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

London: Celebrated 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 South Asian recipient of the honour, the Kolkata-born author says he feels “very, very privileged” to have been chosen for an award that has had a diverse range of recipients over the decades – from artists such as Charlie Chaplin and Ingmar Bergman to most recently Trevor Noah.

The Praemium Erasmianum Foundation, behind the annual award, chose Ghosh as the 2024 Laureate for his ability to make an uncertain future palpable 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 get bad or not, it's our dharma to try and do whatever we can. It's our duty to do whatever we can, to try and hold back the terrible disruptions that we are almost certainly going to see in the future,” he said.

The author of The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable laments that the current process to tackle 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 a very long time”.

“What we can see is that now even the pretence 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 will get so bad that some change will eventually be made, I don't think we can count on that… To effectively implement certain measures requires political action, and it's perfectly clear now that actual environmental breakdown does not lead directly to political action,” he noted.

As a writer of historical fiction and non-fiction, Ghosh views these problems as being “historically rooted, in the long histories of colonialism, inequality and global disparities”. When countries in the Global South, such as India, are confronted with the imperative of cutting down on their carbon footprint, he admits an inevitable backlash against the affluent West.

“You hear people in these countries say they (West) got rich by making us poor when we were weak, so now it's our turn. So, in the Global South, this whole issue is really seen fundamentally as an issue of inequality and global disparities, and in a way, that's what makes the problem so intractable,” he said.

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

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

His most recent work, Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories, was shortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding 2024. Over the course of his illustrious career, the 68-year-old author of popular works such as Sea of Poppies and The Calcutta Chromosome has won a series of literary prizes including the Jnanpith Award in India. Next week, he will add the Erasmus Prize to that growing list of honours for propagating a “new humanism in which not only all people are equal, but humanity also abandons the distinction between man and nature”.

The Erasmus Prize is awarded annually to a person or institution that has made an exceptional contribution to the humanities, the social sciences or the arts, in Europe and beyond. The award consists of a cash prize of EURO 150,000 and adornments of a harmonica folded ribbon with a titanium plate at both ends.