‘It would be a mistake to think that hyper-technological people don't live by stories': Amitav Ghosh
Some books rest quietly on the shelf, their voices barely a whisper. Then there are books like Wild Fictions, which pulse with life, dreaming and waiting. In his latest book, Amitav Ghosh does not merely tell stories, he releases them into the world, wild and ungovernable. Here, rivers speak, winds remember, trees mourn, and forgotten spirits rise to reclaim their place alongside history and myth.
Amitav Ghosh's long journey through memory and imagination, from the tidal creeks of The Hungry Tide, through the opium routes of the Ibis Trilogy, to the urgent ecological elegies of The Great Derangement and The Nutmeg's Curse, finds a new flowering here. Wild Fictions is not a retreat into fantasy but a deeper reckoning with it, a recognition that myth, spirit, and land are not things to be tamed or catalogued, but forces still alive beneath the cracked surfaces of modern life.
As readers, we know that Amitav Ghosh, never merely an academic or a polemicist, speaks with the cautious reverence of someone in the presence of something older, something alive. Storytelling, he reminds us, is not an act of invention but of listening, to land, to ancestors, to the long-forgotten agreements between humans and the earth.
Wild Fictions continues Amitav Ghosh's lifelong project, glimpsed in the blurred histories of In an Antique Land, the tender fractures of The Shadow Lines, and the haunting mysteries of The Calcutta Chromosome, of collapsing borders between fact and fable, between the visible and the invisible. It asks: What if the stories we forgot have not forgotten us?
In a conversation with Scroll, Amitav Ghosh explores memory, language, form, and the resurgence of storytelling. Excerpts from the conversation:
You've long resisted being confined to specific literary categories, novelist, essayist, public thinker. In this age of ecological and cultural disarray, how has your understanding of what a writer should or can do evolved?
I should say straight away that I don't think it's my business to tell other writers what to write. I can only speak for myself, and the reason I wrote my book, The Great Derangement, is that I found it increasingly hard to understand why I myself had been so blind to so many aspects of our changing reality, and to the fact that we are deep into a planetary crisis. Once one has seen these things, it becomes impossible to forget them and they inevitably inform every aspect of one's work and practice.
In Wild Fictions, you write of stories as living, ecological entities, beings rather than metaphors. Was this a gradual insight or did it come as a kind of revelation, a narrative visitation?
In Wild Fictions, I write about the story of Bon Bibi as a kind of living charter that guides the way in which people in the Sundarban interact with their surroundings. I think most people who live in close connection with their environments, have stories of this kind, which often permit them to find meaning in very difficult circumstances. But it would be a mistake to think that hyper-modern, hyper-technological people don't live by stories. Just look at all the talk about colonising Mars: the billionaires who go on about this are obviously reliving the stories that they read in their childhood. There is a deep pathos in this because, in their case, the Earth, having been stripped of so many of its gifts, has lost all its meaning, so they are trying to find meaning in fantasies of colonising another planet.
Your recent prose has grown more fluid, incantatory, even resistant to neat closure, a marked shift from earlier narrative structures like those in The Shadow Lines. How conscious has this transformation been, and how does it reflect the stories you're now drawn to?
The most difficult thing about writing a book is finding the right voice, the right pitch for it. This is often the most long-drawn-out part of the entire process. But once one has found that voice, one enters into a kind of bubble or dome where everything bears the imprint of that voice. When the book is finished and you have stepped out of the bubble, it is impossible to step back into it. It would be absolutely impossible for me to write in the voice in which I wrote The Shadow Lines. That's long gone for me now and that is exactly how it should be. I consider myself fortunate in that I have been able to reinvent myself and my work many times over my life.
There is in this work a subtle yet insistent critique of the literary forms we've inherited, those shaped, perhaps, by a certain Enlightenment rationality. Do you think our allegiance to these forms has limited our ability to imagine the non-human, the more-than-human, or what you call the 'wild'?
In my book The Great Derangement, I've analysed some of the constraints that Enlightenment forms of rationality impose upon literary structures. However, I think it needs to be noted that writers have always defied these structures as well, and that many writers have tried to go beyond them. Herman Melville's, Moby Dick, for example, is a great novel about non-human intentionality, something which falls outside the scope of Enlightenment rationality. So, it's not as if the writers haven't done the work. It's rather that the wider ecosystem of the literary world has tended to marginalise that work (fortunately that did not happen with Moby Dick). Generally speaking, I would say that the publishing world is extraordinarily conservative and still tends to value certain kinds of writing above others. For instance, we have long been told that the sine qua non of literary experimentation was to write in non-standard 'voices'. So enormous praise would be showered upon novels written in, say, the Scottish dialect, or a patois. I wonder what will happen to this aesthetic now that one can simply ask AI apps to write (or rather translate) long passages into Creole, or Irish slang, or AAVE, or Hinglish? It's rather amusing to contemplate.
In fact, I asked Deep Seek to translate one of the above sentences into Cockney rhyming slang and this is what it came up with: ' Straight up, the book game's still stuck in the Dark Ages, innit? They keep rabbiting on about how the bee's knees of fancy scribbling is just talking proper funny – ike that's the only tomfoolery that counts!' (And it signed off with: 'Would you like it more exaggerated or with deeper slang? Cheers, guv'nor!').
The same sentence in Hinglish: 'Bhai, seedhi baat hai, publishing waale log toh bilkul zamana ke saath nahi badle – woh abhi bhi khaas tarah ki likhaayi ko hi top class samajhte hain. Jaise ki, agar tum desi style mein nahi likhoge, toh koi value hi nahi denge!'
I think this is going to pretty much put paid to human linguistic pyrotechnics.
You've often spoken of a 'crisis of imagination' when facing environmental collapse. Do you see this as a failure of language or is it something more intangible, like the diminishing ability to envision a world that doesn't place the human at its centre?
It is both a failure of language and a failure of vision. Our metaphors feel worn out, inadequate to truly grasp the immensity of what we've lost. Yet, at a more fundamental level, we've failed to look beyond ourselves. Premodern traditions recognised a world teeming with its own forms of expression. Modernity extinguished these voices, viewing nature merely as something to exploit. To recover our ability to imagine and connect, we need to shed this human-centred pride. This isn't solely an environmental crisis; it's a crisis in how we understand and narrate our place in the world.
In drawing lines from Kalidasa to WG Sebald, you suggest a continuity of ecological consciousness across traditions. How do you build these connections without flattening cultural specificity?
Kalidasa's Meghaduta is not just a poem; it is a conversation between thecloud and the earth. Sebald's Rings of Saturn is a lament for a wounded planet. These threads are not the same, but they resonate – not because they share a single vision, but because they acknowledge the personhood of the world.
Ashutosh Kumar Thakur is the curator of the Banaras Literature Festival.
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Indian Express
14-06-2025
- Indian Express
Amitav Ghosh's Wild Fictions is a heartfelt essay collection on how climate crises are shaping human activity
Amitav Ghosh's collection of essays, Wild Fictions, is an invitation to be part of the author's journey as he seeks ways for a more caring and humane world. They traverse Ghosh's arc as a writer who has cast a critical eye on the ways human societies relate to themselves and the environment. He questions certitudes on civilisation, progress and Eurocentric modernity and problematises the links of postcolonial societies with their colonial past. In his recent works, Ghosh has tried to join the dots between the world of the past three hundred years and perhaps the gravest challenge of our times — climate change. The world, as he puts it, quoting the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, is entering a 'time of monsters', when an old era is dying and a new one is struggling to be born. 'But the monsters that Gramsci had in mind were political creatures — fascists. What is distinctive about our time is that its monsters also consist of weather events that would have been considered improbable in Gramsci's time — supercharged storms, megadroughts, catastrophic rain bombs and the like'. Ghosh is aware of the pitfalls of a cause-and-effect narrative. He was trained as an anthropologist, but it's well known that the writer is adept at looking at events through the eyes of a historian, environmentalist and climate scientist. Like his works of fiction, the essays showcase what Ghosh is best at — lending an attentive ear to migrants, sailors, soldiers, tribal communities, friends, neighbours. He isn't a passive interlocutor, but a seeker who scans archives, diaries and correspondences and reaches out to his respondents to draw out the complexities of their experiences. He is alert to the changes brought out by the developments in communication technology and, most importantly, does not shy away from showing that the ecological is political. As with his works of fiction, the reader is struck by the wealth of Ghosh's research. Those acquainted with his fiction will find familiar characters — Deeti from The Sea of Poppies (2008), the seafaring community Lascars from the Ibis trilogy, the legend of Bon Bibi from The Hungry Tide (2004). At times, the writer lets the reader make connections. For instance, in one essay, he observes the tragedy of 9/11 through the eyes of friends — among them. architects of the Twin Towers — as one of them gives up his life trying to evacuate people from the crumbling skyscraper. In another essay at a different part of this collection, he gets a ringside view of the incident from his daughter who sees the buildings coming down from her classroom. The incident evokes memories of research he had conducted 20 years ago in Egypt as a doctoral student in Anthropology. The 'uncanny feeling' deepens when he learns that Mohammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 attack teams, hailed from the same region where he had done field work — 'indeed his ancestral village was closely connected with the places I had worked'. What makes people undertake arduous and expensive journeys across continents? Hope of a better life? Displacement? The force of ideology? Community memory? Ghosh's fiction abounds with such curiosity, and inevitably, the quest occupies a major part of this essay collection as well. Like in his novels, he eschews easy answers to underline that migrants — whether they are from the Indian Subcontinent, Africa, West Asia — could bear scars of the past and also enrich their host cultures with their ideas and enterprise. A delightful essay — some of it, a reprise of a section in The Sea of Poppies — contemplates the etymology of the word 'banyan'. Ghosh scorns marketers who try to brand the garment as 'a sleeveless undershirt', 'singlet' or vest. Instead, he tries to find connections between the eponymous tree, the bania, the traveller, sailor and nawabs, and then locates the changing fortunes of the garment in the country's economic trajectory. Wild Fictions is about migration, ecological crises and conversations of Ghosh with fellow writers and academics. It's also a travel book — about the journeys of communities, commodities and ideas. But if there's one thing that unites the essays, it's Ghosh's criticism of Eurocentric modernity. In an exchange with historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, he draws links with modernity, colonialism and racism. In other essays, he asserts that current crises — whether events such as 9/11, the discomfiture with migrants in some parts of the world, the climate and ecological challenges — have to do with power structures created by modernity. Ghosh isn't against modernity per se, but he does seem to believe that European hegemony has foreclosed alternative imaginations of progress. Ghosh doesn't engage much with the large corpus of scholarly engagement with modernity. But in many ways, the writer is like Manmohan Mitra, the protagonist of Satyajit Ray's trenchant critique of the modern civilisation, Agantuk (1991) – a seeker who amplifies the moral voice of some of his protagonists. He draws attention to myriad forms of inequalities — between humans and nature, between different worldviews, nations and peoples. And, he does so gently, without even a sentence in anger.
Scroll.in
14-06-2025
- Scroll.in
‘Umrao Jaan' director Muzaffar Ali: ‘The film has aged gracefully. It's timeless but fresh too'
Among the beneficiaries of the recent trend of older films being re-released in cinemas is Umrao Jaan. Muzaffar Ali's celebrated period drama from 1981, starring Rekha in one of her most well-regarded roles, is not available on any streaming platforms. This makes its re-emergence special, the director told Scroll. Umrao Jaan 's rights are held by the son of the original producer of the film, Ali said. 'Had he sold the film to a streaming channel, it would have lost its mystery,' the director added. 'There is still a craving for the film since people want to see it in its better form.' The movie, which has been restored by the National Film Archive of India, will be out in PVR and Inox theatres on June 27. Audiences can expect Rekha's amazing grace, sumptuous visuals, gorgeous costumes and jewellery, Khayyam's music, Asha Bhosle's singing, Shahray's lyrics. 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My film is deeply rooted in the geography of a place where I belonged.' Umrao Jaan grew out of Ali's own heritage as a descendant of Awadh's Kotwara principality. Before Umrao Jaan, Ali had directed Gaman (1978), a poignant account of a taxi driver in Mumbai who dreams of returning to the village and family he has left behind in Uttar Pradesh. In his memoir, Ali writes about what attracted him to Ruswa's novel: 'Woven into the tapestry of the light and shade of the period's refined decadence is the life of a woman, who, in spite of being the victim of the most adverse circumstances, evolves into a highly cultured human being, an accomplished poet in her own right.' The film was meant as a 'journey in celluloid which would embody the frail and ephemeral beauty of Awadh', Ali writes. The Lucknow that Ali evokes in Umrao Jaan is a thing of the distant past – there is no Umrao Jaan trail to be followed in the present. 'The film is a slice of Lucknow that touched me, that has gone by, that is no more,' he said. 'Some people who watch Umrao Jaan and go to Lucknow might get a shock.' Zikr details the challenges Ali faced in ensuring authenticity in the film's look, music and manners of nineteenth-century Awadh. 'The whole film was made in something like 29 lakhs at the time,' Ali told Scroll. 'Everything was cobbled together with artistic sensibility, not extravagance. The costumes have the richness of textiles that have come from cupboards, not shops or designer labels.' He attributes the popularity of the film to its poetic realism. 'You can't create poetry without a proper narrative or a context,' Ali said. 'Poetry doesn't make sense unless there's life behind it.' In the film, Rekha's Amiran is the embodiment of Lucknow's poetic impulses. Ali cast the iconic actor after seeing her photo in a magazine. 'Rekha breathed life into the character, and she is still living it, in a sense,' Ali said. 'The film touched a chord of truth within her. The film's enigmatic journey, which was sublimated in the flesh-and-blood character played by Rekha. It doesn't happen by giving her lines, creating a set and saying action. There is a kind of subconscious design about getting into that time in life.' The film's recreation of a long-vanished ethos infected playback singer Asha Bhosle and choreographer Kumudini Lakhia too, Ali recalled. 'Asha Bhosle is a miracle of this century in terms of her voice and the kind of feelings she evokes,' he said. 'She too wanted to go into the character and become Umrao Jaan. The kathak bhavas by Kumudini Lakhia are highly underplayed. Each person brought so much grace to the film that I was overwhelmed by gratitude.' Alongside the theatrical re-release, Ali is bringing out a book of 250-odd photographs from Umrao Jaan in collaboration with Mapin Publishing. 'During the process of digitising the film, I grabbed frames and created prints out of them,' Ali said. The surviving copy of Umrao Jaan was in poor condition, with the first 15 minutes in black and white and 15 more minutes missing, he recalled. 'Fortunately, the National Film Archive of India restored the film frame the frame – had they not stepped in, it would have been a lost cause.' The state-run archive is restoring Gaman too. While re-watching Umrao Jaan as it was being restored, Ali was struck by how a movie about a nostalgia for a bygone era has endured. 'The film is like the unveiling of time – it's aged very gracefully,' Ali said. 'It's equally fresh now, but it's also got a timeless feel, which is quite gratifying. You are looking back on yourself through a film that has already reached millions of people over 44 years through different zones, generations and imaginations.'
Scroll.in
06-06-2025
- Scroll.in
‘Fair use' or ‘stealing'? The copyright principle at the heart of ANI vs YouTubers
Is the Asian News International news agency 'extorting' YouTubers who use a few seconds of its content in their videos? Or are YouTubers guilty of ' stealing ' from ANI by using its content without permission? On May 25, YouTuber Mohak Mangal alleged that ANI exploits YouTube's copyright policies to arm twist content creators into buying expensive licences. Other creators have made similar claims. At the heart of this dispute is a legal question: does the use of ANI content by YouTubers qualify as 'fair use'? Copyright legally grants the creator of an original work control over how that work can be used by others. Others cannot copy, share or sell the work without permission. Fair use is the legal principle aimed at promoting freedom of expression by allowing the use of copyrighted material for purposes such as critiques, reviews, teaching and news reporting. 'Qualitative, not quantitative' Most of the prominent YouTubers allegedly targeted for copyright infringement by ANI have adopted the fair use defence. Legal experts told Scroll that are no hard and fast rules in Indian law to determine what is fair use. The broad considerations for fair use usually take into account the intent of the user, the purpose of the use of the copyrighted material and the potential to economically impact the original creator's market. 'There is a misconception that fair use protects the usage of video content of only a few seconds,' said Ameet Datta, intellectual property lawyer and founder of law firm, ADP Law Offices. Datta gave the example of the musical theme from the James Bond films. The recognisable part of the theme 'is barely 17-18 seconds', he said. 'But if you use even six seconds of that, you have used the theme. This is why the test is qualitative, not quantitative.' Prashant Reddy T, a legal researcher who has written extensively on copyright law, said courts have held the use of short clips as copyright infringement. This was in the context of news channels using the content of sports broadcasters. So far, no Indian court has ruled on the fair use of copyrighted content in a YouTube video. ANI did not respond to Scroll 's email requesting comment on the matter. Copyright versus 'fair use' Under India's Copyright Act, 1957, fair use – called 'fair dealing' in the text – is one of the exceptions to copyright. Jameela Sahiba, Associate Director at The Dialogue, a technology policy think tank, told Scroll that courts have identified three factors when trying to determine fair use. The first is the quantum of the copyrighted material used. 'Small clippings of eight to 10 seconds used in a bigger video of over 20 minutes for purposes of information dissemination might fall outside the nature of violation that copyright protects,' she said. The second factor is whether the use of the ANI footage was for one of the purposes outlined in the fair use provision of the act: research, criticism, review or reporting. 'Transformative use, where new meaning or value is added, weighs heavily in favour of fair dealing,' she said. When a YouTuber uses a few seconds of ANI content and contextualises it with their own opinion, more facts and information, the purpose is not to infringe on ANI's copyright, according to Sahiba. The third factor: does the use of the copyrighted material compete with or diminish the market for the original work? 'Courts assess whether the new use serves as a substitute for the original work, thereby harming the copyright holder's potential revenue or audience,' she said. She pointed out that some YouTubers used ANI's content to create unique videos that serve their own audience. Thus they were not competing with ANI in selling news feed subscriptions. Sahiba contended that some YouTubers' use of ANI footage likely fell under fair use when assessed through these factors. 'There is enough guidance by courts to suggest that the complexities of copyright law need to be balanced with the right of creative expression,' she said. ANI finds a niche business in squeezing YouTubers who clip its visuals. YouTube plays along, ignoring fair-use principle. Read the story by @ayushikar1998. 1/2 — the reporters' collective (@reporters_co) May 19, 2025 A risky strategy YouTube has its own policies that strictly regulate copyright claims. YouTube spokesperson Joanne D'Souza told Scroll that YouTube works hard to 'balance the rights of copyright holders with the creative pursuits of the YouTube community'. 'We give copyright holders tools to make copyright claims and uploaders tools to dispute claims that are made incorrectly,' she said. If a copyright holder files a formal request against a video, YouTube can take the video down and send the channel or user a copyright strike. YouTube can delete a channel if it receives three copyright strikes within 90 days. But the channel or user can also file a counter notification if they believe the takedown was a mistake or if they think their use of the content is protected under exceptions like fair use. They can also reach out directly to the entity that made the complaint and ask them to withdraw it. Aman Taneja, partner at Ikigai Law, a law and policy firm, said that the YouTubers affected could file counter notifications to potentially avoid channel closures and the financial penalties allegedly demanded by ANI. 'Once a counter notification is filed making out the case of fair use, the ball is back in the copyright owner's court,' he said. According to YouTube's policy, in response to a counter notification, the copyright owner must provide evidence of having initiated court proceedings for copyright infringement against the uploader. If they don't provide such proof within 10 business days, YouTube will reinstate the taken-down video and clear the copyright strike. It is unclear whether any of the YouTubers allegedly hit by ANI's copyright strikes have filed counter notifications against ANI or whether ANI has filed copyright infringement suits against any YouTuber. Reddy said that going to court presented a far greater risk to ANI than YouTube's copyright regulation process. 'Litigation is an expensive and uncertain composition because all these YouTubers need is one judge making a determination that their usage is fair dealing,' he said. 'Such a ruling could lead to the collapse of ANI's business model and may incentivise ANI to settle the cases on a more reasonable basis.' Important Regarding copyright strikes against YouTube creators in India for use of clips from wire agencies Have received messages from numerous YouTube creators in India about their content being subject to copyright strikes merely for the use of a news clip from a news wire… — Saket Gokhale MP (@SaketGokhale) May 26, 2025 YouTube's policies to blame? If a channel receives three copyright strikes within a 90-day period, YouTube can permanently delete the entire channel, including all videos and potentially other linked accounts. Lawyers told Scroll that this policy is inconsistent with Indian law. Reddy explained that if a dispute between ANI and a YouTuber goes to court and the court finds copyright infringement, it can do two things. 'It passes an injunction telling the YouTuber to delete the particular part of the clip that violates copyright and prohibits them from further using copyrighted content,' he said. 'Or it tells the YouTuber to buy a licence to the copyrighted content for a royalty determined by the court.' In either scenario, the court won't delete the YouTuber's entire channel, he pointed out. 'So the problem here is the YouTube policy that is enabling ANI to pressurise YouTubers and back them into a corner,' he said. Datta said Indian law only provides for the removal of the content infringing upon copyright. 'Unless there is an order banning my account under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act or a court order in cases of egregious and rampant infringement, what an intermediary platform can remove is only individual posts,' he said. Taneja, on the other hand, said that YouTube's policy errs on the side of caution, aligning with general principles of platform moderation. 'As a global platform, YouTube will naturally set standards that help it minimise liability in all jurisdictions.'
