Holland and China, there exist very few polities or public institutions that are capable of implementing, or even contemplating, a managed retreat from vulnerable locations. For most governments and politicians, as for most of us as individuals, to leave the places that are linked to our memories and attachments, to abandon the homes that have given our lives roots, stability, and meaning, is nothing short of unthinkable.
12.
It is surely no accident that colonial cities like Mumbai, New York, Boston, and Kolkata were all brought into being through early globalization. They were linked to each other not only through the circumstances of their founding but also through patterns of trade that expanded and accelerated Western economies. These cities were thus the drivers of the very processes that now threaten them with destruction. In that sense, their predicament is but an especially heightened instance of a plight that is now universal.
It isn’t only in retrospect that the siting of some of these cities now appear as acts of utter recklessness: Bombay’s first Parsi residents were reluctant to leave older, more sheltered ports like Surat and Navsari and had to be offered financial incentives to move to the newly founded city. Similarly, Qing dynasty officials were astonished to learn that the British intended to build a city on the island of Hong Kong: why would anyone want to create a settlement in a place that was so exposed to the vagaries of the earth?
But in time, sure enough, there was a collective setting aside of the knowledge that accrues over generations through dwelling in a landscape. People began to move closer and closer to the water.
How did this come about? The same question arises also in relation to the coast around Fukushima, where stone tablets had been placed along the shoreline in the Middle Ages to serve as tsunami warnings; future generations were explicitly told “Do not build your homes below this point!”
The Japanese are certainly no more inattentive to the words of their ancestors than any other people: yet not only did they build exactly where they had been warned not to, they actually situated a nuclear plant there.
This too is an aspect of the uncanny in the history of our relations with our environments. It is not as if we had not been warned; it is not as if we were ignorant of the risks. An awareness of the precariousness of human existence is to be found in every culture: it is reflected in biblical and Quranic images of the Apocalypse, in the figuring of the Fimbulwinter in Norse mythology, in tales of pralaya in Sanskrit literature, and so on. It was the literary imagination, most of all, that was everywhere informed by this awareness.
Why then did these intuitions withdraw, not just from the minds of the founders of colonial cities, but also from the forefront of the literary imagination? Even in the West, the earth did not come to be regarded as moderate and orderly until long after the advent of modernity: for poets and writers, it was not until the late nineteenth century that Nature lost the power to evoke that form of terror and awe that was associated with the “sublime.” But the practical men who ran colonies and founded cities had evidently acquired their indifference to the destructive powers of the earth much earlier.
How did this come about? How did a state of consciousness come into being such that millions of people would move to such dangerously exposed locations?
The chronology of the founding of these cities creates an almost irresistible temptation to point to the European Enlightenment’s predatory hubris in relation to the earth and its resources. But this would tell us very little about the thinking of the men who built and planned that base in the Nicobars: if hubris and predation had anything to do with their choice of site, it was at a great remove. Between them and the cartographers and surveyors of an earlier era there was, I think, a much more immediate link: a habit of mind that proceeded by creating discontinuities; that is to say, they were trained to break problems into smaller and smaller puzzles until a solution presented itself. This is a way of thinking that deliberately excludes things and forces (“externalities”) that lie beyond the horizon of the matter at hand: it is a perspective that renders the interconnectedness of Gaia unthinkable.
The urban history of Bengal provides an interesting illustration of what I am trying to get at. Colonial Calcutta, which was for a long time the capital of the British Raj, was founded on the banks of the Hooghly River in the late seventeenth century. It had not been in existence for long before it came to be realized that the river was silting up. By the early nineteenth century, the East India Company had decided in principle that a new port would be built at a location closer to the Bay of Bengal. A site was chosen in the 1840s; it lay some thirty-five miles to the south east of Calcutta, on the banks of a river called Matla (which means “crazed” or “intoxicated” in Bengali).
At that time, there lived in Calcutta an Englishman by the name of Henry Piddington. A shipping inspector by profession, he dabbled promiscuously in literature, philology, and the sciences until hi
s true calling was revealed to him by a treatise, An Attempt to Develop the Law of Storms, written by an American meteorologist, Col. Henry Reid. Published in 1838, the book was an ambitious study of the circular motion of tropical storms. Colonel Reid’s book inspired a great passion in Piddington, and he devoted himself to the field for the rest of his life. It was he who coined the word cyclone, and it is for this that he is best remembered today. But Piddington’s particular interest was the phenomenon of the storm surge (or “storm wave” as it was then called): he would eventually compile a detailed account of storm surges along the coast of Bengal and the devastation they had caused.
Because of his familiarity with this subject, Piddington understood that the proposed port on the Matla River would be exposed to extreme cyclonic hazard. Such was his alarm that in 1853 he published a pamphlet, addressed to the then governor-general, in which he issued this ominous warning: “every one and everything must be prepared to see a day when, in the midst of the horrors of a hurricane, they will find a terrific mass of salt water rolling in, or rising up upon them, with such rapidity that the whole settlement will be inundated to a depth from five to fifteen feet.”
Piddington’s warnings fell on deaf ears: to the builders and civil servants who were working on the new city, he must have sounded like a madman—in the measureable, discrete universes that they worked within there was no place for a phenomenon that took birth hundreds of miles away and came storming over the seas like a “wonderful meteor” (to use Piddington’s words).
It was probably the very scale of the phenomenon invoked by Piddington that made it unthinkable to those eminently practical men, accustomed as they were to the “regularity of bourgeois life.” The port continued to rise, even through the great uprising of 1857: it was built on a lavish scale, with banks, hotels, a railway station, and imposing public buildings. The city was formally inaugurated in 1864 with a grand ceremony: it was named Port Canning, after a former governor-general.
Port Canning’s claims to grandeur were short-lived. A mere three years after its inauguration, it was struck by a cyclone, just as Piddington had predicted. And even though the accompanying storm surge was a modest one, rising to only six feet, it caused terrible destruction. The city was abandoned four years later (Canning is now a small river port and access point for the Sundarbans). Piddington thus became one of the first Cassandras of climate science.
13.
If I have dwelt on this at some length, it is because the discontinuities that I have pointed to here have a bearing also on the ways in which worlds are created within novels. A “setting” is what allows most stories to unfold; its relation to the action is as close as that of a stage to a play. When we read Middlemarch or Buddenbrooks or Waterland, or the great Bengali novel A River Called Titash, we enter into their settings until they begin to seem real to us; we ourselves become emplaced within them. This exactly is why “a sense of place” is famously one of the great conjurations of the novel as a form.
What the settings of fiction have in common with sites measured by surveyors is that they too are constructed out of discontinuities. Since each setting is particular to itself, its connections to the world beyond are inevitably made to recede (as, for example, with the imperial networks that make possible the worlds portrayed by Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë). Unlike epics, novels do not usually bring multiple universes into conjunction; nor are their settings transportable outside their context in the manner of, say, the Ithaca of the Odyssey or the Ayodhya of the Ramayana.
In fiction, the immediate discontinuities of place are nested within others: Maycomb, Alabama, the setting of To Kill a Mockingbird, becomes a stand-in for the whole of the Deep South; the Pequod, the small Nantucket whaling vessel in Moby Dick, becomes a metaphor for America. In this way, settings become the vessel for the exploration of that ultimate instance of discontinuity: the nation-state.
In novels discontinuities of space are accompanied also by discontinuities of time: a setting usually requires a “period”; it is actualized within a certain time horizon. Unlike epics, which often range over eons and epochs, novels rarely extend beyond a few generations. The longue durée is not the territory of the novel.
It is through the imposition of these boundaries, in time and space, that the world of a novel is created: like the margins of a page, these borders render places into texts, so that they can be read. The process is beautifully illustrated in the opening pages of A River Called Titash. Published in 1956, this remarkable novel was the only work of fiction published by Adwaita Mallabarman, who belonged to an impoverished caste of Dalit fisherfolk. The novel is set in rural Bengal, in a village on the shores of a fictional river, Titash.
Bengal is, as I have said, a land of titanic rivers. Mallabarman gestures toward the vastness of the landscape with these words: “The bosom of Bengal is draped with rivers and their tributaries, twisted and intertwined like tangled locks, streaked with the white of foamy waves.”
But almost at once he begins to detach the setting of his novel from the larger landscape: all rivers are not the same, he tells us, some are like “a frenzied sculptor at work, destroying and creating restlessly in crazed joy, riding the high-flying swing of fearsome energy—here is one kind of art.”
And then, in a striking passage, the writer announces his own intentions and premises: “There is another kind of art. . . . The practitioner of this art cannot depict Mahakaal (Shiva the Destroyer) in his cosmic dance of creation and destruction—the awesome vision of tangled brown hair tumbling out of the coiled mass will not come from this artist’s brush. The artist has come away from the rivers Padma, Meghna, and Dhaleswari to find a home beside Titash.
“The pictures this artist draws please the heart. Little villages dot the edges of the water. Behind these villages are stretches of farmland.”
This is how the reader learns that the Titash, although it is a part of a landscape of immense waterways, is itself a small, relatively gentle river: “No cities or large towns ever grew up on its banks. Merchant boats with giant sails do not travel its waters. Its name is not in the pages of geography books.”
In this way, through a series of successive exclusions, Mallabarman creates a space that will submit to the techniques of a modern novel: the rest of the landscape is pushed farther and farther into the background until at last we have a setting that can carry a narrative. The setting becomes, in a sense, a self-contained ecosystem, with the river as the sustainer both of life and of the narrative. The impetus of the novel, and its poignancy, come from the Titash itself: it is the river’s slow drying up that directs the lives of the characters. The Titash is, of course, but one strand of the “tangled locks” of an immense network of rivers and its flow is necessarily ruled by the dynamics of the landscape. But it is precisely by excluding those inconceivably large forces, and by telescoping the changes into the duration of a limited-time horizon, that the novel becomes narratable.
Contrast this with the universes of boundless time and space that are conjured up by other forms of prose narrative. Here, for example, are a couple of passages from the beginning of the sixteenth-century Chinese folk epic The Journey to the West: “At this point the firmament first acquired its foundation. With another 5,400 years came the Tzu epoch; the ethereal and the light rose up to form the four phenomena of the sun, the moon, the stars, and the heavenly bodies. . . . Following P’an Ku’s construction of the universe . . . the world was divided into four great continents. . . . Beyond the ocean there was a country named Ao-lai. It was near a great ocean, in the midst of which was located the famous Flower-Fruit Mountain.”
Here is a form of prose narrative, still immensely popular, that ranges widely and freely over vast expanses of time and space. It embraces the inconceivably large almost to the same degree that the novel shuns it. Novels, on the other hand, conjure up worlds that become real precisely because of their finitude and distinctiveness. Within the mansion of serious fiction, no one will
speak of how the continents were created; nor will they refer to the passage of thousands of years: connections and events on this scale appear not just unlikely but also absurd within the delimited horizon of a novel—when they intrude, the temptation to lapse into satire, as in Ian McEwan’s Solar, becomes almost irresistible.
But the earth of the Anthropocene is precisely a world of insistent, inescapable continuities, animated by forces that are nothing if not inconceivably vast. The waters that are invading the Sundarbans are also swamping Miami Beach; deserts are advancing in China as well as Peru; wildfires are intensifying in Australia as well as Texas and Canada.
There was never a time, of course, when the forces of weather and geology did not have a bearing on our lives—but neither has there ever been a time when they have pressed themselves on us with such relentless directness. We have entered, as Timothy Morton says, the age of hyperobjects, which are defined in part by their stickiness, their ever-firmer adherence to our lives: even to speak of the weather, that safest of subjects, is now to risk a quarrel with a denialist neighbor. No less than they mock the discontinuities and boundaries of the nation-state do these connections defy the boundedness of “place,” creating continuities of experience between Bengal and Louisiana, New York and Mumbai, Tibet and Alaska.
I was recently sent a piece about a mangrove forest in Papua New Guinea. This was once a “place” in the deepest sense that it was linked to its inhabitants through a dense web of mutual sustenance and symbolism. But in the wet season of 2007, “the barrier beaches were breached, cutting innumerable channels through to the lakes. Sand poured through them. Tidal surges tore across the villages, leaving behind a spectacle of severed trunks of coconut palms and dead shoreline trees, drifting canoes, trenches, and gullies. Entire villages had to be evacuated.” Eventually the inhabitants were forced to abandon their villages.
