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This article reads Amitav Ghosh’s Ghost-Eye (2025) in the light of relationality, challenging and disrupting anthropocentric assumptions. Starting with the uncanny scene of a child remembering the taste of fish from a past life, the novel unfolds as a complex meditation on memory, reincarnation, environmental crisis, and multispecies entanglements, in which human identity is revealed as emergent through its relations with animals, environments, spirits, and histories. Through the intersection of postcolonial ecocriticism, hauntology, and Indian philosophical ideas such as ethical responsibility, reciprocity, and cosmic continuity, this article investigates how the novel challenges the binary distinctions of human and nonhuman, nature and culture, self and other, and past and present, by building a world where consciousness, matter, and memory are intermingled. Nature, here, is not passive but active: trees call forth snakes, rivers have memory, and ecological systems retaliate against human violence with ethical force, while spectrality and sensory memory show that the past haunts both bodies and landscapes. The novel’s postcolonial dimension highlights how environmental harm is intertwined with the legacies of empire, inequality, and epistemic violence, thereby linking ecological crises to global injustice. Additionally, the novel integrates spiritual ontology with current legal and ethical discussions on nonhuman rights, advocating for an ecological-ethical approach that emphasises interdependence and responsibility. Ultimately, this article argues that Ghost-Eye does not merely represent interconnectedness of humans, nature, and ecological systems; it enacts it philosophically, inviting readers to understand reality as an interdependent network of life.
Dr. Sahabuddin Ahamed, Praveen Toppo. “Trans-Species Hauntology and Relational Being in Amitav Ghosh’s Ghost-Eye: From Ecological Memory to Rights of Nature.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 4, August 2026, pp. 186-206. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n4.11.
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