Book Review: The World And The Word — Amitav Ghosh’s 'Wild Fictions'

Some of the essays in ‘Wild Fictions’ are personal, others analytical, but all of them carry the quiet energy of a writer who has never been content staying in one place, intellectually or otherwise.

File image of author Amitav Ghosh.

Source : PTI

Amitav Ghosh is one of those rare writers who have travelled widely, read deeply, and written with both urgency and care. Over the last four decades, his work — whether novels, essays, or reflections — has been shaped by a desire to understand the world in all its contradictions.

His new book, ‘Wild Fictions’, gathers essays written across different moments in his life. Some of them are personal, others analytical, but all of them carry the quiet energy of a writer who has never been content staying in one place, intellectually or otherwise.

Reading this collection feels like sitting across from Amitav Ghosh, hearing stories that begin in the past but somehow lead us to our present. One piece begins in a village in Egypt, another in wartime Burma. One leads us through the mangroves of the Sundarbans, another to the alleyways of Venice, or to a factory making undergarments in India. The range is remarkable, but so is the patience with which he listens, to people, to histories, to landscapes.

A Young Man And The Wider World

In one of the most striking essays, Amitav Ghosh recalls a time in Delhi when, as a young man with few resources and a lot of hope, he wandered the streets delivering handwritten letters to foreign embassies, searching for a way to go abroad. It was not ambition in the conventional sense that drove him, it was a restless curiosity, a longing to see how the world lived beyond the familiar contours of his own city. The doors didn’t open then, but soon after, a scholarship to Oxford came through, and he began his studies in anthropology. It was the beginning of a lifelong conversation with cultures, languages, and landscapes far from home.

That formative experience, of looking outward, of trying to find meaning in unfamiliar places, echoes through all of Amitav Ghosh’s work. His writing has never been about reinforcing walls or asserting national identities. Instead, it is shaped by an instinct to explore the invisible threads that connect histories and geographies. Whether chronicling the quiet life of an Egyptian village, the aftermath of colonial displacement, or the intricate networks of the spice trade, Ghosh remains drawn to the movements beneath the surface.

In his work, the world doesn’t stand still. Rivers shift, winds carry stories across oceans, people migrate, willingly or otherwise. He is, in many ways, a cartographer of currents, those that move through time, trade, migration, and memory. His fiction, as much as his nonfiction, resists neat categorisations. It mirrors the real world in its fluidity, its chaos, its surprising kinships.

That young man who once knocked on embassy doors might not have known where he was going, but he already carried the instincts of a writer: to ask, to observe, to listen, and to move towards the unknown with an open heart.

Reading As Friendship

The best parts of ‘Wild Fictions’ are where Ghosh writes about the people who have influenced him, writers, scholars, even forgotten diarists and grandmothers. His letters to Dipesh Chakrabarty and reflections on Santanu Das are full of warmth and thoughtfulness. He doesn’t quote their work to score points or impress; instead, he engages with them the way friends do, curious, questioning, generous, and open to being changed by the exchange.

There’s no pretence of superiority in Amitav Ghosh’s intellectual world. Instead, he invites us into a circle of companionship, where reading is not a solitary act but a shared journey. He is as attentive to the living as to the long gone. One moment he is carefully studying a First World War diary by Sisir Sarbadhikari, and, the next, he is listening to the voice of Mokkhoda Debi, a grandmother writing with quiet intensity about her grandson who went to war. In these voices, fragile, often ignored, Amitav Ghosh finds the pulse of history.

There’s something deeply moving in the way he makes room for them, not just as archival curiosities, but as moral and imaginative presences. These are not just stories to him, they are inheritances, lessons, and responsibilities. By reading them with care, Ghosh reminds us that history is not the domain of victors alone. It also belongs to those who loved and lost, who remembered in private, and who wrote without ever expecting to be read.

In doing so, Amitav Ghosh shows us what it means to be a reader in the truest sense — not someone who consumes texts, but someone who enters a relationship with them. In a world where so much reading is performative, his quiet fidelity to the page feels like an act of rare grace.

Looking At The World, And Looking After It

Anyone who has read ‘The Hungry Tide’ or ‘Gun Island’ knows that Amitav Ghosh has long been worried about the environment. But what’s refreshing in ‘Wild Fictions’ is how clearly he writes about the need to rethink our stories about nature. The idea of the untouched forest, he says, is a colonial invention. Real forests, the ones that survive, have always had people in them — tending, shaping, living.

He writes, too, about the journeys of migrants, especially Bangladeshis he met in Italy, and the way their lives have been shaped by both environmental change and political indifference. These are not statistics to him. They are people he has spoken to, walked with, and remembered.

What makes Amitav Ghosh’s writing on these subjects so compelling is that he never writes from above. He doesn’t lecture or simplify. Instead, he observes, with care, humility, and a sense of shared fate. Whether it’s the erosion of a riverbank in the Sundarbans or the quiet resilience of a migrant worker in Palermo, he sees these stories as connected. The climate crisis, for him, isn’t just about rising temperatures, it’s about memory, loss, survival, and the fragile ties that bind humans to their land and to each other. And in choosing to tell these stories with such patience and empathy, Ghosh reminds us that looking at the world also means looking after it.

And what stays with the reader is not just the scale of the crises Amitav Ghosh describes, but the intimacy with which he encounters them. He doesn’t present climate change as an abstract emergency, but as something that unfolds in the rhythms of ordinary lives, through the loss of a home, the silence of a vanished bird, or the salty creep of seawater into once-fertile soil. He reminds us that these are not distant catastrophes; they are already here, reshaping lives in ways that most fiction still fails to grasp. In doing so, he asks a quiet but urgent question: What kind of stories will we need to tell if we are to live differently, and more justly, in a changing world?

A Writer Who Listens

At a time when many writers are expected to take loud positions or cultivate celebrity personas, Amitav Ghosh offers something quieter, and perhaps rarer — a sustained, attentive engagement with the world. He is serious without being self-important, thoughtful without being distant. His writing doesn’t shout, it listens. And in that listening, it invites the reader to slow down, to pay closer attention, to consider what might otherwise go unnoticed.

Amitav Ghosh’s prose often carries the feeling of a conversation that continues beyond the page. He doesn’t impose answers; he asks questions, revisits old ideas, and remains open to change. This quality, of listening deeply to others, to history, to landscapes, gives his work a moral texture that is neither didactic nor sentimental.

‘Wild Fictions’ is not just a collection of essays. It is a window into the life of a writer who has never drawn rigid lines between fiction and nonfiction, imagination and responsibility. Whether he is recounting the lives of migrants, reflecting on the legacy of the empire, or tracing the ripple effects of climate change, Amitav Ghosh again reminds us that writing at its best is a form of attention: to people, to stories, to the slow shifts of climate and time.

For those of us who have followed Amitav Ghosh’s work over the years — from ‘The Circle of Reason’ to ‘The Shadow Lines’, from ‘The Glass Palace’ to ‘The Nutmeg’s Curse’ — this book is a chance to see how the ideas behind the novels were shaped, challenged, and refined. We see the same obsessions and questions carried across decades, deepened by time and experience.

And for new readers, ‘Wild Fictions’ offers a generous insight into one of the most enduring and thoughtful literary voices of our time. In an age of noise, Amitav Ghosh shows us the quiet power of listening, and the enduring value of writing that remembers, connects, and cares.

Book: Wild Fictions: Essays By Amitav Ghosh 

Price: Rs 799

Publisher: HarperCollins Fourth Estate India 

The writer is a Bengaluru-based management professional, curator, and literary critic

[Disclaimer: The opinions, beliefs, and views expressed by the various authors and forum participants on this website are personal and do not reflect the opinions, beliefs, and views of ABP News Network Pvt Ltd.]