Book review: Amitav Ghosh's ‘Wild Fictions’ is a chaotic collection of writing

Ghosh quotes a report from National Public Radio, the US radio channel, which interviewed a Cameroonian immigrant to Madrid who confirmed that he was neither starving nor persecuted. He had migrated out of wanderlust. For me, these passages were both insightful and rang true. On a recent trip to Auckland, I had wondered why so many Uber drivers from India seemed to be from Punjab and on occasion Gujarat and indeed why India, often touted as a rising economic power, is the largest source of illegal immigration to the US after Mexico and Salvador, with some 15,000 being deported on military planes this month.

Ghosh’s essay on migration has other profound insights. Smartphones and streetsmarts allow traffickers and migrants to outsmart developed world governments. Befitting the author of novels that empathetically dealt with indentured labour, he makes the point that, in the 19th century, the colonial state “knew everything" about the workers they shipped overseas: “It was the state that decided where, when and how they would travel," Ghosh writes. “The asymmetry of information has now been completely reversed."

Today, by the time they land, illegal immigrants “know everything about the immigration system, including the grounds that are most likely to gain them acceptance—for example, persecution on the basis of politics, religion, sexual orientation or gender identity.

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The government of a country receiving such immigrants, by contrast, “has only the haziest idea of who they are." Despite all this elaborate planning, the story for many middle-class illegal immigrants is one of financial difficulties and homesickness. This tightly-knit essay, published four years ago, has 20/20 hindsight and foresight, foretelling our present at a time when the politics of Western countries are dominated by the theme of immigration while also looking back to history.

Essays with such deep analysis, however, are few in Wild Fictions. Indeed many readers might struggle to pinpoint any sort of theme—or much that illuminates—in Ghosh’s latest collection of writing, correspondence and musings from the last couple of decades. Many readers might struggle to pinpoint any sort of theme in most of Wild Fictions. It is a jumble of bewilderingly disparate pieces, ranging from a pretentious ode to the undervest for Vogue to rather banal, often bombastic email correspondence. Sometimes Ghosh himself appears to struggle to make a case for why he has included pieces.

There are more than one hundred pages of desperately earnest writing and content aggregation about the experiences of Indians overseas during World War I and its aftermath that scarcely get a mention in the foreword Ghosh has written. The essay that gives the collection its name includes wonderful stories, one fictional written by a Frenchman in the late 18th century, another involving the experiences of a British curator of natural history in mid-19th century Calcutta and a third that is folklore that ought to be turned into a magical realism masterpiece about a legendary figure known as Bon Bibi, still widely venerated in the Sundarbans.

Distressingly, the essay then veers off to a recurrent theme that comes close to being an organising narrative in this otherwise wildly chaotic collection—that fiction has most of the answers to the human condition. By contrast, science and politics are dismissed as too limited in scope to understand humans and the environment. Zoology, botany and geology, he asserts, “direct a gaze of concentrated, interpretive, scrutiny towards the curtain of signs that is called ‘data’ . Natural history is in this sense the indispensable science of interpretation that allows the environment to speak back to us." (I am not sure what to make of this, but perhaps others can penetrate this veil of verbosity to understand what Ghosh means.) And if you are counting on politicians to halt the seemingly inexorable rise of global temperatures, think again. “The limitation of political action is that it cannot generate the imaginative resources that are necessary to a rethinking of the human relationship with nature," Ghosh warns.

There is something similar where history is described as inferior to fiction in developing characters, but perhaps best not to belabour Ghosh’s point further. In this age of misinformation, when fiction is dressed up on social media as fact, giving such pre-eminence to fiction, albeit of a novelistic kind, is worrying.

It is not clear at all, even by Ghosh’s own reading of passages from his novels, that fiction is guaranteed to be a reliable guide. In his novel Sea of Poppies, he tells us in an essay for an anthology published by Vogue India in 2017, a character posits a new economic law concerning the baniyan (undervest): “He argues that the status of this garment has risen and fallen with the fortunes of the subcontinent…the implications of this, of course, is that as India’s economy grows, the fortunes of the banyan will rise again, perhaps to a point where it will become, once more, a finely crafted document."

Perhaps this was a nod to former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan’s use of men’s underwear sales as a barometer of economic health but that was based on much sounder reasoning, that people delay replacing clothing that is not publicly visible when they are curtailing spending.

What this book achieves is a kind of bizarre ventriloquism. I imagined myself not reading Ghosh, but being assailed by the sounds of someone riding a rickety bicycle in a baniyan on the street, shouting that he had several old articles that needed to be recycled in his tattered sack. Fans of Ghosh’s deft comic touch In an Antique Land (1992) and superbly observed non-fiction in his elegant collection published two decades ago, Dancing in Cambodia, will likely be baffled and disappointed. Having misplaced my copy of Ghosh’s Dancing in Cambodia, I ordered it again as an antidote to ploughing through the high-minded email correspondence about subaltern resistance and imperial ideologies between Ghosh and author Dipesh Chakrabarty over a nine-day period in December 2000. I often wondered if Wild Fictions was edited using an early generation, Make in India AI model. Cloying, repetitive pleasantries in a series of letters to an academic, for instance, could otherwise have been excised by humane intervention: “The questions that we’ve been addressing are part of a common struggle—and I am proud to be able to share that struggle with you. This has been a wonderful and immensely rewarding correspondence," Ghosh wrote.

In a similarly unctuous, effusive email with another academic, Ghosh seems to anticipate that this collection might drive reviewers to distraction—or into early retirement. “It is really very rare nowadays to come across critics who actually seem to like the bodies of work they’re writing about," Ghosh claims, before fulsomely applauding this author of a book about World War I literature as “in danger of becoming a Snow Leopard of Literary Criticism! It’s wonderful to see that some aspects of Kolkata’s intellectual legacy have survived against all the odds." The more than occasionally self-indulgent prose and chaotic digressions that characterise Wild Fictions sadly undermine Ghosh’s legacy as a writer of non-fiction.

Rahul Jacob, a former Financial Times foreign correspondent, writes a column for Mint.

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