Hidden Forces: Counter-Epistemologies in the Writing of Amitav Ghosh

John Thieme

John Thieme

 

Abstract

In his book The Nutmeg’s Curse, Amitav Ghosh discusses The Hidden Force, a 1900 novel by the Dutch writer Louis Couperus, referring to it as ‘the most insightful of all European colonial novels’. Its insightfulness, for Ghosh, lies in its representation of the disintegration of a solid and unimaginative Dutch colonial official in Java, who has to ‘confront the epistemic violence of colonialism’, when he is challenged by a series of weird and paranormal events, which he feels embody a ‘hidden force’. This essay argues that hidden forces, which undermine both the hegemony of the colonial project and values ascendant in the global world order of today, recur throughout Ghosh’s writing, whether fiction or non-fiction. It particularly focuses on the role they play in In An Antique Land, The Calcutta Chromosome, Gun Island and The Nutmeg’s Curse.

In the final chapter of his book The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021), Amitav Ghosh discusses The Hidden Force, a 1900 novel by the Dutch writer Louis Couperus, saying that in his view it ‘the most insightful of all European colonial novels’ (NC 249).[1] What makes it so insightful for Ghosh is its representation of the disintegration of a solid and unimaginative Dutch colonial official in Java, who has to confront what Ghosh refers to as ‘the epistemic violence of colonialism’ (250; italics in original) when he is challenged by a series of weird and paranormal events, which he feels embody a hidden force. From its outset, Ghosh’s own work has been similarly concerned with showing how hidden forces undermine the hegemony of the colonial project and, in his more recent work, he extends this by suggesting that such forces, particularly ‘climatic events of unprecedented and uncanny violence’ (NC 257), are threatening the global world order of today.

From his earliest work to his most recent, Ghosh has been concerned with representing the lives of those who have been unrepresented or underrepresented in mainstream historical narratives. His first novel, The Circle of Reason (1986), follows the fortunes a young Bengali weaver, Alu, whose loom becomes a trope for a circular vision of Reason that stands in opposition to Western linear historiography. His recent work, Smoke and Ashes (2023), which offers a coda to his exploration of the nineteenth-century Opium Trade in his expansive Ibis trilogy (2008-2015), is sub-titled A Writer’s Journey through Opium’s Hidden Histories. In both cases, and the same is true of virtually all of Ghosh’s writing, the focus is on the lives of those whom history has for the most part overlooked, and in both his fiction and non-fiction, Ghosh repeatedly attempts to give voice to disempowered subalterns who at best have found a place in the margins of history. And, although his more recent work moves beyond colonial issues to a concern with the contemporary planetary crisis, engendered by anthropogenic climate change and related phenomena, it continues to challenge pre-Enlightenment and non-Western epistemologies.    

To demonstrate this contention, this essay focuses on two of Ghosh’s earlier works, In An Antique Land (1992) and The Calcutta Chromosome (1996), and two of his recent ones, Gun Island (2019) and, more briefly, The Nutmeg’s Curse. In each of these pairings, one of the texts is ostensibly fiction, the other ostensibly non-fiction, but there is slippage between the two modes of writing. Ghosh’s discursive praxis erodes the boundaries between history and fiction to make subaltern alternatives to the dominant imaginaries of the post-Enlightenment West possible. The fiction is set against a background of factual information: the novel The Calcutta Chromosome incorporates specialist information about late nineteenth-century malaria research and religious movements deemed to be heretical in the West. The apparent non-fiction In An Antique Land is informed by speculative fictive invention: sub-titled History in the Guise of a Traveller’s Tale[2] in one of its editions, it contains an imaginatively reconstructed account of the lives of figures whose life-stories have been occluded in colonial records.

In An Antique Land juxtaposes two apparently factual narratives. In the longer of these, a Ghosh persona, engaged in anthropological research in Egypt,[3] describes his experiences living in a fellaheen village. In the shorter narrative, the persona attempts to uncover a hidden history, by pursuing the fugitive traces of the ‘slave’ of a twelfth-century Jewish merchant – in Egypt, the Malabar coast of India, the U.K. and finally the U.S. – and in so doing he pieces together a narrative of the life, not only of the subaltern slave, ‘Bomma’, but also of his master, Abraham Ben Yiju. The account of the quest for the slave draws readers into an anthropological detective-story, which serves as a metonym for the difficulty of the task of excavating hidden subaltern identities. At the same time, in providing a skeletal biography of Ben Yiju, the text engages with the equally fascinating historiographical project of narrativizing the life of a liminal merchant, who is the personification of Indian Ocean trade-routes that confound the East-West bifurcations of Orientalist cartographies. Ghosh represents Ben Yiju as a cultural broker who moves unself-consciously between supposedly discrete worlds. And in the contemporary Egyptian narrative, there is a similar erosion of the boundaries between different worlds, when the writer, in dialogues with the Egyptian villagers among who he is living, finds striking parallels between experiences and events in India and Egypt.

          So Ghosh’s technique blends archival research and fiction. Speculating on Ben Yiju’s marriage to a non-Jewish woman, he says, ‘If I hesitate to call it love it is only because the documents offer no certain proof’ (IAAL [1992] 230; my italics). Commenting on how Bomma became Ben Yiju’s ‘slave’, he writes, ‘From certain references in Ben Yiju’s papers it seems likely that he took Bomma into his service as a business agent and helper soon after he had established himself as a trader in Mangalore’ (259; my italics). Starting with the comment that Bomma’s first appearance on ‘the stage of modern history’ was only ‘a prompter’s whisper’ (13), Ghosh opens up ‘a trapdoor into a vast network of foxholes where real life continues uninterrupted’ by ‘grand designs and historical destinies’ (15-16). Similarly, his account of contemporary fellaheen village life focuses on micro-histories, ‘tiny threads, woven into the borders of a gigantic tapestry’ (95). Ghosh’s Egyptian characters, figures that would generally be relegated to the periphery of travel-narratives, come alive as individuals in their own right. At the same time they become representatives of the subalterns emancipated by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Revolution, whose lives are now undergoing rapid change as a result of ‘their engagement with modernism’, their desire to escape from what they see as their ‘anachronistic’ (200) situation, by ascending a ladder of technological development. The central tension of the dialogues in the contemporary narrative arises from accounts of the villagers’ eagerness to learn about Indian customs, in order to make comparisons between the two cultures’ success in engaging with modernity.

          In the historical narrative, Ghosh’s emphasis on the mobility of the pre-Enlightenment trading networks of the eastern Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean might suggest movements similar to contemporary routes of migration, but the analysis is culturally specific: he makes a sharp distinction between such movements and those of first the post-colonization period and then the contemporary globalized world. The demise of what he views as a centuries’ old ‘culture of accommodation and compromise’ of the Indian Ocean trade comes with the advent of Portuguese colonization, which take control of the trade ‘by aggression, pure and distilled’ (288), refusing any attempts at co-operation. ‘[T]he peaceful traditions of the oceanic trade’ (287) have been the products of a travelling culture that is a world away from those of colonial mercantilism and contemporary global capitalism’s ‘technology of modern violence’ (236). So, while the main emphasis of In An Antique Land is on the collapse of a peaceful, boundary-free culture of accommodation under the impact of colonialism, Ghosh is already suggesting the analogies with neo-colonial practices in the world order of today. Again, there is continuity between the two.

 

The Calcutta Chromosome is ostensibly more fictive than In An Antique Land, but it also interweaves a network of traces – from the history of malaria research and theological movements generally deemed to be heretical in the West, and also slightly futuristic computer technology – to provide the possibility of a hidden subaltern history, which exists in parallel with colonial history as an equally, or possibly more) potent epistemological force, albeit one which has traditionally operated through silence. The predominant mood is established early on in the novel, when a revered Bengali poet is overheard giving a lecture on silence. ‘Every city’, he says, ‘has its secrets […] but Calcutta whose vocation is excess, has so many that it is more secret than any other. Elsewhere […] secrets live in the telling […] But here in our city […] that which is hidden has no need of words to give it life […] it mutates to discover sustenance precisely where it appears to be most starkly withheld – in this case, in silence’ (CC 24-5). This may seem very cryptic, but it sets the tone for a novel that posits the existence of a silenced, hidden network that is more powerful than the colonial epistemologies that have failed to recognize it.

 The main narrative involves a re-examination of the history of late nineteenth-century malaria research by a possibly deranged Calcutta-born man named Murugan, who is convinced that Ronald Ross, the British scientist who was awarded the 1902 Nobel Prize for Medicine for his work on the life-cycle of the malaria parasite was not a ‘lone genius’ (57), a brilliant British dilettante who outstripped all of his contemporaries. Murugan believes there is a secret history that has been erased from the scribal records of the colonial society and from medical historiography more generally, and he sets out to uncover the hidden truth, a project which can be seen as a metonym for the attempt to recuperate subaltern agency more generally. Murugan’s research has led him to the conclusion that Ross and other Western scientists working in the field of malaria research in India have been manipulated by their Indian helpers, led by a woman named Mangala, who appears to be both the high priestess of a secret medical cult, offering a cure for syphilis, and the brain behind the discoveries that eventually led to Ross's winning the Nobel Prize. So, Ghosh's narrative discredits the Western scientist and instates an Indian female subaltern in his place.

          The cult’s discoveries are, however, concerned with far more than a malaria cure. They involve a counter-epistemology, which promises a form of immortality through the erosion of Western conceptions of discrete subjectivity. Mangala's discovery of the means by which malaria is transmitted has come about as a by-product of her real research interest. Working outside the straitjacket of Western empirical methodologies, she has been attempting to evolve ‘a technology for interpersonal transference’ (106), a means of transmitting knowledge ‘chromosomally, from body to body’ (107). In Murugan's view the relationship between Mangala's counter-science and that of conventional scientists such as Ross is analogous to the relationship between ‘matter and antimatter, [. . .] rooms and ante-rooms and Christ and Antichrist and so on’ (103). If one accepts Murugan's thesis, there is, then, the possibility of a subaltern Manichean force which, though it operates through silence and secrecy, is at least as powerful as Western logocentrism.

In short, The Calcutta Chromosome invites its readers to engage with the possibility of an alternative historiography, in which traditionally disempowered subjects prove to be the real puppet-masters. The counter-science cult led by Mangala can only operate through silence, but the fictive reconstruction that Murugan initiates subverts the hegemonic dominance of Western logocentrism all the same. The Calcutta chromosome and the possibility of effecting the interpersonal transference of knowledge occupies a central role in this investigation, since such transference would erode the barriers between elite and subaltern classes, between the purveyors and the recipients of knowledge, and everything in the novel seems to be working towards this end. Structurally it moves between multiple stories and characters; and the near repetition of variant forms of the same situation also works to dismantle the notion of discrete essentialist versions. The novel has several investigators of possible meanings, and it gradually becomes clear that they are all implicated in the material they are investigating. Numerous binary divisions are eroded. Ultimately, as I have argued elsewhere,[4] The Calcutta Chromosome leaves its readers to consider the part they have played in the construction of meaning. The view that readers are passive consumers of texts, epistemological subalterns, is upended, leaving them free to become agents in the process of decoding the hidden histories that have been explored. I began by referring to Ghosh’s comments on The Hidden Force, where the main protagonist is unable to come to terms with mysterious undercurrents in colonial Javanese society. In The Calcutta Chromosome, the pendulum swings away from the colonial psyche and moves towards an engagement with the specifics of a subaltern epistemology. The novel has been widely praised for its ingenuity and readability,[5] but the subtleties of its engagement with different knowledge-systems, which make it one of Ghosh’s finest achievements, remain under-appreciated.

 

As I have said, Ghosh’s more recent work has expanded the parameters of his engagement with the epistemic violence of colonialism and its aftermath by focusing on the contemporary planetary crisis, engendered by anthropogenic climate change and related phenomena, and there is a clear continuity of concerns. For example, in his influential study The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016), he is at pains to point out that cities such as Mumbai, Chennai, New York, Charleston, Singapore, and Hong Kong, founded directly on the ocean by European colonists as an assertion of ‘power and security, mastery and conquest’ are ‘among those that are most directly threatened by climate change’ (GD 37). Meanwhile, he says, today waterside locations continue to be status symbols and favoured tourist spots.

          Ghosh’s main argument in The Great Derangement is that that beliefs about climate that depend on the view that meteorological changes occur gradually have become unsustainable, since the recent proliferation of extreme weather-related events has made the hitherto improbable the new norm. At the same time, The Great Derangement does something else: it engages with what Ghosh sees as fiction’s limitations when it comes to depicting the meteorological shifts that threaten the planet’s future. He claims that the realist novel is unsuited to the representation of dramatic climatological events, because ‘the calculus of probability that is deployed within the imaginary world of a novel is not the same as that which obtains outside it’ (23). The argument here verges on the specious, but to his credit in the years following the publication of The Great Derangement, Ghosh seems to have had a change of heart, largely, it would seem, as a result of his admiration for Richard Powers’s novel, The Overstory (2018),[6] a novel which challenges anthropocentric speciesism by making trees central.

Whatever the precise reasons for Ghosh’s change of heart, Gun Island, which appeared three years after The Great Derangement, is a work in which he offers his own sustained attempt at a novel that encompasses the supposed improbable of extreme weather events, along with a range of other hitherto abnormal phenomena that have become norms in the age of the Anthropocene. The novel’s narrator, Deen Datta, who prides himself on being ‘a rational, secular, scientifically minded person’ (GI 36), finds himself challenged by various happenings that appear to be paranormal. Deen travels between West Bengal, Brooklyn, California and Venice, and in each of these locations, he experiences evidence of climate change. This ranges from disturbances caused by the migration of creatures who have suffered habitat loss to seemingly apocalyptic storms. Dolphins, fish, yellow-bellied sea snakes, bark beetles and brown recluse spiders have all been displaced from their traditional habitats, to the point where the migration of species is a new norm, and several passages in the novel draw explicit analogies between human and non-human migration. The numerous instances of extreme weather in the novel reach a climax in the closing pages, when a tornado threatens the central characters as they drive along a road in the Italian region of the Veneto, and subsequently, when they are on board a ship in the Venetian lagoon, they see a plethora of tornadoes on and above the water. For the rational Deen, what he is witnessing seems to belong to an alternative world that lies outside the bounds of realism and he likens this to a pre-Enlightenment text he has seen in Venice’s Querini Stampalia library, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili’ (276), which translates as The Strife of Love in a Dream. This is a romance told by a man who is transported into a forest, where he finds himself ‘surrounded by savage animals’. He loses himself in a dream-within-a-dream, where he finds himself assaulted by voices emanating ‘from beings of all sorts – animals, trees, flowers, spirits …’ (227; ellipsis in original). What is most uncanny in this instance, though, is Deen’s feeling that he himself is lost in the dream and being dreamed by ‘creatures whose very existence’ he finds ‘fantastical’ […] – spiders, cobras, sea snakes – and yet’, he says’, they and [he] had somehow become a part of each other’s dreams’ (227). So dream supersedes reality in an animist vision, in which non-human species have equal agency with humans, and more generally pre-Enlightenment, non-Western fables challenge the primacy of the Anthropocene, in a manner similar to the animist vision developed by Richard Powers in The Overstory. The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili parallels the Bengali legend that has provided the main impetus for the plot: the legend of the Merchant, Chand Sadagar, and his struggles with Manasa Devi a Sundarbans goddess of snakes and other venomous creatures, such as spiders. So, taking the reader into a discursive space that moves beyond realism, Ghosh proposes the necessity for fabulation, as a riposte to the contemporary planetary crisis. In an Afterword to his verse-narrative Jungle nama (2021) he is explicit about the need for alternative narrative modes. He writes:

The planetary crisis has upturned a vast range of accustomed beliefs and expectations, among them many that pertain to literature and literary forms. In the Before Times, stories like this one would have been considered child-like, and thus fare for children. But today, it is increasingly clear that such stories are founded on a better understanding of the human predicament than many narratives that are considered serious and adult. (Jn 77)

I have written about this aspect of Gun Island more fully in my book Anthropocene Realism (2021). Here perhaps I can just stress that the novel finds affinities between non-Western and pre-Enlightenment Western fabulation in which animism is taken for granted, and sees them as necessary modes to combat the anthropocentrism that has brought about the planetary crisis.

Finally, The Nutmeg’s Curse, a non-fiction work which is sub-titled Parables for a Planet in Crisis. It begins in medias res with a historical tale, which is recounted in a manner suggestive of fiction: ‘nobody knows exactly what transpired in Selamon [a village in the Banda Islands in the Indonesian province of Maluku] on that April night, in the year 1621, except that a lamp fell to the floor (NC 5). The exact nature of what happened on the night in question may be unclear, but Ghosh relates how a fire caused by the falling lamp led to a wholesale massacre of the local inhabitants by the occupying Dutch colonizers, who assumed that the fire indicated that the villagers were revolting. The broader context is that until the eighteenth century, Maluku was the world’s sole source of nutmeg and mace, commodities highly valued around the globe at a time when spices were at the heart of international trading networks. Ghosh’s elaboration of the tale makes it a parable about the violence of colonial mercantilism but again, he emphasizes that there are continuities with ‘our present predicament’ (19), in which dependence on natural resources, in the form of coal, oil, and natural gas, which are ‘fossilized forms of botanical matter’ (18) dominates the global economy.

In the ensuing sections of the book, Ghosh ranges widely, across various aspects of the planetary crisis, developing an argument that shapes itself into a powerful polemic against Anthropocentric exclusivism. As in Gun Island, the crux of his argument is that there are hidden forces that resist what he calls ‘the vision of world-as-resource’, in which ‘the physical subjugation of people and territory’ is accompanied by ‘a specific idea of conquest, as a process of extraction’ (76). He locates the origins of the contemporary ecological omnicide that has generated the climate crisis, and along with it the loss of biodiversity and all the other injurious consequences of global warming, in the epistemology that legitimized a ‘new economy based on extracting resources from a desacralized inanimate Earth’ and ‘the subjugation of human ‘brutes and savages’, along with ‘an entire range of nonhuman beings – trees, animals, and landscapes’ (38). In a chapter on ‘terraforming’, in which he particularly focuses on Native Americans, he discusses how interventions by settlers constituted a form of biological and ecological warfare that dispossessed and exterminated Indigenous peoples. By such means, the nations of the Great Plains of America were destroyed by settlers spreading diseases like smallpox and sanctioning the slaughter of the buffalo that were essential to their way of life. In opposition to the view of Earth as a site of resource extraction, again as in Gun Island, he puts forward a hylozoist view of existence in which agency is no longer the sole prerogative of human animals. Humankind, in its colonial and global capitalist incarnations is displaced from its centrality in favour of a vitalist politics and poetics akin to the Gaia hypothesis of the British chemist James Lovelock, who has promoted the belief that the Earth is a self-sustaining organism that regulates and replenishes itself.[7]

Let me end by coming full circle back to Ghosh’s comments on Louis Couperus’s The Hidden Force in The Nutmeg’s Curse. Ghosh concludes his remarks on The Hidden Force by saying that the predicament it represents is ‘emblematic of the plight of all humanity, as it faces the planetary crisis’, because ‘most of humanity today lives as colonialists once did, viewing the earth as though it were an inert entity that exists primarily to be exploited and profited from’ (257). So again he finds a seamless continuity between the epistemic violence of the colonial era and the Anthropocene exclusivism of today. His final words are, ‘It is essential now, as the prospect of planetary catastrophe comes ever closer, that […] nonhuman voices be restored to our stories. The fate of humans, and all our relatives, depends on it’ (257).

 

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[1] References to Ghosh’s works are by the initials of the main words in their titles.

[2] The 1994 Vintage First Departures edition.

[3] Ghosh’s own doctoral thesis was on Kinship in Relation to the Economic and Social Organization of an Egyptian Village Community, Oxford 1982.

[4] See Thieme 2003.

[5] See Khair 2003:145-6.

[6] See Ghosh ‘Reading and Conversation on Gun Island’, Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures, University of Virginia, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pixQalTh0xQ (Accessed 28 September 2024).

[7] Gaia is the subject of Chapter 7 of The Nutmeg’s Curse (NC 85-98).

 

 

WORKS CITED

Couperus, Louis ([1900] 2012) , The Hidden Force: A Story of Modern Java, Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace/Amazon.

Ghosh, Amitav (1986) The Circle of Reason, New Delhi: Roli Books.

--- (1992) In An Antique Land, London: Granta.

--- (1994) In An Antique Land, New York: Vintage New Departures.

--- (1996) The Calcutta Chromosome, London: Picador.

--- (2008-15) The Ibis Trilogy: Sea of Poppies, John Murray, 2008; River of Smoke, John Murray, 2011; Flood of Fire, John Murray, 2015.

--- (2016) The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

--- (2019) Gun Island, London: John Murray.

--- (2021) The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, Gurugram: Penguin/Allen Lane.

--- (2021) Jungle nama: A Story of the Sundarban, London: John Murray.

--- (2023) Smoke and Ashes: A Writer’s Journey through Opium’s Hidden Histories, New Delhi: Fourth Estate.

Khair, Tabish (2003) ‘The Question of Subaltern Agency: Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome’ in Khair, T. (ed.) Amitav Ghosh: A Critical Companion, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003: 142-61.

Powers, Richard (2018) The Overstory, London: Heinemann.

Thieme, John (2003) ‘The Discoverer Discovered: Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome’ in Khair, T. (ed.) Amitav Ghosh: A Critical Companion, New Delhi Permanent Black, 2003: 128-41.

--- (2023) Anthropocene Realism: Fiction in the Age of Climate Change, London and New York: Bloomsbury.

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Bio: John Thieme is Professor Emeritus at London South Bank University. He has held professorial positions at the University of Hull and the University of East Anglia, and has also taught at the Universities of Guyana and North London. His critical books include Postcolonial Con-Texts: Writing Back to the Canon (2001), Anthropocene Realism: Fiction in the Age of Climate Change (2023) and studies of V.S. Naipaul (1987), Derek Walcott (1999) and R.K. Narayan (2007). His creative writing includes Paco's Atlas and Other Poems (2018), Digitalis and Other Poems (2023) and the novels The Book of Francis Barber (2018) and Cabinets of Curiosities (2023). He edited The Arnold Anthology of Post-Colonial Literatures in English (1996) and was the general editor of both The Journal of Commonwealth Literature and the Manchester University Press Contemporary World Writers Series for two decades.

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Setu, April 2025